What Good Is A Union In Hell?

“Brothers, sisters, siblings, we stand here now on the precipice of oblivion… This isn’t just about fighting for better wages and working conditions… This is about who is willing to fight for life itself?”

By Maximillian Alvarez, The Real News

On Sunday, July 20, 2025, TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez delivered the keynote speech at the national convention of the National Organization of Legal Services Workers (NOLSW), UAW Local 2320. “I am here to report back to you from the front lines of struggle, without hesitation or hyperbole, that we are at risk of losing everything,” Alvarez told the crowd of union members. “And so I am here not to extol the virtues of your union or the value of unions in general, but to ask you bluntly: What good is a union in Hell? How much can an organization of the dawned do in a future no one wants to live in? What good does a collective bargaining agreement serve when the world as we know it is dying?”

Additional links/info:

• NOLSW-UAW Local 2320 website, X page, Facebook page, and Instagram

Featured Music:

• Jules Taylor, “Working People” Theme Song

Credits:

• Audio Post-Production: Jules Taylor

Below is the transcript of the speech Alvarez delivered at the 2025 NOLSW-UAW convention in Baltimore, Maryland. The text has been lightly edited for length. 

15 years ago, in the darkness of the Great Recession, when my family, like millions of other families, was losing everything—including the house I grew up in—when I was hopelessly broke, crushingly depressed, and working 12-hour days in different warehouses and factories in Southern California as a temp, I never would have imagined life would someday put me in rooms like this.

Over the years—on my podcast Working People, on The Real News Network, in my book The Work of Living, on channels like Breaking Points—I’ve interviewed workers from all walks of life, from industries across the economy, from just about every union you can imagine. Railroad engineers and conductors with SMART-TD and the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen. VA nurses with National Nurses United. Young baristas with Starbucks Workers United. Strippers in Hollywood who unionized with Actor’s Equity. Longshore workers with the ILWU. Public school teachers with the Chicago Teachers Union. UMWA coal miners and UPS Teamsters. Newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh workers at the Pittsburgh Post Gazette who have been on strike for over two years. UNITE HERE hotel and hospitality workers from the Las Vegas strip to colonial Williamsburg. Legal aid advocates and attorneys with UAW Local 2325, UAW graduate student workers, UAW autoworkers at the Big Three automakers. And so many more.

I’ll be honest, when I started doing this work, I didn’t really know shit about unions. I did not grow up in a union family. And the dominant consensus in the Southern California I knew in the ‘90s and early aughts was that unions, at best, had served important functions in the past but were unnecessary today; at worst, they were corrupt, self-serving, bloated bureaucratic institutions that hurt businesses and held individual workers back from advancing in their jobs. By the time I started my podcast in 2018, a lot of those anti-union sentiments I absorbed as a kid had melted away, and I myself was part of a union for the first time—shout out to the Graduate Employees Organization, AFT Local 3550 at the University of Michigan.

Still, I knew way less about unions and the labor movement then than I do now. And while I have since become a staunch advocate for both and become known as a fierce, unapologetic advocate for workers’ rights, that is not what I set out to be—and Working People was never intended to be a show about unions. As the title makes clear, it was and is a show about people; it was and is a “podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today.” I did not start the show because I hoped to one day be speaking in rooms like this to union members like you. I started the show because I did not want my father, Jesus Alvarez, to live the rest of his life and to go to his grave feeling like a failure. Pops was the first working person I interviewed for the podcast, and I often joke that I basically started the show as a ruse to get my dad to talk about the trauma he and our family had experienced, because I could see the shame and hurt eating him alive, destroying his sense of self, destroying my parents’ marriage, destroying our family.

What I saw happening to my own father was what I had seen happen to so many of my coworkers at the restaurants, retail stores, and warehouses I worked at; what I myself had felt as a low-wage worker in America. He had become convinced that his life was as small and worthless as this rigged system trains us to believe by beating and cheating and wearing us down until, eventually, we stop dreaming of a better life, we stop believing we deserve better, and we accept “getting by” as good enough. From that first interview with my dad to every interview I’ve done and every report I’ve published since, my primary goal has been to honor the humanity of working people, to remind us that we do deserve better, that our lives are beautiful and every life is precious, that our stories are worth sharing, worth listening to, worth remembering, worth celebrating, and that we cannot and must not keep internalizing as personal failures the indignities and injustices of economic and political systems designed to fail us.

It was in that context that I came to learn much more about unions, the history of organized labor, and the existentially vital role unions play in our individual and collective struggles to believe we are worth more—to not only dream of but demand better workplaces, better lives, and a better world, and to fight to get them together. I have also learned about and railed against the many real problems unions have, from the local to the international level, the unfathomably restrictive and boss-friendly nature of US labor law, and the failures of organized labor to live up to its promise to union members and to the working class writ large as the ruling class takes back all that our ancestors fought for and won. But I have never wavered in my understanding that we will not get to the world we deserve without unions, or in my belief that unions CAN live up to their promise when they are more democratic, more accountable to the rank and file, more militant, and when they understand and take seriously the responsibility unions have not just to their members, but to the entire working class. Unions are one of the only institutional forces we have for working-class people to independently organize themselves and fight for our needs as workers, as a class.

