Can Organized Labor Survive Trump’s Second Term?
In spite of the Teamsters decision not to endorse Kamala Harris for president ahead of the 2024 presidential election, most unions backed the Democratic Party. In fact, organized labor groups poured more than $40 million into Harris’ campaign for president, and are now bracing for the anti-labor presidency of Donald Trump.
But Eric Blanc, assistant professor of labor studies at Rutgers University, says all is not lost. He believes there’s no stopping the recent surge in labor organizing in the United States. Blanc blogs at the Substack Labor Politics and is the author of We Are the Union: How Worker-to-Worker Organizing Is Revitalizing Labor and Winning Big. He spoke with YES! Senior Editor Sonali Kolhatkar on YES! Presents: Rising Up With Sonali about how labor can survive and even thrive over the next four years.
Sonali Kolhatkar
joined YES! in summer 2021, building on a long and decorated career in broadcast and print journalism. She is an award-winning multimedia journalist, and host and creator of YES! Presents: Rising Up with Sonali, a nationally syndicated television and radio program airing on Free Speech TV and dozens of independent and community radio stations. She is also Senior Correspondent with the Independent Media Institute’s Economy for All project where she writes a weekly column. She is the author of Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice (2023) and Bleeding Afghanistan: Washington, Warlords, and the Propaganda of Silence (2005). Her forthcoming book is called Talking About Abolition (Seven Stories Press, 2025). Sonali is co-director of the nonprofit group, Afghan Women’s Mission which she helped to co-found in 2000. She has a Master’s in Astronomy from the University of Hawai’i, and two undergraduate degrees in Physics and Astronomy from the University of Texas at Austin. Sonali reflects on “My Journey From Astrophysicist to Radio Host” in her 2014 TEDx talk of the same name.
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