A Short History of Labor Around Dallas

March 13, 2026
education, history, unions
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If you have a lot of time, you might spend it nosing around my labor history web site. Start with the time line at https://lilleskole.us/labordallas/hist/histdate.htm. There are very few honest books about Texas labor, but Patricia Evridge Hill’s “Dallas, the Making of a Modern Industrial City” and Michael Phillips “White Metropolis” are worth your time if you have some.

If you are as short of time as I, read this.

Dallas labor was slave labor from the city’s inception in 1841 to well past 1865. Milestones were the execution of a slave woman in 1853 and the downtown fire of 1860, which was used as an excuse to get people to vote for secession. Three slaves were murdered for it and all slaves were given lashes. Not much more is known.

Dallas and Tarrant barely voted for secession, and the 8 counties northward voted against it.

Violent Texans ended the Reconstruction Era in 1868, long before the rest of the nation. Hardly anything is known about it in Dallas. The person who was supposed to head the Freedman’s Bureau in Dallas was murdered in East Texas and never arrived.

The Knights of Labor established several chapters here in 1882. Their great rise, and their downfall, were associated with our area. The big influx of members came about because of their successful fight against railroad baron Jay Gould in the Great Southwest Railway Strike. It originated at a convention in Sherman in 1885. A year later, Gould broke the contract and hired murderers to break the union.

The downfall of the Knights may have also come about because they failed to support the Haymarket Martyrs in Chicago during their show trial 1886-7. A new organization called American Federation of Labor was named in 1886. They nominally supported the Haymarket martyrs and found a way to outlast both of the previous national labor federations by organizing only the most skilled and highest paid of laborers. They also enthusiastically supported government foreign policy to the detriment of international solidarity, and that helped them avoid the punishment that destroyed the Industrial Workers of the World.

Just about the only AFL union that successfully organized everybody on a worksite instead of only the elite was the United Mineworkers of America. They had some great battles, including the Ludlow strike that included a massacre of women and children. In Thurman, Texas, West of Fort Worth, mineworkers put together a militia to send to Colorado.

The idea of organizing everybody, not just the elite, outlasted the Industrial Workers of the World. In the early days of the Great Depression, socialists and communists did their best to organize “industrially.” Often, it took the form of organizing the unemployed.

T.E. Barlow, a Communist organizer, was murdered in the Tarrant County Jail in 1933 for the crime of organizing unemployed workers. Carl Brannin, socialist organizer that turns up here and there all over labor history of the period, helped organize a sit-in at the Dallas City Hall that lasted a month. Brannin lived out his old age in Dallas and I had the honor of knowing him. I believe his last public action was to oppose the nuclear reactor being built at Commanche Peak.

In 1935, the Mineworkers were able to convince the AFL to form a Committee for Industrial Organizing. Immediately, the progressive union organizers went to work and reaped the reward of their previous decades. The Autoworkers union was put together in 1937. AFL leaders demanded that the new unions divide out their elite workers, but they refused and were kicked out of the AFL. They formed the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and started organizing everything that moved.

Inspired by the CIO, the old craft unions in the AFL also began adopting industrial organizing. Unions that had limited their membership to skilled machinists or electricians, for example, started organizing entire factories and entire industries.

In the 1930s, Wallace Reilly (yes, he owned the print shop now known as Reiley Echols) was state president of the AFL and resisted the coming of the CIO, as did also and most notably the Dallas Morning News and the Dallas police. I think that millinery workers were the first to try to penetrate the Dallas anti-union barricades. Textile workers were next. A lot of women suffered and a lot of them spent time in Dallas jail.

In 1939, major aerospace plants were built in Dallas and Fort Worth. Eventually, the Autoworkers got the one in Dallas and the Machinists won in Fort Worth. But the CIO still hadn’t had a successful breakthrough.

The giant Ford assembly plant in East Dallas was the CIO’s big target. But the Dallas Morning News, head of the Citizens Alliance then and now, and the Dallas police had other ideas. Ford also hired goons to beat up, tar&feather, and even assassinate union organizers. None of them were ever prosecuted.

