Americans are hungry to be part of unions. So why is US labor so timid? | Hamilton Nolan

Support for organized labor is soaring. Yet the biggest US union coalition endorsed Biden without asking anything in return

At a splashy event in Philadelphia last weekend, the AFL-CIO, America's largest union coalition, announced its endorsement of Joe Biden for president in 2024. You may notice that the election is still 17 months away. This was the earliest endorsement in the AFL-CIO's history, amounting to an all-in bet by organized labor that the interests of the Democratic president are identical to its own. The problem with this is not so much that labor might have decided to endorse a Republican - whoever that party's candidate is, they are sure to despise the concept of working-class empowerment - but rather the fact that the endorsement is an implicit acceptance of the status quo.

These union leaders believe that the Biden White House as currently constituted is the best they can hope to get. Indeed, they are overjoyed by what they have gotten already. It is this lack of ambition that is the labor movement's biggest flaw. They have been beaten down for so long that they have lost their ability to believe that the world they deserve will ever be real. This is a sort of trauma, induced by a decades-long decline in union power. By settling for what they have, unfortunately, they have forsaken their leverage to ask for more.

Hamilton Nolan is a labor journalist based in New York