In Conversation with Labor Journalist Kim Kelly

Kim Kelly is a freelance labor journalist and author based in Philadelphia. She’s been writing Teen Vogue’s labor column since 2018, is a labor writer for In These Times and contributes to outlets like The Nation, The Baffler, and Rolling Stone. Her first book Fight Like Hell, the Untold History of American Labor came out in 2022; the Young Readers Edition, Fight to Win will be coming out on May 6 (preorder here!). You can also subscribe to Kim’s newsletter here.

Kim was interviewed by Organize Your Organization author and Communications Workers of America organizer Isabel Aries. This interview took place on January 14, the week before the inauguration. The transcript has been edited for clarity and brevity.

Isabel Aries: Entering 2025 how are you feeling about the labor movement and everything that’s to come this year?

Kim Kelly: Can I swear? Oh man, shit is fucking dark.

So I tend to err on the side of being posi, right? Unfortunately, numbers are seldom our friend in the labor movement. The cold facts show just how subject we are to not only the whims of politicians in general, but the changing of the guard in the federal government.

We all know the presidential administration is going to be different. And we know that’s going to make a lot of things very, very, very, very bad. I know how different federal agencies impact workers, whether it’s our right to organize or actually running union elections or getting safety standards through.

As much as I do not have to hand it to the government in any way, ever, there are a lot of people – workers – in the government that do a lot of really crucial work. And it’s really fucking with me that OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration) is in the crosshairs for so many of these conservative anti-labor freaks. The Department of Labor, The NLRB (National Labor Relations Board) [. . .] There are so many institutions that are in danger of either getting nuked altogether or getting absolutely defanged and chopped off at the knees.

I don’t love that. I think that’s going to be bad and it’s going to be very difficult to rebuild once we – hopefully – get a less anti-labor administration in the future. And also, the fact that it’s going to be tougher to organize, the fact that vulnerable workers are going to be under so much more strain. Threats against immigrant workers – whatever their documented status is, that’s going to be an enormous humanitarian disaster and a disaster for labor. How many undocumented folks work for The Teamsters? How many of them work in construction in New York? How many of them are working in fields in California and Florida that keep this country running? That’s a crisis for the labor movement and for humanity in this country. And that’s just one group of vulnerable workers.

Women, anyone who can get pregnant, trans men, non-binary people. The erosion of reproductive rights is a massive labor issue that I think a lot of unions still haven’t fully grasped. The very lives, to say nothing of the livelihoods and dignity of our trans siblings, non-binary siblings, that is a massive labor issue that I have not seen that much leadership from many, if not most of our national union leaders and labor leaders. Obviously the Movement for Black Lives is still going. Things have not improved for Black and Brown workers, Native workers, Asian workers.

Everyone who was vulnerable during the Biden administration, who maybe felt a little bit of hope or was able to organize, or able to harness this increased energy, whether it was genuine coming from the people in the streets, or convenient coming from institutions, and nonprofits, and the odd progressive politician, will be affected. We had a moment during the Biden administration where some good things happened, but now we have lost whatever ins we might have had with the powers that be. Everything that was already hard is going to get harder. This bullshit culture war framing has found some purchase in the labor movement, in the fact that we’re seeing this kind of collaborationist stance coming from some union leaders with some of these Republican freaks that are pretending to be pro-worker.

There’s all sorts of dangerous shit bubbling, and the workers are going to bear the brunt of it. The most vulnerable, the most marginalized, the most threatened workers, who already had a hard fucking time, are going to deal with the brunt of it. It’s really tempting to just fully give into despair, but you can’t do that, because that’s how the bastards win. That’s the lesson of my book, all the stories I try to write and basically labor history in general. If all you have left is spite, then at least you have that, and you can use that to keep fighting.

IA: Trump is a huge threat to organized labor and we saw a lot of that in his first administration. So what did we see in his first administration that you would expect to come back or be exacerbated in the second?

KK: We had this massive upswell in nativist xenophobic racist sentiment in a very public, officially sanctioned way. He tried to ban Muslim travelers; he was screaming about deportation; he was targeting immigrants, targeting specifically a lot of people from Mexico, Central America, South America. I think we’re going to see a lot of that – we’re already seeing it, and that’s going to make it harder for folks in those positions to organize.

