Texas has long ranked at the top of the list for the best states to run a business and the worst for quality of life and working conditions. Almost one out of every five Texans does not have health insurance. We are the only state in the country that allows private-sector employers to opt out of providing workers’ compensation. Despite having a $33 billion surplus to put toward improving life for all Texans, our state lawmakers instead chose to spend the most recent regular legislative session attacking workers’ rights, immigrants, public schools, transgender people, voting access, and higher education.
Yet, the working people of Texas have a foil for the forces that seek to deny them prosperity and protections: unions. A long history of open hostility toward organized labor has left the Lone Star State with one of the lowest densities of union membership in the entire country and a lack of awareness around the singular power that unions have to improve working conditions and quality of life. Despite the odds, this trend is beginning to reverse in Texas, not through miracle or luck, but through rank-and-file workers organizing at a rate not seen in decades.
For Matt Lloyd, a member of United Auto Workers (UAW) Local 2360 in Carrollton, Texas, the explanationis simple: “A lot of people in Texas just don’t know about unions, really,” he says. “I think that’s why it’s been easy for state leaders to paint a bad name on them, because people don’t know we’re here, or what we can do. But they’re starting to see us now.”
Lloyd spent his early childhood in a union household in Detroit. His great aunt, both uncles, father, and grandfather have all retired from decades-long jobs at Ford, Chrysler, and General Motors. “We’re a proud UAW family,” he tells me. Growing up, his family had been able to give him a good life with their wages as autoworkers. But by the time Lloyd started a job as a packer for Stellantis in Carrollton, things had changed.
Courtesy UAW Local 2360
Matt Lloyd (front right) and other UAW Local 2360 members on strike in front of the Stellantis plant in Carrollton, Texas, on September 22, 2024.
There were months when, not having enough time to make the commute home and back, Lloyd would sleep in the parking lot for the few hours he had between shifts. With two children at home, the endless hours took a toll on his family, but he had no choice—he wasn’t being paid enough in a forty-hour work week to make ends meet.
In September 2023, Lloyd and his co-workers walked out of their plant and took to the sidewalk outside. Twenty-five miles west, workers at the General Motors plant in Roanoke did the same, marking the first two Texas locations to join the United Auto Workers’ historic “Stand Up Strike.” They would go on to hold the line for forty-five days, often raising their signs in the pouring rain. When he saw the contract they’d won, Lloyd knew he wouldn’t be spending any more nights in his car.
Lloyd made a point of emphasizing the impact UAW President Shawn Fain’s relentless fighting stance had on members in his shop leading up to the strike. “He was out there saying things we’d never heard before,” Lloyd says. “What stuck with me was that this is bigger than one plant or one person; it’s for everyone that works for a living, for all of us.”
When you live in a state that overtly treats unions as the enemy, the decision to go on strike can be particularly daunting. But strikes are when workers have the most leverage to win what they deserve. It’s for this reason, Lloyd tells me, you must push past that fear to get to what’s on the other side: “As long as you haven’t thrown in the towel, you can change things. You gotta stand on it, and boldly. Don’t be afraid.”
Even though she wouldn’t have believed you if you told her this ten years ago, Kellen Humphrey knows exactly what’s possible when you don’t let fear hold you back from exercising your ultimate power as a union.
“When I got pregnant, I was like, oh, I have to do something,” says Humphrey, a prenatal nurse and one of the main organizers behind the successful effort to unionize Ascension Seton Medical Center in Austin. Humphrey grew up in a small town just outside of Houston, where, as she puts it, “unions just weren’t talked about.”
When Humphrey first began working at Ascension Seton in 2014, she was proud of the quality of care she was able to provide to her patients. For years, she watched as management increasingly embraced a “lean” staffing model. By 2019, dangerously high patient-to-staff ratios had left her regularly fearing for the lives of her patients and their babies.
