Why did American labor leaders do so little to seize the real opening for resurgence that emerged after the COVID-19 pandemic? Despite a very tight labor market, a vigorously pro-union National Labor Relations Board, and youthful grassroots activism at Starbucks, Amazon, and beyond, most unions invested exasperatingly little into new organizing.

Critics of the labor movement’s institutional leadership may not find this inertia particularly surprising. Unions have for many decades now been hamstrung by risk aversion, an overdependence on establishment Democrats, and costly, unscalable organizing practices. As I explain in my book We Are the Union, these factors certainly hamper any real turn toward organizing the unorganized. Yet labor’s post-COVID malaise is nevertheless somewhat puzzling, given both how exceptionally favorable the moment was for labor growth and the fact that this same union bureaucracy, only two decades prior, had invested considerable resources into growth, charging ahead under the slogan “Organize or Die.”

Whereas in 2000 the AFL-CIO set a goal of unionizing one million workers annually, in 2022 it had lowered its horizons to bringing in that same number over a full decade, an exceedingly modest target ensuring a continued decline in the percentage of the workforce represented by unions. If labor officials could put real money and energy toward recruitment in the less favorable conditions of the 1990s and early 2000s, why did they stubbornly stick to business as usual after 2020?