In 1941, the CIO got a break. The new attorney of the new NLRB was visited by three former employees at Ford. They had been fired, possibly for stealing, and wanted the NLRB to help them get their jobs back. Their jobs, as they explained to the young lawyer, was to beat up union organizers and sympathizers. They provided detailed descriptions of their activities.

The NLRB used their written complaints in the lawsuit that eventually forced Ford to allow the UAW to organize them nationwide. I have the lawyer’s complete story as provided by his son, who was County Treasurer for some while. The lawyer, whose name I think was Nat young, was the first person to accept our “Hero of Labor Award” at a Labor Day Breakfast around 1990.

The successful UAW local in East Dallas looked around for someone to organize the giant North American Aviation plant at the far western edge. They came upon Jack Anderson, who personally told me how the African American trash haulers organized the plant. The rest of the history of unions at that plant is detailed on my web site, already mentioned.

The CIO was well established. By the early 1950s, it was headed by Roy Evans, a friend of mine. Evans became an officer of the AFL-CIO when they merged in 1955. In 1958, the UAW pulled out of the federation and Roy had to find another union, but he went on to serve a term as President of the combined federation in Texas.

Another outstanding “graduate” from my union in western Dallas (Grand Prairie) was Pancho Medrano, also a friend of Roy’s and mine. He was a boxer and was chosen to be Sergeant at Arms at the new union at North American. Later, he was chosen by UAW President Walter Reuther to head up Civil Rights work. If you hear of milestones of the civil rights movement, you may also hear that Pancho was there.

I believe it was 1962 when Pancho became the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit against Texas Ranger violence against Farmworkers. The suit was won and the Texas Rangers, once the scourge of all working families, has not been known to use violence against strikers again.

By 1984, the old “North American” factory was known as LTV and the union as UAW Local 848. During a long contract fight 1984-5, I began to be known as an organizer of workers, and organizer of retirees, and, especially, a communications director. I’ve continued that work to the present.

Union militancy had more or less died with the 1955 merger and the AFL-CIO was suffering a long period of decline. From around 35% of the workforce organized, they fell to below 10%. In 1987, some of the most active unions from the CIO days organized Jobs with Justice to restore solidarity. In 1990, my wife and I established North Texas Jobs with Justice with a meeting at Local 848.

 Our first action was to have a labor contingent in the Dallas MLK parade. After that, we carried out solidarity actions with unions, churches, civil rights organizations, and community groups regularly.

The AFL-CIO began to catch up nationally after a “palace coup” election in 1995. They made sweeping improvements, but they didn’t take effect in Dallas until 2013. After that, I gave up Jobs with Justice and devoted all my efforts to AFL-CIO. We did some amazing things.

The AFL-CIO took over an older retiree organization and established the Alliance for Retired Americans around 2001, the year before I retired early. They chartered Texas in 2006. I am a charter member and its longest-serving president. One of my first projects was to get national to hire Judy Bryant as state organizer. The Texas Alliance, TARA, allows everybody to join, union or not.

Allowing everybody to join was also a strength of the Young Active Labor Leaders when it was established by the Texas AFL-CIO around 2020. TARA and YALL are powerhouses of solidarity for the labor movement. YALL is unchartered and TARA is a 501c4. Both are considered “constituency groups” even though they are like no other.

In April, 2025, I learned that national AFL-CIO had a plan to merge Dallas and Tarrant into a new labor federation similar to the one in Houston. On January 1, the Dallas Central Labor Council was terminated. I was its final president.

Road to Contentment

March 10, 2026
art, chauvinism, democracy
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I want to tell you why you are discontent. I want to tell you how to overcome your discontent every day.

The reason for your unhappiness is that you aren’t being yourself. If you were being yourself as you were created by millions of years of evolution, you would settle into a life of caring for others.

As evolution shaped us, we are herd animals. We care for one another the way a herd animal protects its members. When they are aware of an attack, for example, bison form a circle with the calves and weaker members at the center. It is natural for them, and it is natural for us to take care of one another.