A lot of the issues we had the first time around came down to the people that he put in power. Going back to those unsexy federal agencies – I honestly didn’t even consider this as much until a few years ago when I started really looking into the black lung crisis in Appalachia. I started communicating a lot more closely with MSHA – the Mind Safety Health Administration, and with folks at the DOL – Department of Labor, and dug into the process of how a proposed regulation becomes a standard. All this bureaucratic red-tapey stuff actually does impact people. I didn’t quite realize how much it really does matter who is calling the shots in those departments.

We might have a not-totally-horrible person as the Secretary of Labor. It matters who the Secretary of Labor is because they shape the goals and the projects of the Department of Labor, which shapes – so much – the NLRB. The fucking Democrats just whiffed it, yet again. They had a chance to at least stave off some of the worst of what is potentially coming for the NLRB by keeping a couple of Democrats in there. They whiffed it. It’s fucked. It’s going to be a fully Republican-dominated board. The majority of unions, of union petitions, of folks who are trying to organize their union, are going to be working with the NLRB to get their union certified, to get their elections run, to force their employers to accept the union.

And for the past few years – the Biden years – we had a pro-worker Board. It was dominated by not-Republicans. And the NLRB was kind of on fire: tons of new organizing, tons of new union elections and petitions. It was actually doing good stuff for workers. It was underfunded, it was understaffed, it wasn’t as good as it should be, but it was doing some work.

Now imagine this incredibly important entity that basically controls the rate of unionization in this country being run by a bunch of anti-labor Republicans who don’t want people to be organizing. They want workers to shut up, go to work, and accept whatever crumbs they’re offered. If it’s been tough to get an NLRB election through, if it’s been tough to organize through that specific channel in the past few years, think about how much worse it could be if the people who work there don’t want you to have a union in the first place.

A bunch of big corporations like Tesla and Trader Joe’s are trying to erode some of our biggest labor laws. These are our foundational, albeit rickety and exclusionary labor laws, like the National Labor Relations Act. The oligarchs, anti-labor politicians, and corporations are essentially trying to chip away at workers’ ability to do anything, to advocate for themselves, to organize, to bargain, to protest, to strike. They’re actively trying to take that legal right away from us.

There’s a lot coming that is not going to be good. At least we know that. Our organizers, and labor leaders, and folks who have been paying attention know that. I really hope there are a lot of contingency plans in place. I hope there has been planning and organizing, because at least we had a little bit of notice. We had a Trump round one. It seems like this time he’s back and he means business. It seems like this time there are more smart, evil people involved, instead of just insane, evil people. That’s the scary part. I hope that people have taken advantage of the fact that we have had a little bit of time to plan and build up safeguards to try and stave off the worst of what is potentially coming.

IA: You talked a lot about the NLRB and that’s one of the things that we’re curious to get your take on. We can expect that the NLRB is going to become more pro-employer and anti-worker. So what can we do to fight against that? What rights and organizing tactics do we still have even if we can no longer rely on the NLRB?

KK: You don’t have to go through the NLRB. Most folks do, because it’s the more established channel. You get your coworkers together, you want to organize, you tell your boss and he’s like, ‘I don’t know about all that.’ And you have to go to the NLRB, and then they run an election. You kind of have to go through this whole song and dance to hopefully, eventually win your election and get certified. Then your boss is required to bargain with you.

But in the past few years there have been a lot of independent unions that have sprung up, organizing, fighting, and winning outside of the NLRB realm. There are organizing projects like the Union of Southern Service Workers – I am a huge fan. They’re under the Fight For 15 and a Union umbrella, which is part of the SEIU cinematic universe, but they have a lot of autonomy. They’re very worker directed. They are a union of low wage Black and Brown service, fast food, and retail workers across the South, and I did a piece on them a while ago. They say very clearly on their website that they’re not interested in being certified, they’re not interested in the NLRB, they’re organizing outside of this framework because it doesn't work for them. Because it was never meant to work for them. Because the majority of their members are low income Black workers, Brown workers in the South – the exact people that are excluded from some of our major labor laws. Because it’s America. America is racist as fuck. And they’ve done a really interesting and innovative type of organizing. It’s almost more in the IWW model – the Industrial Workers of the World. You can still do a fully shop floor led solidarity unionism-based campaign. You don’t have to go through all these official hoops. It’s not something that works for everybody, especially if you’re working up against a big corporation or particularly recalcitrant boss, but it is possible to organize outside of that framework. People have done it. People are doing it.

