Last Sunday afternoon, I ended up standing in a line in New York like it was any other day—except it wasn’t.
More than 100 people were waiting to get in for a rally meant to launch Union Now, a new nonprofit created by Sara Nelson, president of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA.
It drew a mix of local and national labor leaders, including Randi Weingarten of the American Federation of Teachers.
And then, of course, Sen.
Bernie Sanders and New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani—both the kind of big, unmistakable figures who can turn a room into something like a scene.
You could hear the low swell of conversation, the kind that comes with coats still on, and somebody’s phone buzzing every few minutes.
Unions, AI, and the fight for leverage
At the start, singer-songwriter Josh Ritter played an acoustic set, ending with a cover of Woody Gutherie’s “This Land Is Your Land.” Nelson joined him for a bittersweet moment—one that people seemed to feel in their chests, not just their ears.
The rally was clearly about unions’ power, but it didn’t pretend that power is what it used to be.
Speakers laid out a decline that’s been building for decades: unionization rates have fallen from more than 20 percent to now slightly above 10 percent over the past 40 years.
That drop, organizers argued, is tangled up with rising inequality, millions of working-class jobs shipped overseas, and politics that increasingly bends toward wealthy interests.
Mamdani and Sanders leaned into the same target: AI and Silicon Valley leaders they framed as symbols of elite-driven politics.
Attendees I spoke with sounded concerned, sometimes angry, not just theoretical about automation.
One member of a local carpenter’s union told me he didn’t think either party had offered a pro-worker pathway for AI, warning it would hit like a “freight train” in the coming years.
That phrase got repeated back to me a couple times, like it had lodged in people’s heads.
And at least once, the mood snapped into something uglier and more immediate: around halfway through the rally, a nearby man shouted “Fuck Sam Altman” to applause.
There’s a real policy headache hiding underneath all of this, too—organized labor trying to rebuild while the workplace itself keeps changing.
As policymakers talk about bringing manufacturing back, some are openly saying a lot of the returning jobs may end up automated.
Misryoum newsroom reporting points to growing automation abroad, including “lights out” factories where production is automated to the point that lighting is no longer needed.
If that’s the direction, then job losses aren’t just a fear for the future; they’re part of the argument labor leaders are making right now.
They keep circling back to the same demand: workers need more power to shape policy, not just react to it.
Sanders presses a labor-led AI agenda
Union Now is built around that exact idea—giving workers extra support as they push for fair wages and stronger protections, especially as unionization continues to decline.
Nelson described her goal to connect unions and workers with resources they may not have otherwise, particularly at the moment when organizing efforts can get strangled by time.
After the event, she told me the organization is meant to provide “an additional mechanism of support for workers who are trying to organize.” Her line was plain and practical: if workers can focus on organizing rather than scrambling to cover shifts or take another job, “they can win.”
Sanders, who has spent decades tying working-class issues to a bigger political fight, framed unions as essential to democracy itself.
Following the rally, he talked about why union membership fell—trade policies such as NAFTA and Permanent Normal Trade Relations with China, the shuttering of factories, and the way union ranks shrink when jobs are lost and union workers die.
He also pointed to what he called “incredible anti-union and union-busting activity” by corporate America, arguing that companies break the law frequently “with impunity.” He said the answer is strong legislation that makes it possible for workers to form unions without bosses acting illegally against them.
On AI, he didn’t fully dismiss the risk, but he questioned the inevitability narrative.
He described an event he’s scheduled in Washington with labor leaders focused on AI and robotics, and then raised a sharper question: who benefits.
He argued that robots could reduce a worker’s hours while preserving pay—his example was a 40-hour work week dropping to 20 hours without loss—then asked whether that would actually be bad.
The real battle, in his telling, is making sure the technology improves working people’s standard of living rather than simply enriching “Mr.
Musk and Mr.
Bezos and the other guys.”
Sanders also pushed back against the current, familiar argument that deregulation and supply constraints—sometimes framed in the language of “abundance”—will fix what’s hurting the working class.
He said bureaucracy is real and can slow government unnecessarily, but calling for doing away with regulations is, in his words, “an absurd idea.” Instead, he argued for a political movement led by working people and trade unions to fight for healthcare for all, raising the minimum wage to a living wage, and building the millions of units of affordable housing needed.
Whether that strategy can translate into concrete wins while automation accelerates—well, that’s the part nobody at the rally sounded fully certain about.
Actually, maybe some were.
The crowd just didn’t say it out loud.
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