That is what I want to talk to you about with the time I have left. When I was initially invited to speak at this convention, I researched the proud and incredible history of the National Organization of Legal Services Workers—you guys have a hell of a history. I planned to talk to you about the importance of your roles as justice workers in our unjust society, the specific issues you could lead the way on in your contract bargaining and workplace organizing, the specific challenges you all are facing now under the current administration and the specific opportunities you have to empower the powerless, the poor, and the exploited, as you have done for so many decades. And I cannot overstate how vital the work you all do in your day-to-day work and in your union is. It’s so, so important. But a lot has changed in our world these past few months.

As a reporter myself and as editor in chief and co-executive director of The Real News Network, I have seen these monstrous changes up close. Again, I’m not just a labor reporter, and I don’t just report on unions. You could say that I and everyone at The Real News are class-war correspondents, reporting from the front lines of the ruling class assault on working people’s lives, our health, our communities, our freedom, our democracy, our planet, and on life itself. I don’t need to tell you that we are losing this war, but I need you to understand all that we are losing with it. I am here to report back to you from the front lines of struggle, without hesitation or hyperbole, that we are at risk of losing everything. And so I am here not to extol the virtues of your union or the value of unions in general, but to ask you bluntly: What good is a union in Hell? How much can an organization of the damned do in a future no one wants to live in? What good does a collective bargaining agreement serve when the world as we know it is dying?

My brothers, sisters, siblings, we stand here now, on July 20, 2025, on the precipice of oblivion. We are cooking our planet at a blinding pace and life is dying off en masse all around us, war and genocide and imperialist plunder are ripping our world and our people apart, the maga-rich are speedrunning our society to collapse and pillaging everything they can like Earth is having a going-out-of-business sale, placating us with lies and AI-generated fake realities so we keep rejecting the monstrous truth in front of us and keep fighting each other as we lower ourselves into the mass grave of human civilization. We have descended quickly into what sisters Astra Taylor and Noami Klein rightly call “end-times fascism.” The levers of power are controlled by a ghoulish death cult of billionaire oligarchs, war hawks, bigoted misanthropes, and religious fanatics who have given up on this world and the very notion that we can have a society that works for everyone.

“Not so long ago,” Taylor and Klein write,

It was primarily religious fundamentalists who greeted signs of apocalypse with gleeful excitement about the long-awaited Rapture. Trump has handed critical posts to people who subscribe to that fiery orthodoxy, including several Christian Zionists who see Israel’s use of annihilatory violence [against Palestinians] to expand its territorial footprint not as illegal atrocities but as felicitous evidence that the Holy Land is getting closer to the conditions under which the Messiah will return, and the faithful will get their celestial kingdom… But you don’t need to be a biblical literalist, or even religious, to be an end times fascist. Today, plenty of powerful secular people have embraced a vision of the future that follows a nearly identical script, one in which the world as we know it collapses under its weight and a chosen few survive and thrive in various kinds of arks, bunkers and gated “freedom cities”… Today’s rightwing leaders and their rich allies are not just taking advantage of catastrophes, shock-doctrine and disaster-capitalism style, but simultaneously provoking and planning for them.

I see the inhumane results of this dismal, anti-human, anti-life politics everywhere. I see it in the dozens and dozens of documentary reports we have published over the last two years from the Occupied West Bank and from what remains on the blistered earth that was Gaza. I hear it in the stories of working-class people, union and non-union, who are living in sacrifice zones that are multiplying in every state, from East Palestine, Ohio, to here in South Baltimore, from Honolulu to rural Texas. People whose communities have been made unlivable by corporate and government pollution, people whose lives are sacrificed at the altars of greed and deregulation, people whose communities have been abandoned and are being obliterated by the predictable and unpredictable consequences of man-made climate change.

I saw it last week when I returned home to Southern California to report on the terror campaign and fascist occupation of the neighborhoods I grew up in by armed, masked, unidentified men kidnapping people who look like me and my family off the street, from their job sites and bus stops, from immigration courts, from their homes. No one I talked to even knows if these people are agents of the state, bounty hunters, or vigilante impersonators, but they’re being told to stand by and do nothing as they or their loved ones are kidnapped without warrants, disappeared, and possibly sent to blacksite prisons in countries they’ve never been to before without access to lawyers or contact with their families.

Again I ask you, not in an accusatory or presumptuous way, but in desperation and hope that you will find a forceful answer: what good is your union, or any union, to them?

That may seem like an unfair question to ask of any union, any local, but when history calls our number, fairly or unfairly, it is the duty of every person of conscience to answer the call. These are not normal times, and business as usual won’t cut it. For instance, I have seen firsthand the truth of labor’s claims that unions raise the floor for all workers, not just their members. But we cannot rely on such traditional axioms when the end-times fascists and oligarchs are attacking the very right of unions to exist while smashing holes in the floor and pushing more of us into the black abyss below.

