Review essay of Hamilton Nolan’s ‘The Hammer: Power, Inequality, and the Struggle for the Soul of [U.S.] Labor’ by Kim Scipes

Hamilton Nolan is one of an emerging group of journalists who have taken over the “labor beat” in U.S. journalism. This book is his first, and it is his effort to understand the intensifying failure of the labor movement while proposing a way out.

New York: Hachette Books, 2024 (ISBN: 978-0306830921 hardcover)

The child of two activists from the 60s, he says he didn’t start off focusing on the labor movement; he was interested in finding out “why America was so fucked up,” with its intensifying inequality and inability of most people to keep up. He figured out there were two ways to address this: (1) through the government “aggressively regulating capitalism” (a “solution” of which he’s thoroughly skeptical) or (2) we could empower people “to increase their own power so that that they can reclaim their rightful share of the nation’s wealth.” His conclusion:

I realized that unions … are the single most important tool that exists to fix our single most important problem.

He began learning all he could about the labor movement and started looking for dynamic leadership who was willing to step up, had some vision of making things better, and who was willing to work their ass off to revive this sleeping behemoth (my term). It didn’t take him very long to realize the current leadership of the AFL-CIO was “a lost cause” for this project. Somehow, he found Sara Nelson, President of the Association of Flight Attendants (AFA), and she provided some needed inspiration to him.

In addition to Nelson, he realized that workers independently acting to form their own unions was another way to go. He began scouring the country, looking for positive examples he could learn from/be inspired by, and whose stories he could tell. And combining both, he does just that in this book.

He writes about Nelson and her plans to seek the presidency of the AFL-CIO. Young—and certainly younger than many heads of U.S. unions—energetic, dynamic, and almost unstoppable, he shares her story. However, physical problems intervene and disrupt her plans; with both of her hips ultimately needing replacement, her body literally sabotages her longshot hopes. Discovered through a stumble while running, Nolan writes,

That stumble may have changed the history of the American labor movement.

While he may or may not have put his finger on the solution, he is very clear about the problem at the “top” of the labor movement:

Officially, the AFL-CIO is America’s largest organized labor group, a coalition of sixty unions representing thirteen million members. Unofficially, the AFL-CIO is the Grey Gardens of the labor movement, a once-grand mansion whose owners sometimes seem to carry on oblivious to their crumbling surroundings. People employed at the grassroots level of unions often scoff and dismiss the AFL-CIO as a remote, out of touch, meaningless bureaucracy, far removed from the actual work of organizing workers. Its history is marked by racism, self-destructive red-baiting, and an elite streak that undermined the real potential for a truly unified labor movement spanning all classes or workers in the twentieth century. Today, it’s primary function is as a mediocre in-house lobbying firm and traffic cop for America’s unions. By any reasonable analysis, it has for the past fifty years failed to accomplish its most important goal: building (or even maintaining) power for the working class.

There’s more to say, and he says it, but you get the drift.

And yet, as he points out, the labor movement has such potential that it’s worth delving into its world. From that standpoint, he begins his exploration.

He starts with South Carolina, “the most anti-union state in America.” He’s very straight-forward and gets to the heart of the issue:

Yet all attempts to organize workers in a poor state runs up against the hard fact that many of the people most in need of a union also feel, often correctly, that the job they have is the best one they can get where they live, and trying to improve it also puts them at risk of losing it all together. [From my personal experiences in trying to organize workers in rural Kentucky years ago, that this is true in most rural areas, regardless of whether the state is considered rich or poor-KS.]

Then he shifts to California, where years of work among childcare workers has enabled them to change state law that allows them to unionize. This is where the power of a union—even one over such a disparate group of workers, containing members of all different ethnic groups and religions, and scattered across one of the largest states in the union—can illuminate what can be done once workers organize themselves.

Following, he reports about the developments in Sara Nelson’s quest for the AFL-CIO presidency. She has dinner in Chicago with Randi Weingarten, President of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), who tells her that it’s doubtful she can win the labor center’s presidency. As Nelson keeps seeking support, it seems events—such as the Covid-19 crisis—and her own personal health are conspiring against her.

