The Minneapolis Federation of Teachers (MFT) Local 59 march while on strike in 2022.
In the forthcoming book, Who’s Got the Power?: The Resurgence of American Unions, Minnesota-based labor writer and historian Dave Kamper unpacks the tumultuous wins and losses of the labor movement of the first half of the 2020 decade. In the book, available in October, Kamper analyzes the labor fights that defined the 2020s—from the UAW strike, to the UPS Teamsters strike, to Starbucks Workers United, to the surge of higher education union drives. He argues that while there is certainly work to be done, the labor movement’s reinvigoration over the past five years has given him a newfound optimism, based on the widespread solidarity seen across the country.
Kamper is a senior state policy strategist for the Economic Policy Institute, and began organizing on the University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign campus as a graduate student in the 1990s. He argues that the current era of unionism presents a historical high and a changing tide filled with hope following a few decades of losses stemming from the 1980s. The pandemic blew everything apart, Kamper says, in order for new strategies to emerge.
The book weaves in pivotal events in labor history that set the stage for the labor movement’s position going into 2020, including the attack against public sector unions through the passage of Act 10 in Wisconsin in 2011 as well as the seeds planted by the Chicago Teachers Union in 2012. Kamper’s style isn’t just for the seasoned union organizer—but is also approachable and informative for labor movement newcomers.
Workday Magazine interviewed Dave Kamper about lessons from the past five years, Minnesota’s unique position as a national leader in organizing, and how to meet the challenges presented by the Trump administration. The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Workday Magazine: Can you describe this book to me?
Dave Kamper: It’s about the changes and the exciting developments in the labor movement in the first half of this decade. Basically, it’s an optimistic book for horrifying times. Because however terribly scary the present moment is, we’re going into it with a labor movement stronger, more innovative, and more united than we’ve had in either yours or my lifetime.
Workday Magazine: How did you decide to write this book?
Kamper: If I can just brag for a minute about something I’m really good at—which is being wrong. I recorded this incident in the book. I work for the Economic Policy Institute and one morning in 2022, we were having our planning meeting and someone said, “There’s this election for these Amazon workers in Staten Island. Should we give attention to that?” I said, “Yeah, we can, but they’re going to lose really bad.” And of course, they won. They won by a lot. That caused me to reassess the cynicism with which I’ve lived most of my life in the labor movement.
Cynicism, or realism, as those who are cynics always like to call ourselves, has been my way of doing things. In the past five years, things that never should have happened, did happen and they kept happening. I realized that I’d become an optimist, and I wanted to write a book about that.
Workday Magazine: Why did you decide to focus this book on the last five years specifically?
Kamper: The book started specifically as about Covid. And then I realized it was more than Covid—Covid is just one part of the book now. There’s a great book by Naomi Klein that invokes the concept of disaster capitalism, which is that when bad things happen to the world, capitalism finds a way to screw everyone over. And the pandemic was an exception to that rule.
The pandemic was terrible—people died and there were all sorts of bad things. But we also had, for the first time in American history, something that was very close to a universal basic income in the expanded unemployment benefits of $600 a week. We had an eviction moratorium. We had a massive expansion of healthcare to all kinds of people. We had workers who took advantage of the labor shortages and the supply chain snarls to win things for themselves that just never happened before. The pandemic marked a real shift in all kinds of workers attitudes, especially towards embracing solidarity as a core virtue.
Workday Magazine: How did you get involved with the labor movement?
Kamper: As always, me being wrong was the basic start of it. I entered graduate school at the University of Illinois in the mid ‘90s, and there were these people who were trying to organize a graduate union. I thought it was the most foolish idea in the world, but I got organized. People educated me. They talked to me, they encouraged me to challenge my own thinking. I signed a union card and then I became a steward. Then I was taking over buildings and leading illegal strikes. I decided that being involved in the labor movement was going to be more rewarding to me than trying to make an academic career. So I went to work for the unions and did that for about 20 years.
Workday Magazine: I love the part in the book where you talk about the labor movement in the ‘90s and how it felt like you showed up to a party too late and there’s a bunch of people reminiscing about how cool it used to be. Can you tell me about that shift from that era to the moment we’re in now?
Kamper: When I got into the movement, and for many years thereafter, it was dominated by people who have been around for a long time. The message to younger workers was, “You are welcome to be involved. We want you, but we want you on our terms,” instead of trying to build something in your own image. What I think we’ve really seen through the last few years is workers remaking the union in their own image.