Left to themselves, children are the same way. They strive for fairness among themselves. I know this because I had a private school where children were largely left to their natural inclinations rather than being pitted against one another for grades and encouragement as they are in other schools.

But the children in most schools and the adults in capitalist society are pitted against one another. The only way for anybody to advance under capitalism is to climb over others. Alienation is forced on us, and alienation is the source of our discontent.

We know about this alienation. We usually experience it as guilt. Every day in every city, we walk by or drive by the suffering victims at the bottom of our capitalist fight among ourselves. Sometimes we give them a dime or a dollar, but it doesn’t seem enough.

What About Your Exes?

Alienation makes us desperate, and that is why we cling to the one person that capitalist society allows us to have – our spouse or significant other. It’s also the reason that so many of our relationships fail. We cling too hard, or maybe the other person clings too hard.

We cling desperately to that one person because we are alienated from virtually everybody else, and we doom the relationship because no one person can fill our void of alienation.

Some people try to fill the void with their children. These are the stage mothers and helicopter parents who, again, are often undone in their ambitions because they tried too desperately.

We Need to Do More

Recognizing your true need to care for other humans is the way to overcome your alienation and your discontent. We aren’t bisons, of course, so we are called upon to do considerably more than form circles around our calves.

Knee-jerk charity is also insufficient. Should you stop every time you see a homeless person and try to meet their true needs? Should you buy them new clothes, find them a job, or rent an apartment for them? How many could you help? Should you aspire to religious poverty and try to become the next Buddha? A few people try that, but more of them try it for only a while.

Strive to Care Effectively

We are herd animals like bison, but we are also thinking animals. If we seriously and honestly want to stop human suffering, then we have to think about the reasons for it. After that, we have to apply ourselves to resolving those reasons. That is the road to contentment and the way to stop being simply a victim of alienation.

It may be simple, but it’s not easy.  It doesn’t take a lot of thought to realize that the people at the bottom of this alienated heap have counterparts at the top. Elon Musk, for example, has more wealth than 53% of American households! They are the ones benefiting from this awful system and the ones who will fight you to continue it.

Follow the Good Examples

Look among your friends and acquaintances for those who are older and have maintained their sense of humanity. I don’t mean the churlish and cruel older people who make up stereotypes of discontent. I mean the older people who are still smiling at life.

You will find them among the activist population. The happiest old people I ever met were those who were still in the struggle. I never met an unhappy old communist.

It’s a Fight, but It’s Worth It

You can’t be content while you’re being oppressed.

It was really hard for me to accept a life of struggle. I think I tried everything that looked easier before I gave in to the obvious.

During the “Pop Psychology” days of the 1960s and 1970s, the key word for everybody was “adjust.” “I’ve adjusted” generally meant the same thing as “I’m happy” or “I’m content.” A “well-adjusted” person was someone who had it made. If someone (me) wasn’t happy, he/she wasn’t fully “in sync with his/herself” and needed to “adjust.” There were all kinds of elaborate ways to help people get adjusted, and most of them involved long expensive therapy sessions. Some involved massage, some involved heavy sedation, some involved electric shock, some involved brain surgery.

I never met a therapist who didn’t subscribe to this “adjustment” business. To that extent, they are agents of the status quo. Maybe all of them aren’t, but then I’ve not met them all.

Why Adjust?

But why should we adjust to an unfair world? Why should we adjust when we ourselves are being oppressed, and we can see a lot more oppression on other people? Why should we adjust when we could make things better?

There is precious little peace for anyone in our society. “Getting and spending, we lay waste our lives,” said Ralph Waldo Emerson. Actually, most of the world’s population doesn’t have enough for the bare necessities and spend their days searching for subsistence. Half the world’s children don’t have enough to eat. People are currently being incinerated by bombs paid for by American taxes.

Most of the people who do have enough can’t stop driving to accumulate more. Their children often become degenerate spendthrifts. Are any of them content?