He shifts to Las Vegas and its Culinary Union, a union that has developed its power in the hotels, casinos, restaurants, especially on the Strip but throughout much of Nevada. As he cheerfully summarizes, “The Culinary Union, you see, runs this fucking town.” A union made up of 55 percent women, 54 percent Latino, and 45 percent immigrants, “the union provides guaranteed contracts, free health care, and a pension to all of those workers and their families.” It also is “one of the most powerful political forces in Nevada.” He describes how they recruit and organize internally to keep developing its power.

Building off of the discussion about Las Vegas’ Culinary Union, he discusses the efforts of UNITE-HERE, the country’s foremost hospitality and tourism industry union.

Nolan naturally wonders if UNITE-HERE has built such a powerful “machine” in Las Vegas, can it replicate this success elsewhere? An interesting question, which he seeks to answer. He thinks it can:

… the general strategy used to build and maintain union power in Las Vegas can be used to build and maintain power in any city that relies on a tourist economy. By organizing the workers in the places that make up the spine of any tourist city’s businesses—the hotels, the airports, the stadiums, the casinos, the tourist attractions—a union can, in effect, wrap its hands around the city’s throat and demand that the working class receive its fair share of the money flowing into town. Cities that rely on tourism are fragile. Any disruption to the flow of visitors and their open wallets will soon cause the local economy, and all its tax revenue, to collapse. Tourist-heavy cities therefore offer one of the best opportunities for building union power at municipal scales.

That’s the theory; but then there’s the practice. Nolan examines the situation in Miami and New Orleans, and this is some of his best writing in the book. He talks and listens to those people on the ground in these cities who are trying to implement such a strategy. The problem? Lack of resources, especially money for staff members.

[Note: I recently reviewed Eric Blanc’s recent We Are the Union for Z Network. Blanc recognizes the essentialness of this problem in labor organizing and argues that developing worker-organizers can overcome the problem of lack of full-time staff members.]

Then, Nolan jumps back to the reality of the AFL-CIO. He talks about the 29^th Quadrennial Convention which took place in Philadelphia in June 2002. (Interestingly, as part of LEPAIO, the Labor Education Project on AFL-CIO International Operations, others and I were outside of the Convention, leafleting attendees as they entered the premises, protesting AFL-CIO foreign operations.) He writes, “…the crowd at the AFL-CIO convention was, generally speaking, indistinguishable from the crowd at the Mid-Atlantic Insurance Industry Convention.” (I had to laugh; it was true!) He continues:

But it was clear that this was not an organization that saw itself as the vanguard of a radical, powerful, new labor movement. This was the unions’ version of middle and upper management. The Revolution would not be televised here.” (Busted!)

You may think that Nolan—or myself—are being cruel here. Consider this: the biggest announcement of the convention, by unopposed and newly elected President Liz Schuler, was that the AFL-CIO would organize 10 million workers over the next decade! Praise Jesus! However, Nolan points out the obvious problem:

Because if you did a moment’s worth of math, it became clear that adding one million union members over the next ten years would cause our country’s already paltry union density—the percentage of American workers who are union members, which [he argues] is the single most important measurement of union strength—that existed at the moment to decline.

Nolan further pointed out that even with one million new union members, in an economy then expected to create another 13 million total jobs during the same time period, “… at the end of the decade [2032-KS], union density in America would have fallen under 10 percent, into the single digits, the last stop before true irrelevance.” Unfortunately, Nolan was being too gentle; in 2024, according to the U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, total union density was 9.9 percent.

[In a talk given by this author to the Institute for Critical Studies of Society over Zoom in late July 2025, it was noted that the failure of the labor leadership to stand up to Trump’s insanity during the first six months of his presidency makes union density—at any level—seem far less important than Nolan assumes; but it certainly illustrates well his overall point about their large irrelevance.]

From denigrating the current approach of the labor leadership, Nolan pivots to talking about efforts of “ordinary” workers who seek to organize themselves. He talks about fast food workers trying to organize in West Virigina, and organized Nabisco workers in Portland Oregon who go on strike. He certainly is an evocative writer, and he brings their stories to life.