The very first chapter of my book is about the Frito-Lay workers in Kansas. I went down and met with a bunch of them. They’re fantastic human beings. There were people involved who’d been around with the union for a long time, and they said to me what really made a difference was that lots of new people got involved and wanted to take action. And darn it, they were right. So it was this openness on the part of existing leaders to welcome new folks, but also the arrival of new folks, and not always young people.
It took people in labor a lot longer than it should have to realize how weak we were. I think this is one of the lessons of the last 45 years or so of labor history. From 1980 to 1985, we got shellacked. The labor movement got crushed, absolutely stomped to bits, and yet it took 20 to 30 years for some people to accept that that’s what had happened. Similarly, Scott Walker got elected governor of Wisconsin in 2010 and he passed Act 10, destroying public sector collective bargaining rights. And yet there were many people in the labor movement who, up until just recently, weren’t prepared to admit there was a crisis in the public sector. That gap between the bad thing happening and everyone agreeing that the bad thing happened is a big deal and creates a lot of challenges.
Workday Magazine: In the book you have chapters that focus on, just to name a few, flight attendants, Starbucks workers, academic workers, the UAW, and Hollywood actors and writers strikes. Why did you decide to focus on these fights in particular?
Kamper: One of the things that my publisher did, which was the right decision for someone like me, was to say, you get 60,000 words. I went to graduate school in history, I can’t say “good morning” in under 15,000 words. So I had to make choices. So I chose what feels to me like representative examples that can tell a lot of different pieces of the story. I needed public sector workers, immigrant workers, and I needed to talk about the biggest things that happened in the period, which are really to my mind, the Teamsters win at UPS, the SAG-AFTRA actors and writers strike, and then, of course, the monumental UAW strike.
I framed the book around that UAW strike, which to me was the most unexpected and the most shocking victory. I also felt that part of the goal of the book was to explain the labor movement for people who didn’t understand the labor movement. There’s a lot of great labor writing out there but some of that writing is written for people who know a lot of the ins and outs of unions. I tried very hard to write a book that if you kind of thought unions were good, but that’s kind of where your knowledge stopped, you could read this book and not feel like this is you’re writing to an audience that doesn’t include me.
Workday Magazine: Over the past five years, we heard the term “unprecedented” a lot. And it’s true, a lot of unprecedented things happened. But something I appreciated about this book was the way labor history was intertwined. Can you tell me about how labor history has informed your book?
Kamper: What I took from that training as a historian was that historical context always matters. And that if history doesn’t always repeat itself, it rhymes. In general, I process things by thinking about historical analogies, and then thinking through what’s the same and what’s different, and how these things are connected to each other. And again, thinking about the generational shift, there was an attitude you still see of more veteran labor unionists to be like, “The new people don’t appreciate all that we did,” and that’s a terrible way to frame it—it’s patronizing. And it misses the point, because what really matters is understanding that we’ve been here before, and that the way that we handle things in the past can’t be completely replicated, shouldn’t be completely replicated, but understanding that there are parallels that we can look at really matters.
Maybe I should have started feeling this optimism in 2012 and I just didn’t catch it. The Chicago Teachers Union went on strike so kids could have textbooks. If you took a collective bargaining class in the year 2000, they told you that that’s not something you can bargain for and you shouldn’t even try and you’re crazy to think about it. That’s the legacy of the Treaty of Detroit in 1950 and the great bargain that the industrial union struck with corporate America to trade an amazing improvement in the standard of living in return for giving up on fighting over a lot of bigger issues of managerial control.
While there’s certainly exceptions prior to 2012, it’s really the Chicago Teachers who set the bar for using their power as a union to bargain to improve their students’ lives. That was, in fact, unprecedented, in the previous 75 years. It’s kind of a miracle and it does deserve that credit. Similarly, what’s happened at Starbucks, when they won their first elections, I was like, “Oh, good for you kids. You won a couple of union elections.” And then they kept doing it, and they kept doing it, and they kept growing, and they kept growing. Yes, they’re still struggling, and yes, there’s still challenges, but the fact that they’ve gotten where they’ve gotten, that’s a new model of organizing. No one’s ever done it like this before in the United States. It’s pretty impressive. And it was not something I saw coming.
Workday Magazine: The intro of the book is written by Sara Nelson, international president of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, AFL-CIO. Can you tell me about why you selected her and why she’s just such an important figure in the labor movement today?