The Only Possible Peace Comes from Fighting

Countless religions and motivational speakers promise that you can adjust to the present society and find contentment, but you can’t. The only contentment within a contentious society comes from striving to improve it. Figuring out how to do that doesn’t take a lot of brain power. It might take a little courage.

Message to Zeeshan

January 27, 2026
democracy, economy, elections, history, politics, strategy
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To Zeeshan: Why You Matter to Me

I’m wholeheartedly advocating your campaign in Congressional District 33. My reasons may be unique.

It’s not because I dislike the other two candidates. Julie Johnson and Colin Allred have been solid for labor and for retirees. I’ve always liked them both and would have had a hard time choosing between them if you hadn’t come along.

It’s not because I think electing a new congressperson this November will significantly change the awful direction that our nation is going. I am not convinced that we will even have American elections in November.

My reasons for supporting you are strong. They include some specific parts of your program, but are more about the salutary effect you have on our fragmented progressive movement.

I admire what seems to be growing respect between you and another candidate in a different district, Reverend Doctor Frederick Haynes III. You and I are recently acquainted, but I have been listening to Haynes for decades and I have never witnessed a better spokesperson for unity between the civil rights movement and labor. Also, I have never heard him say anything that wasn’t absolutely true.

I was tremendously impressed by your call for shortening working hours without cutting paychecks. I have never heard a candidate with this program, and I don’t believe that even old-timers in the labor movement are likely to remember that “30 for 40 [hours] with no cut in pay” was once a basic demand in the Congress of Industrial Organizations.

Shortening the working hours without cutting pay is the only possible solution to the threat of automation. Artificial intelligence, today’s most prominent form of automation, is being promoted fanatically by big business and the Trump Administration. It has one and only one purpose: layoffs. Even though artificial intelligence is in its first stages, America is already in a jobs crisis, and it will get worse unless we shift to your solution.

The other proposals for fighting automation and artificial intelligence are tragedies. They consist of minor attempts at legislative regulation and, most forlorn hope of all, controlling automation with union contracts. 90% of American workers don’t even have a union contract!

Ordinary progressive spokespersons are insufficient in these times, because these are not normal times. We are facing an aspiring fascist dictatorship that can only be stopped by a strong, intelligent, and well-integrated people’s movement. Judges haven’t stopped it, and neither have legislatures, nor will they.

We need spokespersons like you who understand the threat, can clarify it for others, and can point us toward solutions. Most particularly, you have the potential to help overcome the boss-invented divisions that are holding us back. Racism and chauvinism are the best known of these sociological maladies, but jingoism must also be overcome. For far too long, some of our political representatives have voted well enough on domestic issues, but they almost inevitably failed us on international ones.

Your message of unity is the same that Dr. King expressed at Riverside Church in 1967. He tried to heal the rifts dividing labor, civil rights, and the peace movement. Dr King is gone but the rifts remain, until now when we finally have an opportunity for clarity and unity.

President Trump is spending almost $1 trillion dollars on the military, and he recently called for a 50% increase! The main beneficiaries of American militarism are oil companies. He isn’t making America great, he is making rich America obscenely richer.

America is running out of time. Spokespersons like you have to explain the danger and put forward the only possible solution – unity!

That’s why I’m on board for Zeeshan Hafeez.

We Cannot Fail!

January 3, 2026
civil rights, democracy, history, politics, strategy, unions
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As I write this on January 3, 2026, the nations of the world, even moderate nations, are condemning the U.S. invasion and occupation of Venezuela. For American workers, the best news is that the national labor movement, the AFL-CIO itself, has joined the international labor community in condemnation.

The AFL-CIO’s action opens the way for discussions and resolutions in every labor body in America. The obvious demand is to remove all U.S. military forces from Venezuela immediately. Everyone must participate!

What we face in the United States goes much further than the invasion of a sovereign nation. We are facing a government that has committed itself to the use of bullying and brute force in order to achieve its aims. That bullying will not stop in Venezuela, nor will it stop in other invaded nations. It is, and has been for some time, the regular practice of the Trump Administration within the United States.

