As tens of thousands of New Yorkers streamed down Seventh Ave from Times Square toward their dispersal point at Fourteenth Street for the city’s “No Kings” protest on Saturday, October 18, a separate march of perhaps five thousand waited uncertainly a long avenue block away. At its front, march leaders led a chant of “Whose streets? Our streets!” — apparently oblivious to the irony that the New York Police Department (NYPD) was at that moment refusing to allow it to march uptown and west to join the far larger protest. Behind them, protesters stood, now mostly silent and uncertain: What was the plan? Why were we waiting? Finally the word filtered back: disperse and walk east on the sidewalk to Union Square, where marchers were told, incorrectly, that they would meet up with the main march.

Saturday’s labor march provided almost the perfect metaphor for the health of the New York City labor “movement”: unable or unwilling to mobilize its 750,000 members in substantive numbers, irresolute and unclear in its plans, keeping its own members in the dark, and afraid or unwilling to challenge the NYPD’s dictates. And rather than strive to provide organization and leadership to hundreds of thousands of ordinary New Yorkers protesting Trump, organized labor signaled that it stood purposefully apart.

Although the march was called by the NYC Central Labor Council (CLC), large segments of NYC labor were missing in action at the assembly point. Virtually all of the construction trades — perhaps supportive of Trump’s policies, or simply afraid of their own members, even as Trump is shutting      down huge government-funded construction projects for transit, wind, and solar; the uniformed services — not just police and correction officers but sanitation and fire too; every Teamsters local, including 237, the second largest municipal workers union; transit workers; the Hotel and Gaming Trades Council; all of the major cultural worker unions, undoubtedly deciding (correctly) that their members would be more invigorated joining the main march rather than isolating themselves with their union brethren.

What of the unions that showed up? Hospital workers with 1199SEIU, which in recent memory has mustered forty or fifty thousand workers for contract rallies, turned out the most: perhaps (generously) one thousand. Its SEIU cousin, 32BJ, whose property service workers face threats from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, brought a few score. The Communications Workers of America (CWA), representing 70,000 private and public sector workers, had a contingent of fifty bearing signs boasting “CWA strong,” rather than any political message. The largest municipal workers’ union, the American Federation of State, County and Municpal Employees (AFSCME) District Council 37, with one hundred thousand members, gathered two hundred.

But that was larger than the turnout from the United Federation of Teachers (UFT), which boasts 150,000 members — despite the Guardian’s claim that its national parent, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), was (perhaps outside of New York City?) “anchoring events.” As a UFT member myself, I know that there was not even an email to members asking them to mobilize. Too small and disorganized to even form their own contingent, UFT members mostly seemed to march with their AFT colleagues, the Professional Staff Congress (representing CUNY faculty and staff), which pound for pound was the day’s winner, mobilizing somewhat more than five hundred of their 20,000 members. Its president, James Davis, seemed to be the only major union leader who could be bothered to march with his members.

The dismal turnout for the labor march tells us that most of the members of these unions who participated in No Kings marched in the main protest, either ignoring their union’s plans or wholly unaware of them.

Perhaps more significant than the march’s tiny size was its obvious disarray. Why was there no rolling sound system in a pickup truck accompanying the marchers? Why was there apparent confusion about the end point of the march and its goal? If it was felt necessary for some reason to begin separately, to differentiate labor from the broader demonstration, why was there no effort to link up with the main march? (According to a report from one labor leader, that was the initial plan, but the NYPD forbade it.)

Organized labor’s marginality in the New York City No Kings protest was not necessarily representative of demonstrations elsewhere. In Chicago, for instance, the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) has been heavily involved in organizing, and had a prominent presence at, the series of protests against Trump’s authoritarian attacks on the city, including this past week’s No Kings protest. And United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) has been a prominent anti-Trump force in LA. Nevertheless, NYC unions’ rather sorry showing on Saturday is indicative of labor’s anemic approach to fighting back against Trump more generally. Despite the administration’s vicious attacks on collective bargaining rights and civil liberties, unions have for the most part responded (at best) by issuing strongly worded statements or pursuing legal action.

But the serious, militant involvement of organized labor in the anti-Trump movement is likely crucial to effectively resisting the president’s authoritarianism and assaults on workers. The No Kings marches, which demonstrated popular opposition to Trump on a new scale, are necessary. But as we can see from the policies being implemented in Washington, DC, and the military and ICE paramilitary deployments in the streets there — and in Chicago, Portland, Los Angeles, and Memphis — they are far from sufficient. Waiting for and hoping for relief through congressional elections still more than a year away is a fool’s errand. Just this week, the Supreme Court indicated it will effectively strike down the Voting Rights Act, enabling the dismantling of virtually all of the few remaining Democratic-leaning districts in the South. The voting equipment company Dominion Voting Systems has just been bought by a MAGA supporter. So we can reasonably anticipate genuine voting machine fraud in 2026 — just the little tweaks here and there necessary to flip swing districts.

One day soon, we need to move beyond mere marches to disruption — of the economy and in the streets. For decades, I’ve been frustrated by the overblown chant, “If we don’t get it, shut it down!” We really do need the capacity to make that happen — but that capacity doesn’t emerge spontaneously, even if some particular event creates the basis for a mass uprising. The networks that have called the No Kings and May Day Strong protests into being need to be supplemented by networks that can actually shut down at least significant segments of air and rail and truck transit systems, large-scale manufacturing and energy production, and the vast cultural and health care industries.

Organized labor, weak and ambivalent and disorganized as it often appears, is the only existing network of workers as workers, capable of collective action at the point of production. It’s hard to imagine serious disruptive capacity without its active participation — the kind of disruptive capacity the anti-Trump opposition needs to win.