In the run-up to this Labor Day weekend, while most of the country planned cookouts and one last trip to the lake, roughly a hundred Teamsters Local 1932 members walked off the job at the DJT6 warehouse in Riverside, California, and more than 1,300 members of UNITE HERE Local 26 and Teamsters Local 25 went on strike at Encore Boston Harbor instead of clocking in. I got my start in politics in Nevada, working for Senator Harry Reid, in a state where the most politically influential organization for decades has been a union, the Culinary Workers Local 226, Nevada’s largest immigrant organization and roughly 54 percent Latino. Labor Day has never been an abstraction to me. It is a workforce, mostly immigrant, mostly invisible to the people it serves, still organizing every single year to make the country notice.

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The United Food and Commercial Workers, which represents 1.2 million workers, sought a federal injunction against ICE raids on its meatpacking plants in 2020 and is still condemning ICE operations against its members today. In Los Angeles last year, SEIU California president David Huerta was injured and arrested while monitoring an ICE raid outside a workplace, a reminder that union leadership now sometimes means showing up in handcuffs. Add the Culinary Union’s decades of treating immigrant rights and labor rights as one fight, and the Teamsters and UNITE HERE members who spent this particular week on a picket line instead of a shift, and a pattern emerges that has nothing to do with decline. It is a labor movement, from Delano in 1965 to Riverside and Everett this week, that keeps rebuilding its leverage in whatever form the moment allows.