We can expect violence from them as they try to stop us from exercising our rights as citizens. They will be attacking protesters. They will be, they already are, looking for ways to frame anybody who stands against them.

And yet we will protest. We will demand our rights, including the right to vote unfit people out of office. This is the greatest test of the democracy in our history since the Civil War. We cannot fail.

YOU must take leadership!

December 30, 2025
strategy
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We cannot afford to take idle time in the situation we’re in today. If the working families of America ever needed leadership? We need it now. Everyone has leadership quality.

That’s why I’m looking at you. We need leadership, you got it. Everyone has leadership quality, but most of us don’t use it. None of us can afford any further Indulgence.

I guess I should ask if you care. That would be the only. Screen that I would make. If you don’t care, then you probably need to reevaluate that, because everybody cares about everybody else.

So, I’m wanting you to take on leadership because it has to be done in the crisis that we’re in. I don’t think I need to go over the crisis, but just today we found out that the war effort that Trump is making in the Caribbean has gone so far that they are now attacking installations on the mainland.

On leadership, what is it? Well, the easy definition is just to say a leader has followers. Well, it’s obviously true. But it doesn’t really tell you much. In my studies of leadership, I learned a very valuable lesson when I was a elementary school teacher. Because some of the kids are leaders.

You do something called a sociogram, and you can find out which ones are. The kids are leaders, because in a sociogram, the children say who they look up to, or who they would like to spend time with, that sort of thing. And it turns out to be only a few of the people in the classroom.

A leader is someone who knows what to do next.

I guess you could refine that and say a leader is someone who is able to convince others that they know what to do next. But the trick is to actually know what to do next. Now, that might imply some study. Some of it is in books or stories. But a lot of study is just talking to other people and getting ideas.

You have to work within the framework that you have. But don’t start with the obstacles. You can get to the obstacles later and the problems and why it all won’t work or why it’s no use trying. You can get to that later. At this point, you’re just doing some studying and asking others and figuring things out.

Then. You have to analyze what’s possible. What framework are you working in? And you can look at the obstacles I guess at that time. The whole end of the process is that you come up with some options.

And this is where it gets interesting. This is where, for the first time,
what I’m asking you to do may seem a little hard. It’s not going to require any natural abilities, it’s just going to take a little bit of your courage.

The next step is for you to try something. If it doesn’t work. try something else. But by all means, try something. And finally. Never give up! As long as the need continues to exist. And it is impossible to deny. That’s a need for your leadership exists. Right now.

Understanding Where We are Grows From Where We’ve Been

December 26, 2025
art, history, strategy
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By Gene Lantz

Dallas activists had spoonfuls of ice cream and local history on December 21. A group of us gathered at a Dairy Queen just 2 miles uphill and west from downtown Dallas. At that site in 1854, socialists from Europe established their communal farm and changed North Texas forever. We talked about them and then walked together to see a stone monument nearby.

A French socialist named Victor Considerant rented horses in St Louis in 1850 or so. Then he rode to an open hillside outside the grubby little town of Dallas. The town was established only a couple of years earlier and was just beginning its first main industry, tanning stinky buffalo hides.

Considerant thought the area looked like his homeland and should, he figured, be good land for grapevines and a wine industry. Back in Europe, he was able to raise money for a stock corporation to start sending European socialists to Texas. They named their commune “La Reunion.”

They were literate people. Unlike the rough-hewn Scots-Irish frontiersmen tanning hides nearby, they were cultured, artistic, musical, and far-thinking people. Like the other socialist settlements in Texas from the time, they were “freethinkers” on religious questions and had no churches. What really set them apart was that they didn’t enslave other human beings.

“History Is Bunk”

The official story of Dallas, told in almost all the books, is that the only reason it became a great city and cultural center was because of the genius and foresight of the early capitalists who created it “out of nothing.” In truth, it was a crossroads long before the first trading post was set up. It was a shallow place in the Trinity river where natives and early Spanish explorers could cross.