Then, sadly, he discusses the state of labor leadership, focusing on the year 2022. There’s not too much to be complimentary about:

The raw number of union members rose to more than two hundred thousand, but failed to keep pace with the growth in jobs. In a year in which unions were historically popular with the public, and high-profile union organizing drives were heavily covered in the mainstream press, and Democrats controlled Washington, union density had not risen, nor even stayed the same, but declined. It was plain evidence of the fact that organized labor had neither a plan nor the capacities to organize workers at a big scale, even when conditions were in its favor (emphasis added).

Nolan then talks about the difficulties of organizing workers—and it is tough!—but he runs off the rails himself. Despite all the problems and difficulties of independent union organizing that took place in 2022, and concludes (somehow!) that this independent, non-union led organizing was “a thrilling sign of how much enthusiasm exists for organized labor”!!!

I don’t know how Nolan can claim this; he certainly offers no evidence for it; in fact, throughout this book, he’s denigrated much of the leadership of organized labor, and with good cause. In my experience, people like working together, they like standing together to stop some bullshit from arrogant bosses, and they like being so solid that they can establish a union and get a first contract, but those are very different than striking for organized labor. In fact, in the same section of the book as in which that claim was made, Nolan writes—in response to one very specific case in New Orleans where an individual worker tried to organize Lowe’s initially by himself—

None of that [help-KS] happened. Because there is no real national infrastructure for labor organizing that is able to intelligently respond to opportunities or take advantage of the newfound demand.

Nolan closes the book with a clarity he’s had throughout much of it: the issue is power. (I totally agree.) However, he claims, “The one thing we can say with absolute certainty is this: increasing union density will change America for the better. It is the single most straight-forward adjustment that will begin to reset the skewed balance of power between labor and capital.” However, despite his clarity, he does not tell us how we are going to increase union density … or how it will automatically enable those promises.

Where I really disagree with Nolan (and those with roughly similar social democratic politics who are suggesting ways forward for the trade union movement) is the lack of vision; and I argue this is a much greater problem than union density. Without a vision, they have no hope to really inspire anyone but ideologues.

First, they don’t recognize that there is not a labor movement in this country and arguably hasn’t had one since right-wing labor leaders—especially Walter Reuther of the autoworkers, and Phil Murray of the Steelworkers, the latter who was also President of the CIO—drove 11 left-led unions out of the CIO in 1949/50. Thus, instead of thinking of working people overall, this collapsed the concept of a labor movement into a trade union movement, where they think only of trade union members and often just the most dominant of those; this has largely collapsed unionism into focusing overwhelmingly on wage increases for members (good for them!) but by ignoring what is going on in the rest of society, has isolated unions and their members from most of the rest of society. Once this separation happened, the trade union movement was labeled a “special interest,” and they haven’t been able to shed that conceptualization; the right wing could not do that to a labor movement. More importantly, this collapse into just a trade union movement means its’ increasing irrelevance to larger and larger numbers of Americans; working Americans simply do not see joining the trade union movement as offering a solution to their various situations.

Previously, this author examined the trade union movement across a forty-year period, from 1981-2023. It puts this trade unionism into a global perspective. Although lengthy and detailed, the article illuminates the escalating failure of the top level leadership of the AFL-CIO affiliated unions in terms almost anyone can understand (see Scipes, 2023).

However, the trade union movement has failed to develop a global understanding of the world and how corporations’ assault on workers around the world have negatively affected U.S. workers. This has two problems: first, it ignores the labor imperialism of the AFL and then later the AFL-CIO, beginning in the late 1890s, where they have actively collaborated with the U.S. government and some corporations to destroy genuine labor movements around the world through helping to overthrow progressive, democratically-elected governments (including Guatemala in 1954; Brazil, 1964; Chile, 1973; as well as supported the failed coup effort in 2002 in Venezuela); it ignores the supporting of dictatorships in countries such as the Congo, as well as Indonesia, the Philippines, South Korea, and Taiwan and the white racial “apartheid” government in South Africa, to name the most obvious; it has ignored efforts by AFL-CIO allies such as the Trade Union Congress of the Philippines, whose largest affiliate worked with death squads (no exaggeration!) in the mid-to-late 1980s to try to defeat a progressive labor organization, the KMU, in representing workers in the largest copper mine in Asia (see Schuhrke, 2024; Scipes, 2010, where these claims—and more—are carefully documented).