It’s the same as when folks start independent unions and don’t affiliate with bigger ones. The ALU – the Amazon Labor Union, that was kind of the big marquee example. They’ve ultimately affiliated with the Teamsters, but in fairness they’re going up against a megalithic company with more money than God. Sometimes you need a little extra firepower.

But there are independent unions out there that are making strides and making waves. You have options. When you’re organizing and you’re working with an organizer from a union, they’ll likely encourage you to go through the NLRB process, but you don't have to. A union is a group of you and your coworkers organizing collectively to improve your workplace. All the other stuff is kind of negotiable.

The IWW often doesn’t even advocate for contracts. They take the stance that it’s better to just build shop floor power and worker power and keep the bosses on their toes and bend them to your will that way. And that’s worked. They’ve been around since 1905, so it’s worked.

We’ve gotten spoiled in a way. It is very helpful when the NLRB is on your side. I’m not going to lie to you. It’s not necessarily easier to go outside of that framework, but it’s possible. It’s doable. And it’s something that I think we’re going to see – or hopefully we’ll see – more workers and more unions exploring, because if you can’t count on using this established channel, then you have to build your own, or dig under it, or dig around it. If they’re going to actively obstruct, then fuck them, we’ll do it ourselves.

That’s a little bit of an intimidating prospect. It can be a little scary because if someone’s telling you this is how you become a real union, then you’re going to want to do that. But the next few years are going to be a time of creativity and thinking outside the box, thinking independently, thinking militantly and not necessarily taking the rules as a given.

IA: Along that same note, we’ve seen people say that if the NLRA gets overturned and the NLRB is abolished, then it gets rid of restrictions on workers too and could lead to a return of the pre-NLRA/NLRB workers fights against their employers, like people rioting in the streets, wildcat strikes, I’ve seen Molotov cocktails being tossed around metaphorically a few times. Do you think that that’s a realistic view of the current political and economic environment that workers find themselves in now and what kind of organizing would you expect to see?

KK: Not for nothing, we have seen an increased level of strike activity, and organizing, and creative tactics, and all the things you want to see, right? The past few years, especially. Especially since the earlier days of the pandemic, when we had this massive upswing in interest and energy, and a severe drop in the amount of fucks given when it came to causing this kind of trouble.

I don’t think the people will take this lying down and as much as I want to see an explosion of worker militancy, I also think people are in such a precarious position. Look, I’m an anarchist. I’ve read a lot of history. I love thinking about what our forebears got up to in the late 1800s. It’s a different world in a way. Folks were hungry. Folks were disenfranchised. Folks were crushed by healthcare costs back then too. And they rioted. They blew up bridges. They went to war for the right to join a union. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t. I do wonder if folks today have the appetite for the level of chaos and level of violence that once permeated the movement, that once really illustrated that this is class war – the kind of war where someone might come to your house and shoot your dad because he's in a union.

I believe in the movement. I believe that there are workers who are ready to throw down. And I also think the world that we’re in now is so inhospitable for a working class person, for a poor person. If your union asks you to go on an officially sanctioned, everyone voted, above board, legal strike, you might feel in the pit of your stomach, Okay, I want to support this, but my mom is sick. I have two kids. My deadbeat boyfriend isn’t pulling his share. I’m not feeling very good. I have a lot of debt. I’m kind of scared my manager doesn’t like me already. I don’t know if I can do this. That’s how most people in the country feel already. No one’s having a nice time unless they’re worth a few million. If there are more opportunities for workers to show solidarity and material support and be very vocal, and very public, and very visible in their support for other striking workers, other workers in general, I have full faith that folks will do that. I have full faith that some folks will get real creative! But I also worry that most people are struggling so much already that trying to push them into taking part in big actions will be tough. I want to go to war against the bosses, but I also don’t want anyone on our side to get hurt and we’re hurting already.

If I had my druthers, I would prefer to have really strong, inclusive, and updated labor laws that are actually enforced. I don’t know if I want to go back to the 1800s. A lot of people died. A lot of people lost their fingers. A lot of people lost their houses. The cops have military weaponry now and they know they can kill us and get away with it. And with a Republican-dominated judiciary and Republican politicians in charge of everything, there’s not going to be sympathy. We don’t have that many friends in high places. That was one thing during the Gilded Age, the politicians then were not the same as the politicians now. The conditions were different, the technology was different. Back then, surveillance was, you know, a guy might follow you home from work peeking into your windows. Pretty creepy, but not quite the same as having your location tracked and everyone in your family’s devices seized. It’s unfortunate that the bad guys have so many more tools at their disposal now, but we’re still out here. We can get creative, we can still organize, we can still do the best we can – that’s all anyone's ever done.