Dallas was also a crossroad when the first transcontinental highway went through the middle of town and then came out toward Fort Worth on the very street that now passes in front of our Dairy Queen. The Dixie Overland Highway ran from Savannah Georgia to San Diego California.

The genius capitalists didn’t make Dallas a cultural center either. It was the socialists from La Reunion. The official story about all the socialist communards in Texas is that they failed because they weren’t good farmers and socialism just doesn’t work. But that doesn’t explain why they all went out of business at practically the same time, in 1860.

When the Confederacy established its wartime draft, soldiers went after the free thinking socialist communities. One of them, Comfort, near San Antonio, tried to send its menfolk to the Mexican border, but they were hunted down and massacred. At La Reunion, a shootout with the Confederates was their last page in history as a communal farm.

But it wasn’t their last contribution to Dallas and North Texas. The population of Dallas was about 1,000. There were 500 or so communards. Most of them moved to the eastern part of town and established East Dallas, where their descendants still hold La Reunion celebrations. They contributed to the arts and even in politics. One of them became Mayor of Dallas and has a park, Reverchon, named after him today. They were the people who made grubby little Dallas a cultural center.

You can learn a lot at the Dairy Queen.

Wear Solidarity Red on Thursdays

December 26, 2025
history, strategy
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by Gene Lantz

One of the simplest and easiest things that labor leaders could do is to ask people to wear a certain color on a certain day of the week. The fact that they don’t do it and have never done it is the saddest evidence that we aren’t employing the simplest tactic for bringing union members and our allies together into an effective movement.

There are some obstacles, but they are technical and barely worth mentioning. They have to do with “what color” and “what day.” The first question is the easiest to answer because red has been the color of the workers’ movement since 1789.

My UAW local promotes wearing red on Wednesdays.” By giving away free red shirts during contract negotiations, we’ve increased participation. The AFT in Dallas promotes wearing red on the Thursdays when they go to school board meetings. Various unions promote a color and a day during times of great need such as during contract negotiations, but they choose color/date for contrast, not unity, and limit the whole idea to their particular members.

The only union with an effective program is the CWA, which promotes red on Thursdays since one of their members was killed on a picket line some years ago. Because CWA is big and because they have by far the most effective color/day program, I recommend that everybody adopt red on Thursdays, even if their union has another color or wears red on a different day. It’s not that hard to choose a color twice a week, and it doesn’t have to be a shirt.

If labor leaders are just too timid to pick a color and a day, I recommend that they run a short and cheap on-line survey of members. It wouldn’t be binding and wouldn’t even be scientific, but it would be a start and at least a formalistic indication that we intend to build a movement.

All the small stuff aside, the easiest thing would be to make a motion in every labor meeting that we ask all supporters to add wearing something red on Thursdays to their other clothing plans.

Two Bad Approaches

December 26, 2025
strategy
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In revolutionary politics, all tactics are good if they are appropriate in their time and place. Armed struggle and exclusive devotion to parliamentary work, for example, may have been good tactics in a certain nation at a certain time. In the United States right now, both are disastrous.

Don’t Shoot!

The obvious argument against armed struggle is that no one is going to out-shoot the U.S. military. It is the strongest military the world has ever known and has sufficient nuclear weapons to destroy the planet. Nevertheless, some naïve activists exhort us to “pick up the gun.” Perhaps the problem is just that they are new to the movement and haven’t thought much about what would work and what wouldn’t. More likely, they aren’t materialists in their thinking. In other words, they believe in religious or superstitious notions that exist only in their own heads. They don’t even consider the likely outcomes of their actions.

If they did think about outcomes, they might consider what actually happens when trigger-happy activists try to take on the establishment. A civil rights activist in Dallas some few years ago was able to shoot five policemen before they blew him up with a grenade attached to a robot. I’m not sure anybody remembers his name today, but the police collected large sums of money in donations. They got raises and improvements in their benefits. They held, and still hold, special public celebrations for their fallen heroes every year.

