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If you grow up in America as the average person, you’re never really in a setting where you are living democracy in action. As a child, you’re in a family, you’re told what to do; you go to school, you’re told what to do; you get a job, you’re told what to do. Where is this democracy in action that people are supposed to see? For a lot of people, the first time they really live democracy in action and experience a democratic institution is when they join a union or when they go through the process of organizing a union.

In particular, new organizing—making people go through that process of organizing with their co-workers and, most of the time, being in a fight against the boss—is also something that instills class consciousness in people in a way that you can’t do just by telling people to read a book, because it’s lived experience. People might never have read Marx, but they can see that their boss is lying to them, and trying to keep them poor, and telling them that they don’t deserve to be paid what they’re worth. All that stuff is first-person experience that changes people politically.

When we talk about the value of reviving unions, in a political sense, it’s not just like, oh, union members tend to vote more Democratic, and that’s good. It’s that the experience of organizing a union and being in a union changes people in a way that lines up with progressive values.