I wish I was more positive about it, and I really hope I’m wrong. I hope I’m being a wet blanket. I would love that. Please prove me wrong. I am dying for the revolution. I just don't want anybody to get hurt. That’s not really how that works.

IA: I want to talk about the Democrats, because I think they've really bailed on workers and the labor movement. At the federal level, you know, we talked about them refusing to confirm Lauren McFerran. What changes do you see as necessary in the party or maybe even outside of the party that are necessary to protect workers rights nationwide?

KK: We’re currently locked in this dominant two-party system and the Democrats have for years branded themselves as the pro-worker party. They’ve gotten so many union members to vote for them. They’ve gotten so much of our goddamn money. We’re sort of unfortunately wedded to them, at least in their perspective.

One thing I would love to see is for us to ask for a divorce. Or to, at the very least, make it clear that you can’t automatically assume that unions are going to show up and support you. You can’t sponge off the labor movement for votes and then abandon us like you always do. We’re not going to give our support or our money to any Democrat candidate who doesn’t have a strong actual material pro-worker record, who doesn’t have actual policies that are going to help us, who isn’t going to just fold the second Nancy Pelosi looks at them. They need to know that we’re not in their pocket.

The union leadership at a national level needs to stop pretending the Democrats are our friends and treat them like bosses: We can work with you. We will negotiate with you. What are you going to give us? Every election cycle, whether it’s local or national, if there’s union money, and union power, and union attention being poured into it, it should be treated like a contract negotiation. Not a charity, not a donation, not a fundraiser. They’re not our friends. They can be useful tools. That is the friendliest perspective I think we should allow the Democrats.

I'm sure there are a lot of ‘vote blue, no matter who’ types in the labor movement in general, because it’s a big tent. But I feel like most of us are not that impressed with either political party. That’s kind of the theme of “America: The Show” the past few years. Nobody likes these motherfuckers. It kills me that the labor movement, or at least the people who tend to be represented as its leaders, have allowed us to be wedded so closely to the Democratic Party that it becomes news when a major union, like the Teamsters, doesn’t endorse their corporate candidate for president. Sure – that was uniquely kind of irritating in the context, but why are we just blanket endorsing these people?

It just shows a lot of the flaws in this ridiculous two-party system. As the labor movement, we’re not supposed to be friends with these people. We’re supposed to be respected opponents. Somehow that message got lost along the way.

IA: So shit is hitting the fan right now. There’s the rise of fascism – that little thing, we’re experiencing massive fires in LA, not to mention all the other tragedies and issues that people are constantly dealing with. We work with a lot of nonprofit workers who are in social movement spaces. What do you see as a potential role of those types of nonprofit workers in social movement spaces, and the overlap between union work and movement work?

KK: I think the past few years there’s really been an explosion of folks in those spaces organizing. I think that is very, very good for the labor movement, and for the movements that they’re working within. It shows even more clearly how intertwined all these different struggles are. There is this inclination to put different struggles, different issues, different movements in little separate buckets. Here is the Black liberation bucket, and the queer rights bucket, and women’s issues bucket, and immigration bucket. Sometimes all of those different buckets are one person’s life. That’s one person’s experience because we all contain so many multitudes. By really understanding and embracing that, the fact that workers contain so many different identities, that’s a strength for the movement.

The fact that abortion workers at a reproductive health clinic are organizing – that’s a win because not only are those workers now going to be able to improve their workplace and make things better for themselves and for workers that come after them, they’re going to build solidarity with other workers in their city and in the national movement.

Seeing someone at a nonprofit, whether it’s an environmental nonprofit, or reproductive rights, or a queer legal clinic, seeing those folks organize, it underlines that yes, I’m part of this movement, I do this because I care, but this is my labor. I'm a worker. I need to be protected too. I’m not just doing this because I love it. Of course I love it. That’s why I'm trying to make it better and trying to make it more livable, because I deserve to be okay too.

It’s just a much more humane viewpoint. Hopefully seeing good union jobs in that space is a way to bring more people with energy into those movements and to do that work. Those jobs require a lot from people – emotional, mental, physical work. If you have a union contract with some good benefits, it’s like: okay I can do this.