More recently, someone shot a right-wing commentator at a public presentation. The Trumpsters imposed the largest anti-free-speech movement in history. People went to jail; even more people lost their jobs – not because they had anything to do with the shooting or condoned it, but because they failed to speak about it with what the Trumpsters considered proper allegiance to the shooting victim. Presently, the guy’s wife is spreading his ideas to thousands, and the Governor of Texas has mandated that every high school in the state has to have one of his clubs.

And possibly the worst example ever is the sniper who apparently took a shot at candidate Donald Trump while he was making a televised speech. His ear may have been hit. His polling shot up. Some of his white Christian nationalist supporters said that the bullet was deflected by God. Trump implied the same. A little later, he was elected president of the United States.

Don’t Stop At Voting

The electoral sphere cannot be ignored because power actually changes hands there. Who gets elected and who doesn’t is of vital interest to the working class. But those who prioritize voting to the point of ignoring all other forms of organizing and political struggle are misleading us to the point of criminality.

The joke is that people attend a craps game where the dice are known to be loaded because, “it’s the only game in town.” The same could be said about American electoral politics. The Democratic Party and the Republican Party rigged the game decades ago so that American voters are hemmed in between them. Gerrymandering and allowing oceans of secret money to sneak into campaign treasuries are more recent deteriorations of democracy.

Around 27% of all eligible voters do not even register. 73% do. A great many don’t vote. In non-presidential races and local races, considerably more people skip voting. Wikipedia says that 64.1% of registered voters turned out in 2024. Of those, Trump won a plurality of 49.8%.  Multiply .73*.641*.498 and you will get .23. In other words, 23% of the eligible voters in America elected Donald Trump in 2024. But he has used that “mandate” to impose the most anti-working-class rulings in modern history.

With few and largely irrelevant exceptions, elections rigged by the bosses will always result in victory for the bosses. There are exceptions, of course, and all bosses are not equal. Voting matters, but it is entirely untrue that the winners of our rigged capitalist elections represent the will of the people.

Real democracy has to assert itself from underneath all the gimmicks and pressures. That means working in all possible arenas of struggle. They include labor organizing, strikes, boycotts, fund raising, and mass demonstrations. The idea of abandoning all but the legislative arena deserves the name that Lenin used, “parliamentary cretinism.”

Buckle Seat Belts for 2026

December 26, 2025
democracy, economy, history, politics, strategy
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By Gene Lantz

“Expect the worst and hope for the best.” – Accountant’s credo

The Worst

The world economic system will continue to tremble and quake

American manufacturing and the stock market will rise without improving the jobs situation

Artificial intelligence will gobble up jobs and tremendously worsen the jobs crisis that is already underway

Income disparity, juiced up by Trump policies, will drastically worsen

Communications, especially cell phone communications, may end healthy competition and become even more of an oligopoly

In the electoral arena, candidates will be straining to find a “middle” in an increasingly divided electorate

Mister Trump, who has already shown that he will stop at nothing to maintain and extend his power, will likely start a war and implement martial law as his continuing drive toward fascism continues

Unions will refuse to recognize the new situation and continue the exact policies that have so far lost nearly ¾ of our peak density

Millions will not be able to afford decent health care. Emergency rooms will be overrun

The Best

In the electoral arena, candidates will be forced to clarify their intentions during 2026. Where I live in Dallas, labor will pressure all candidates to reveal their stand on Gaza

Unions will be more aggressive in the electoral arena. Where I live, we are working on two union members running in the January 31 special election. Two Steelworkers have filed for statewide races in the coming primaries.

A growing but unguided mass movement against dictatorship has exploded

More and more people are figuring out the dangers and what to do about it

Some unions are discarding old ways and implementing a larger reliance on our magnificent popularity in the general population of workers

Youth and retirees, two sectors recently encouraged by the labor movement, are growing and adding muscle

The Starbucks workers, using a combination of strike and boycott simultaneously, are showing all workers how use labor’s popularity against the bosses. On December 22 alone, 19 Starbucks stores signed up for union elections.