Without that global understanding, they cannot explain the loss of millions of factory jobs in the U.S. that were destroyed by corporate managements’ relocating production overseas to places like Mexico and China, especially since the mid-1960s/early 1970s as U.S. corporations desperately sought to compete with overseas’ corporations from the other imperial countries as they recovered from the destruction of World War II. This competition only became fiercer by the early 1980s with the development of corporations from formerly colonized countries, like Brazil, Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan.

And without that global understanding, they cannot explain that the U.S. is not just an “ordinary” country, but that it is a country that has sought to dominate other countries of the world since at least 1945; in fact, that the United States of America is the center of the U.S. Empire. This is why the U.S. has spent so much money on the U.S. military: not to defend the United States from invasion, an impossibility which is obvious to any clear eyed realist, but to be able to dominate other countries. And supporting Israel in its genocide in Gaza is part of maintaining the U.S. Empire.

And the AFL-CIO cannot explain why their Solidarity Center—its’ foreign labor operations—is active in over 70 countries around the world. The AFL or, subsequently, the AFL-CIO, has never given an honest report of what it is doing in these countries, who it is working with, and for what trade union purposes, that can be independently verified. Nor has it reported that it has accepted approximately $1 billion from the National Endowment for Democracy—created by and funded annually since then by the U.S. Government in 1983, and which has probably been given at least as much if not more from the U.S. AID (US Agency for International Development) since the early 1960s. This, of course, legitimizes the imperialist efforts of NED, which is also composed of the international wings of the Democratic Party, the Republican Party, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, as it engages in its imperialist “democracy promotion” nonsense around the world.

In short, I argue that the AFL-CIO foreign policy leaders—a very small group at the very top of the labor movement; not the large majority of union leaders—think the U.S. should run the world, and have been willing to sacrifice workers’ interests at home while working to maintain (if not expand) the U.S. Empire around the world; again, this is detailed in Scipes, 2023.

Without this global understanding, we get social democratic pablum; NOT a real analysis.

And without this global understanding, we cannot make things make sense to others. For example, while Democrats are less bad than Republicans—especially under Trump—they are ultimately just as evil, for they, too, seek to dominate the other countries of the world.

Because of this lack of global understanding, not only can these labor leaders not honestly address their past (even if they wanted to, of which there is no evidence), but worse, they have no idea of how to operate in the present, such as confronting Trump, nor are they able to confront the future.

There are three existential crises which they cannot even begin to address: (1) climate change and the warming of the Earth; (2) the false hope of Artificial Intelligence, as a way to increase efficiency to make capitalism work, which is designed to destroy literally millions of jobs while making even more obscene profits for the few; and (3) the established failure of capitalism, as it is unable to economically support successfully the lives and well-being of working people around the world; not only has capitalism never succeeded globally, but its failure in the U.S. has become more and more obvious over the past 40 years.

I don’t know if there’s still time to upend the status quo sufficiently to enable large numbers of human beings to survive into the 22^nd Century. Any analysis, however, that does not forthrightly address these issues, among others, is clearly insufficient.

I know, however, that IF it can happen, it will be because working people globally join together—starting locally, uniting regionally, nationally, across borders, until we reach global integration—to reach such power so as to force the elites of every country to withdraw from public life. While benefiting a relative few, while accumulating their resources and power, the elites (the rich and powerful, and those who have supported or enabled them) have fucked the world—and will keep on doing so until we can stop them. The issue is: can we stop them? Only by unifying globally do we have a chance! Any other so-called solution, in my opinion, is pissing in the wind.

In short, Hamilton Nolan’s The Hammer is worth reading critically, although I find his title, and especially his subtitle, overwrought. While I think his infatuation with Sara Nelson and her potential to “save” the AFL-CIO is over the top, his focus on the importance of a real labor movement to workers of this country is clear and on target. His thinking and writing about workers is poignant and powerful. His solutions, unfortunately, do not meet the required demand.