What the Union Local Teaches
Hands-on Civics for the Working Classes
Once a month, in basements and union halls across Oregon, working people sit down together in conversations guided by Robert’s Rules of Order. They draft motions, argue over amendments, take roll, and count votes. They elect officers from among themselves, discuss contract negotiations that shape their working lives, and file grievances. They do all this after long shifts, for no extra pay, in rooms with folding chairs and overwarmed coffee.
The meetings are not glamorous, but they are still the most important hands-on civics class in everyday American life.
Most leaders grew up on the classroom version of civics, learning about the three branches of government, how a bill becomes law, and how democracies function. The real lessons of how to put these theories into practice came later. While serving on committees, they learned how to run meetings and participate in caucuses. Most of us, however, will never sit on a board, run for office, or write a resolution. As a consequence, the lesson of how power actually plays out in such settings may remain a mystery.
For workers who carry union cards, the local affiliate is where they actually practice self-government. It’s where a hospital orderly learns to amend a motion from the floor, where a community college instructor learns how to count a strike vote, where an electrician learns to chair a meeting, where a custodian learns to file a grievance and push it through multiple steps.
This is on-the-job training in democracy. A union local is one of the last places in American life where ordinary people are expected to participate actively, not just watch from the sidelines. Unlike many other organizations, which mainly ask you to show up, a union trains members to navigate meetings, debate issues, and make decisions using formal rules of order.
For many working people without formal training in leadership, the union is often the only place to gain the skills and confidence elected officials deploy every day. It wasn’t always like this; social and civic organizations—Lions Clubs, City Clubs, Rotary—were much more prominent. Today, however, they have faded. So too have other, similar organizations, such as PTAs and county political parties. Even when they do exist, they flourish only when people have the time and economic comfort to participate.
The work unions do for public life goes far beyond bargaining and grievances. Unions turn out voters at higher rates than any other working-class institution. Their members often become the organizers who staff city councils, school boards, and statehouse committees. Locals help fund community groups that defend public libraries, public schools, public parks, and public lands. Behind efforts to pass minimum-wage hikes, paid leave laws, and workplace safety rules are unions doing the hard work of coalition-building. Stewards become mayors. Bargaining chairs become legislators. When a private equity firm moves to close a public hospital, when a corporate owner threatens to ship jobs elsewhere, when a state agency looks to cut a service, the community’s response is often led by unionists.
When union density falls, wages drop—and so do the practical skills people need to act together. Fewer people know how to organize a campaign, draft a resolution, hold a leader to a promise, or build coalitions across real differences. Robert Putnam’s famous work on the decline of community organizations in postwar America found that union membership fell the fastest. Later political science confirmed the link between fewer unions and weaker mass democratic participation.
That link is not an accident. When unions and other mass-membership institutions that teach ordinary people how to act together vanish, people slowly lose the ability to collaborate effectively. What remains are individual acts of consumer choice, private complaints, and the habit of looking for a strong leader who promises to act on workers’ behalf.
So, we should ask: Is there anything else that trains millions of Americans in the daily work of governing themselves?
The answer is a qualified “yes.” Tenant unions, mutual aid networks, immigrant rights groups, and congregations with strong committee structures all do organized, rule-bound work at a large scale. Where they exist and function well, they offer democratic training that closely resembles what labor does. The difference is that organized labor is the only entity doing it for millions of people, backed by legal protections that force employers to recognize members’ decisions, and with the staying power to keep it going for decades instead of just during election cycles or other episodic periods.
Of course, not every local operates equally well. Some unions run staff-dominated meetings in which members are there to ratify, not to deliberate. Some have turned meeting rules into an empty routine by going through the motions without real discussion. The answer is not to write off such unions; it is to strengthen those that have grown weak. A weak local can be revived. A dissolved local cannot.
Oregon knows this story in its bones. The 1934 longshore strike shut down the Portland waterfront, alongside a broader West Coast action. Teachers walked out in 2019 to demand better school funding. Staff at Powell’s organized in waves. Graduate workers built some of the earliest public-sector graduate employee unions in the country. Portland Community College faculty negotiated some of the strongest contracts for part-time faculty and walked out in 2026, in the first community college strike in Oregon’s history. Nurses recently went on strike at Providence, winning a strong contract in so doing. Oregon’s labor movement isn’t a relic of the past. It is a living civic institution doing work few other institutions are positioned to do.
Oregon’s experience is not an exception; it is a concentrated version of a broader struggle over who governs public institutions. Take, for instance, the phenomenon of higher education power dynamics. On campus after campus across the United States, upward accretion of administrative control has threatened to reshape institutions for a generation and undercut a long tradition of shared decision-making. Centralizing authority is often framed as a financial necessity, but it also narrows who gets to decide how teaching and learning are organized.
Boards of directors, institutional administrators, and their C-suite counterparts all speak the language of power. Unions pull the other way. The people who do the institution’s daily work gather to set priorities, argue over proposals, and insist that decisions be made with them, not for them. These are the counterweights to the firm consolidation of power at the top.
And that’s why working people set out the folding chairs, start the coffee, and call a meeting to order. They argue over amendments, count votes, and hold one another to rules they wrote themselves. No one will mistake it for a seminar in democratic theory. It is something better: the practice itself, carried out by people the rest of the system rarely trusts to govern anything.
Without tending, activist union effectiveness may erode, one lapsed meeting or one dissolved local at a time. Those at the top of unionized workplaces relish opportunities to exploit the demise of such locals, further consolidating what already exists as considerable management power. But what such CEOs cannot defeat is the will of workers to defend their rights, to seek justice, and to find each other in union halls throughout the state.
Our ongoing task is to protect those rooms and multiply them, so that the everyday habits of self-government are not forgotten, and so that unions remain living schools of democracy.