The Indicators

Nearly all of this analysis comes from information gathered during the past week, and especially on Christmas Day when the Washington Post published ten charts describing the current U.S. economic situation.

Gold and silver prices set new records. The usual “gold bug” speculators are buying precious metals of course, but major investors and some governments are also buying them. Precious metals pay no dividends, but they are a haven of safety for those who think a worldwide financial crisis is imminent.

Two major financial indicators, a soaring stock market and an expected increase in manufacturing, are both rooted in investment in artificial intelligence. Investors are buying into it and energy-gobbling data center building way up and projected to be gigantic. At the same time, the labor movement is “cool.” Although Trump’s anti-labor policies explain some of the labor market problems, the main problem now and in the future is job-killing artificial intelligence. The same thing lifting the stock market and manufacturing in America is driving down the jobs market.

The union response, so far, is to try to contain artificial intelligence through union contracts. Even if this were possible, it wouldn’t solve the problem because most workers, more than 90%, have no union contracts. As the bosses without unions implement artificial intelligence to lower their production costs, they will undermine all workers, including those with union contracts.

Income disparity is the illness afflicting all workers worldwide. Among the many alarming reports comes this sentence from the current week by Politico: “Bank of America says its top account holders saw take-home pay climb 4 percent over the last year, while income growth for poorer households grew just 1.4 percent.” Even though inflation held at 3% during the past year and dropped to 2.7% for November, it’s still a lot higher than income growth for poorer households.

All of the major tech companies have hitched themselves to the Trump agenda, and for good reason. They produce artificial intelligence, and they all know that artificial intelligence is Trump’s main hope to lower production costs enough to outperform China and other worldwide economic competitors. “Lower production costs” is a euphemism for  fewer jobs.

Elon Musk, in many ways the master tech investor, has practically cornered the market in communications satellites. He has already bought the software and established the partnership with T-Mobile that he needs to change all cell phone communications to satellite. Everybody who currently works in cell phone tech is in danger. The Communications Workers of America have a vital boycott against T-Mobile, but it hasn’t yet achieved nationwide participation.

Just two recent election results are sufficient to show the strain in the electoral arena. Mister Trump successfully used the power of the United States government to overcome the progressive government of Honduras. He failed to do the same in the New York Mayoral race. Candidates in 2026 will find it difficult to dodge the issues important to working people. For example, the Dallas Central Labor Council voted to pressure all candidates who apply for endorsement to reveal their positions on the genocide in Gaza.

War in Latin America is imminent. The Trump Administration has already discarded every aspect of international law and human decency in its attacks against Venezuela. So far, they have managed to resist the provocations, but Trump isn’t finished. He needs the popularity of a wartime presidency and, if it becomes necessary to maintain power, he needs an excuse to implement martial law and end democracy once and for all.

Our unions have taken hardly any positions on the coming war nor on any of the pressing international questions. Domestically, we continue to try to organize more workplaces under the rules set in the early Roosevelt Administration. We continue to try to use our diminishing membership base to affect legislative change, just as we have since around 1947 when we had 35% of the American workforce organized. Today, we have closer to 9%.

So… Why Are We Smiling?

Clearly, the Trump Administration and the billionaires it leads are flailing around in desperation. They aren’t acting out of strength nor confidence, but like boat wreck survivors trying anything and everything to cling to life. They have very little thought of what they are doing, and they are being led by an unstable person.

Democracy has taken hits, but is a long way from disappearing in a country convinced, for 250 years, that democracy is best. The worldwide system of governance is very weak against a super power, but it has the credibility of all caring people.

Our anti-war movement may seem small, but the structures created in earlier upsurges still exist and are ours to use. Our unions may seem small and timid, but we still have the power to  shut down the major intersections of economic and social life. Organizations close to the unions, especially the youth and senior movements, are growing stronger.

Candidates in 2026 will be pressured to take our side, and more of them will

People are catching on. We have the communications ability for accelerated strategic progress. We haven’t yet agreed on a plan of coordinated mass resistance, but we are clearly headed that way.