From the massive tax cuts to the catastrophic cuts to programs like Medicaid and SNAP, Republicans know that their policies today, like the policies Republicans have been pushing my whole life, will continue to supercharge inequality, will continue to enrich and empower the same oligarchic ruling class destroying our planet and our society, and will continue the 50-year trend of making life measurably harder for poor and working people. While they rob us and our economy in broad daylight, the insurance policy of Trump and the ruling class he represents is the hyper-expansion of an unaccountable police state to execute his mass deportations. You know what was also included in the “big, beautiful bill” Congress passed and Trump signed two weeks ago? $170 billion in new funds for border security and immigration enforcement that will make ICE the largest domestic police force in the US, bigger than most countries’ militaries, and the most heavily funded law enforcement agency in the entire government. Trump’s implicit, and increasingly explicit, promise is that deporting or incarcerating immigrants, people who LOOK LIKE immigrants, citizens, dissidents, and an ever-expanding class of “undesirables” will eventually leave only a deserving few for whom the manufactured scarcity of capitalist class war will seem like abundance when there are fewer human beings left around to fight over the scraps.

That is their dark vision. They are executing it now, as we speak, and the traditional checks and balances that have protected us in the past are being gleefully smashed in front of our eyes. I can’t tell you how all of this will end, because that depends on what we all do right now, but I can tell you where we’re going if we do nothing. And the more atomized, disunified, alone, and fearful we are, the easier it will be to break us, control us, disappear us, and deliver us to the dark dystopia on the horizon.

Brothers and sisters, this is the defining moment of our lives and our generation, and what we do or don’t do now will define the course of our future or the lack thereof. Politicians aren’t coming to save us, corporations aren’t coming to save us, it is up to us, the workers of the world, the great laboring masses, to save ourselves.

This isn’t just about fighting for better wages and working conditions. It was never just about that. But it sure as shit can’t be about just that now. This is about who is willing to fight for life itself, for liberty, and for the needs of all met so all can pursue their happiness… Who is willing to fight against the imposing forces of death, control, lies, greed, and destruction?

I have met fighters from all corners of society. I met a group of them in Pasadena, California, last week. They call themselves Grupo Auto Defensa. They’re not part of an official organization, they have no backing from unions or nonprofits or local government; they’re just a group of neighbors from the hood, as they describe it, who saw the fascist terror spreading in their community and decided to band together to do something about it. From chasing ICE cars out of town with bullhorns to setting up security brigades so terrified residents can walk outside and go to the grocery store, from providing know your rights information to reclaiming public space, protecting each other, and rebelliously refusing to live in fear.

These everyday heroes have shown extraordinary bravery by making the decision to get up, organize, and do something. Just like you all or your predecessors organized and did something at your job when they formed a union. And if we’re gonna survive this, if we’re gonna stop this, if we’re gonna keep hope alive that we can still have a future worth living in, we need working people everywhere coming together, forming unions in the most literal sense. You are in labor unions, you have a lot to teach people out there. And the labor movement has a lot to learn from people like Elizabeth Castillo, Jesus Simental, and their neighbors who all formed Grupo Auto Defensa.

What transferable skills, structures, and strategies for bringing people together as a union of the willing can you bring from organized labor and help others harness and develop in their struggles? What support, material, legal, or otherwise, are you as unions willing to give to this fight? What coalitions can you help build to bring working people together in a united front that fights for light and life as such? How can we leverage the positions and different legal restrictions of labor unions, tenant unions, and grassroots unions of all kinds to creatively marshal working-class resistance, apply pressure, and build power on and off the shop floor? What rights and privileges as union workers are you willing to put on the line for those whose rights, from their reproductive rights to their very right to exist, are under attack? What will you do, as unions, to stand up for immigrants, queer and trans people, Palestinians obligated by weapons paid for by our tax dollars, students imprisoned for exercising their first amendment rights? How can we in the movement use our skills, our spaces, our connections, and our resources to physically bring disconnected people together in real spaces where they can know one another, like Grupo Auto Defensa is doing in Pasadena and like you are all doing right here?

Resignation, despair, acceptance of our own powerlessness as a permanent, unfixable state—this is, simply and truly, unacceptable. We will not accept it. We cannot afford to be paralyzed by fear and defeatism; there is too much at stake—for us, for our children, our planet, and for our future. Now is the time for bravery, and history is calling upon all of us to be brave and to instill bravery in others. We must model bravery in our everyday lives by how we carry ourselves, by how we treat each other, and by standing firmly for what’s right, always, even if no one is watching.

Your international union president, brother Shawn Fain, famously said “the working class is the arsenal of democracy and the workers are the liberators.” If that is true, brothers and sisters, then for ourselves, for each other, for our children, this is our time to prove it.