It’s good for the entirety of the working class and the labor movement, because it shows how many different kinds of jobs can be a union job. I feel like we still see this discourse every time a new group of workers organizes – grad students, or abortion workers, or journalists. It’s like, ‘Oh, why do they need a union?’ Because we work our asses off!

Expanding the general view of who a worker is, who the working class is, that’s going to make us stronger. It’s going to make the movement more inclusive and more welcoming to people who maybe didn’t think that they could be in a union or that they deserve to be in a union. My first organizing experience, I was working at Vice, and I come from a union family but I never thought I’d be in a union because I’m just a writer. Well nobody’s just anything. If you go to work, you deserve a union, especially if you’re doing work that is making the world better for people. That’s one of the points that gets ground into nonprofit workers when they’re organizing or when they’re being mistreated: ‘Oh, well you do this job because you love it, because you’re part of the movement.’ Yeah. But your rights as a worker and as a person matter too.

So I think setting those examples is just going to make life better for everybody. It’s such a wonderful development and I hope more people do it, because we need more good union movement jobs, because that’s how you keep good, principled, devoted movement people in those jobs.

IA: Our last question, just to try to end things on a more positive note, especially because you are such a positive person: What is giving you hope right now? What hope would you want to share with current union members or people that are interested in organizing a union, but who are scared to start?

KK: Even though I said a lot of really depressing things, that’s just one piece of it, right? There have always been terrible barriers facing workers in this country. And workers have still organized anyway. They’ve gone around, or under, or outside, or upside down – they’ve found a way, they’ve figured it out. And they’ve made the world so much better for all of us.

Any step in the right direction that has been taken in this fucking demon country is because regular people, working class people, poor people, unionized workers have fought for it and pushed it forward. Obviously it’s not new. This is something that’s always happened because, like we said, the sanction framework, the NLRB, the official unionizing rubber stamp agent, hasn’t always been around and people have obviously organized anyway.

I love seeing folks who are left out of these labor laws, who are not given the option to organize in traditional ways, finding ways that work for them. Some of my favorite groups of workers that I’ve seen organizing in the past few years have been sex workers. Because of the way the laws are and the criminalization and just general repression of workers in that industry goes, there’s only a handful of workers who can “legally organize”. That’s why we’ve seen strippers in California and in Oregon, and now in Las Vegas with the Chippendales, organizing. That’s just incredible to start with, that we are seeing workers in this industry that have been shut out for so long, who are organizing, and striking, and winning, and getting support from major established unions. Love to see it.

Something during the earlier days of the pandemic that gave me so much hope were workers in Oregon – the Haymarket Pole Collective. A group of sex workers, mostly Black, Indigenous, and queer in Portland that organized a really strong mutual aid network and were organizing lots of events that were tied into the stripper strike movement. They got a massive grant from the state to distribute to their members. That took an incredible amount of organizing. That’s not a traditional union, but it’s workers coming together to improve their working conditions. That’s what a union is, whether or not you got the rubber stamp.

I spend a lot of time following incarcerated workers organizing. Seeing folks, and hearing about folks, and talking to folks who are in the the worst possible fucking conditions, who are still finding ways to organize and fight back, even though it isn’t legal for workers in prisons, incarcerated workers to join unions, still finding ways to protest, and strike, and advocate for better conditions for themselves and their fellow workers. That’s the kind of thing that gives me hope. Folks who are facing an impossible challenge. Like, what can I do? I’m trapped in this cage. I have no control over my time or my body. I’m still going to figure it out.

During the earlier days of COVID, one of my best friends was incarcerated at Rikers and he helped organize a strike to get soap and masks, and they won. That’s a labor story. That’s a labor victory. There’s so many things like that happening across the country, in prisons and other workplaces, in stores, in restaurants, and on work sites. Someone’s always doing something. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. But that spirit that drives people to keep trying, that’s never going to go away.

Being a student of history – a self-taught student of history, I’ve seen how much bullshit has been thrown our way as workers, as members of the working class, and poor people, and how people have still found ways to rise above it, and swim against the tide, and force change, and force progress, and hold tight to that dignity. That understanding that we always deserve better – that’s something that we can never lose. It doesn’t matter who’s in charge, it doesn’t matter red or blue, whatever the fuck kind of rich people are talking at us from the TV this week. We know who we are. We know what we’re capable of. They’ve tried to crush us. Over and over and over and over and over. But we’re still here and we’re not going anywhere.