We must stop confusing caution with prudence. The future of labor depends on our willingness to be bold. We don’t need perfection. We need more workers in struggle. The only way we can win is if we fight.

We also cannot be afraid to lose union elections. In fact, we cannot be afraid to lose on a larger scale. It is far better to fight and lose than to not fight at all. In fact, the insistence on running union elections only if we will win is contributing to our slow death.

The math is clear: unions must either scale or fail. To do that, union must be willing to pour the resources necessary into organizing an army of rank-and-file and staff organizers and run coordinated strategic campaigns that scale up our ability to win.

Running thousands more union elections is necessary, but not sufficient. Workers must also be adequately supported in overcoming employer opposition. That means training thousands of new organizers & designing organizing models that distribute rather than concentrate expertise.

The major obstacles are employer opposition and labor’s capacity to effectively support worker organizing. Most workers who want a union never begin organizing. Of those who do, only some win recognition and fewer still secure a first contract due to employer opposition.

Labor’s collapse is not due to worker apathy. Roughly 70% of Americans approve of unions, and tens of millions say they would join one today if given a real chance.

Labor’s event horizon is the point where unions could become too small to win big gains for current members, too weak to organize new workers at scale, too invisible to the public to matter. At 3% national density, the nation will look like South Carolina everywhere.

On average, BLS-reported union density has declined 0.1 % a year over the past two decades. If current trends hold, private-sector union density will hit 3% within a generation — the point I call labor’s event horizon.

Even with historically high win rates, unions have not been organizing workers in large enough numbers to keep up with job growth in the economy.

Half a century ago, unions routinely ran more than 7,000 union elections a year in an attempt to represent four to five times the numbers of workers we are trying to organize today.

This has had the paradoxical effect of increasing union election win rates over the past few years, while the number of workers filing for union elections has significantly dropped.

As labor unions have shrunk and employer union busting techniques have intensified, the number of organizing campaigns has significantly dropped. Today, most union drives don’t go to an election unless there is very high confidence that they will win.

Private-sector union density has collapsed from roughly one-third of the workforce in the mid-20th century to under 6% today. In just the last two decades, private sector unions lost nearly one-quarter of remaining density.