Kamper: I’m fortunate to have known Sara for several years now. The thing I appreciate about Sara is that she has both the ability to inspire and the ability to to bring real, strategic thinking to what she does. I’ve seen her bring large crowds of rooms to tears with her ability to inspire them and fire them up. I’ve also seen her in rooms talking about organizing strategy and how things work. She has a well-earned, hard-work grasp of it. She’s genuinely the kind of labor leader that I think we need more of. She is, to my mind, one of the very best, if not the best union leader today. I was honored she was willing to write the forward. I didn’t ask her to write about me or the book. She wrote it just after Trump had gotten elected again. Most of this book was written before 2025. I think people would love to have her perspective on the present moment that we’re in, and that’s what she wrote about.
Workday Magazine: Selfishly, I want to ask about the role of Minnesota in this book. I was very excited to see Minneapolis and Minnesota shout-outs—from the teacher strike in 2022 to the Awood Center. Why is Minnesota a hotspot for labor organizing and how does that kind of relate to the bigger picture?
Kamper: What we see in Minnesota is a microcosm of some of the things I write about the book nationally. There’s a lot of history here. Nobody is alive who played a role in the 1934 Teamster strike, but it set Minnesota on a path by setting certain things forward. It set Minnesota on a path different from a lot of its neighboring states. Why are we so different from Iowa? Why are we so different from the Dakotas? Why are we so different from Wisconsin? In some ways that strike is a big part of it and the political and social and economic changes made.
You also have some things very particular here. The Minneapolis teacher strike was very much an outgrowth of Covid but also an outgrowth of the same teacher reform movements that started in Chicago and St. Paul and then spread to Minneapolis and many other places in the country. In many ways, that’s an example of what we’ve seen. You’ve also got this tremendous infusion of new people to the movement, not always young, but new. The Somali community in the Twin Cities, and its embrace of labor solidarity is really fantastic and it’s something that is particular to Minnesota, mostly by historical chance.
There’s a great historical parallel in this to when you saw unions in the 1930s pop up, where quite often, the locus of organizing was partially the workplace, but it was also the church where all the Italian immigrants went, or the beer hall, where all the Czech workers met at the end of the day. Those cultural solidarity elements that mixed with the workplace solidarity are playing a role with what’s happening with the Somali community here.
It matters that we’ve got someone like Peter Rachleff here, who isn’t an old cranky man yelling about the old days. He and I met with the Macalester undergraduate workers when they started organizing. We didn’t patronize them or condescend to them. We treated them like the serious people they were. It matters that we’ve got unions like the Saint Paul Federation of Educators, which in my mind are the strongest union in the country. When SEIU left the AFL-CIO in 2005 there was open warfare in California. We didn’t have that in Minnesota and that’s paying off in spades now, you can see the benefits of that unity. And that’s conscious work by a lot of people, many of whom will never get remembered by history, who did a ton of things to keep us all united.
Workday Magazine: Looking forward, what do you think are kind of the lessons learned from these past five years? What are the messages you would tell young workers at this moment?
Kamper: The first thing is to trust yourself and to trust what you know. I’ve been in this movement for a long time. The truth is, illiterate shoemakers in Massachusetts figured this out 200 years ago. There’s no expertise in the movement. What matters is solidarity. And that’s not a slogan, that’s not a cliche. I think it’s the actual truth. To win is to turn towards each other and to find strength with each other and to be in struggle with each other. You can’t do it alone and you shouldn’t want to do it alone. And that’s harder than doing it by yourself because you have to compromise and you have to struggle and you have to engage with people and you may have to push past some things—but that act of struggle, that act of engagement, makes all of you stronger, makes all of you more effective, and builds you in all kinds of fantastic directions.
I think it’s possible to be an optimist about the labor movement and not be rose-colored glasses about it. We’ve got a lot of problems in the movement right now. There are some unions that are way too comfortable with Trump, that are way too comfortable with his anti-immigrant rhetoric, his authoritarian tendencies, and there are some who really are misunderstanding what tariffs are all about in the Trump context. There are still parts of the movement that are very selfish and focused on themselves. Sometimes that selfishness comes from a space of desperation, that all we can do is look out for ourselves or that we don’t have enough strength to look out for other people. You can acknowledge all of that and still be an optimist about the movement. You’ve got to be okay with the tension between “I love this movement and I’m excited about it,” and “It’s got a lot of things that it needs to do better at.” I think you’ve gotta have a kernel of hope. It’s a hope, again, based on solidarity that needs to be a part of it.