“Unions Are Laboratories of Democracy”: Hamilton Nolan on Joe Biden, Gawker, and the Power of Labor

In the summer of 2015, the online news site Gawker, known for its gossipy scoops and puckish style, became the first major digital media company to vote to unionize. The victory bucked a then widespread belief that young journalists had no interest in unions, and spurred a wave of labor organizing in digital media. At the center of the Gawker effort was a journalist named Hamilton Nolan, who had joined the site amid the Great Recession and became its “de facto labor reporter,” publishing scoops on corporate malfeasance and union drives across the country. “We had a lavish roof deck at the office, but no system of getting regular raises; big parties with open bars, but no functional system of internal communication; a pancake machine in the kitchen, but no severance pay,” he writes in his new book, The Hammer: Power, Inequality, and the Struggle for the Soul of Labor. “All major company decisions were made inside the mysterious mind of the owner. He smoked a lot of weed.”

Gawker Media’s first contract only lasted for a few months before the company filed for bankruptcy in the face of a $140 million legal judgment stemming from a Peter Thiel–funded defamation lawsuit, filed by the former wrestler Hulk Hogan. (The site was revived in 2021, only to be shuttered again last year.) But the experience created a lasting impression on Nolan, who went on to be a labor reporter at The Guardian and In These Times, a progressive magazine in Chicago. “My immersion into unions felt like finally grasping the right tool after rummaging around in a toolbox for years,” he writes.

The Hammer, which hits shelves this week, comes at a moment of unprecedented public interest in organized labor, even as the percentage of American workers in unions continues to decline. It is both a love letter to the power of workplace organizing and a lacerating critique of the shortcomings of mainstream labor organizations, which Nolan argues have failed to meet the moment. In this interview, edited for length and clarity, Nolan talks to Vanity Fair about whether Joe Biden really is “the most pro-union President in American history,” and why he believes that the labor movement is “absolutely central to the success or failure of the American experiment.”

Vanity Fair: How did this book grow out of your own experience trying to unionize your own workplace?

Hamilton Nolan: I grew up with activist-type parents, went into journalism, and started working at Gawker, where I was writing a lot about labor, inequality, and class war. Every once in a while, people would say in the comments section, Why don’t you all have a union? But I didn’t really take it seriously for many years until 2015, when I spoke to an organizer. We said, “Let’s give it a shot here.” And we unionized. That experience of going through a union drive, especially at a time when there weren’t a lot of unions in the media industry, gave me a lot of insight into the topic. And it also impressed upon me the value of unions, and then the gap between the potential they had and how they were actually being used. For a lot of people who’ve gone through the process of organizing their workplace, you get such a burst of energy and excitement about the potential of unions, and then you look around society, and you’re like, Why doesn’t everybody have this? That was the seed of what grew into this book.

Last year, we saw a number of high-profile strikes in major industries, including Hollywood, automobile manufacturing, and health care. Polling consistently reveals some of the highest public support for labor unions in decades. And yet, as you write in the book, the current reality for the labor movement is a bit less rosy. Can you talk about that?

The average person who reads the news and maybe reads about exciting union campaigns has a perception of a new level of energy around unions and organized labor in America. That energy is real. But the most important measurement of the strength of unions in America is union density, which just means the percentage of workers who are union members. And that measurement has been declining since the 1950s. It used to be that one in three Americans were union members. Now it’s one in 10. The most recent figures in the book were from 2023, where you saw union density was still declining. In late January, the Labor Department released the new union density figures, and it declined once again to the lowest point on record. What we have is this situation where there’s all this public excitement about the labor movement, and yet organized labor has not figured out how to stop its systematic decline. That tension kind of punctures the bubble of the happy narrative around organizing.

We also have a president who touts himself as the most pro-labor president in US history. How would you evaluate the Biden administration’s actual record on labor?

I think he is the most pro-union president, but that’s a very low bar, even among Democratic presidents. Barack Obama did not pass “card check” [legislation], which was a pretty modest pro-union reform. Bill Clinton was sort of the heart and soul of neoliberalism. You can go back through Democratic presidents through my lifetime, all the way back to Jimmy Carter, and none of them were really that enthusiastic about spending their own political capital on behalf of unions. Biden has done that. Probably the best thing that Biden has done for unions are some of his appointees, particularly at the National Labor Relations Board. The NLRB is very good. They’ve done what they could to try to reshape labor law, when it’s impossible to get any good reforms through Congress. So, yes, Biden is the most pro-union president, but he also broke the railroad strike. He ain’t perfect. But we’re coming up from a very low bar.

Much of the book focuses on the AFL-CIO, the largest federation of unions in the US. You criticize the organization in quite strong terms, calling it a “mediocre in-house lobbying firm and traffic cop for America’s unions.” Can you outline your criticisms of the AFL-CIO?

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