She knew there were unionized nurses in California that had fought for and won huge improvements in staffing requirements, but when she initially floated the idea of organizing with her co-workers, she was met with reluctance. “I had co-workers tell me it’s illegal for us to form a union in Texas; it’s never going to happen here; you’ll get fired if you talk about it,” Humphrey recalls.
Nearly three years later, on a hot morning in June 2023, Humphrey and her co-workers walked out of their hospital together in what was so far the largest nurses strike in Texas history. The picket line, led by nurses dancing their way down the sidewalk, spanned the entire block in front of the hospital. A long-time Texas union leader from the Communications Workers of America, Derrick Osobase, remarked on the picket line that he couldn’t remember the last time he had seen this many members from so many different unions walking the line together.
That strike was a result of years of nurses talking to their co-workers, as many times as it took to break through. To have an organizing conversation requires showing your co-workers they have the power to make the changes they want to see in the workplace, and pointedly asking them if they’re going to join you in using it. “I was raised with Southern manners—to be a people pleaser and avoid confrontation,” says Humphrey. “I had to push myself.”
In March 2024, the nurses ratified their first union contract, securing dramatically improved staffing ratios and pay increases between 11 and 25 percent, among other major wins. “The political climate of Texas has led us to believe we can’t win because we’re used to begging and pleading with our elected officials to pass a law that makes our lives better. We’ve allowed the failures of our state to make us apathetic. But we don’t have to be,” Humphrey says with the kind of calming grin that comes from a lifetime of professionally caring for others.
While the Austin nurses were preparing to go on strike, a group of workers in Dallas was also, quietly, on the verge of making history. At the Dallas branch of the International Rescue Committee (IRC), a refugee resettlement nonprofit founded by Albert Einstein in 1933, years of unmanageable caseloads and a total lack of employee input in decisions that impacted every aspect of their work had left staff demoralized and heartbroken.
When her co-workers initially approached Nora Rizvi about the effort to organize their office, she was overcome not with fear, but with relief. “Unions were never something we discussed at home specifically,” she says, “but in Islam we place such a big emphasis on unity and community. I saw that in our union.”
Republican Governor Greg Abbott has made Texas infamous for exporting its share of refugees, spending upward of $148 million busing families to cities in the North and on the coasts. For Rizvi and her co-workers, many of whom initially came to the IRC as clients, helping refugees build a new life in Texas is their daily work.
“There are so many things working against us in this state, but that didn’t stop us from demanding better,” she says. “In Texas, we don’t have an option; we’re already fighting for our livelihoods and for our clients every day.”
In September 2023, the workers of IRC Dallas announced the formation of IRC Workers Unite, with the union for which I work as an organizer, the Office and Professional Employees International Union (OPEIU) Local 277. The Dallas workers’ announcement marked the first U.S.-based IRC office to unionize. Within a year of the election in Dallas, IRC workers in Abilene, Texas; Denver, Colorado; San Jose and Oakland, California; and Atlanta, Georgia, all successfully formed unions in their offices.
“What happens down here is important; it impacts and shapes what happens everywhere else,” Rizvi says. “I think IRC thought we would just be one and done, but they were obviously wrong about that. IRC workers all over the world want to, and deserve to, have a seat at the table, and now they know they can.”
The Texas labor movement has a fighting heart in large part because the state has failed working people so completely.
When we first met, Rizvi told me that she struggles constantly with the uncertainty her clients will face entering the workforce. Immigrant workers in Texas are disproportionately subject to wage theft, misclassification, injury, and fatality on the job. At the Republican National Convention in July, Abbott was allotted just six minutes to speak. He used them almost exclusively to attack immigrants, at one point leading the crowd in the chant, “Mass deportation now!”
It takes exceptional courage to demand better for yourself when you live in a state run by politicians that have made careers out of demonizing you. “They don’t see us as people; they see us as machines, just here to generate more and more money for them. But Texas runs because of immigrants,” says Maria Bustamante, whose friends call her Betty.
Bustamante has worked in the laundry department of the Hyatt Place Austin Airport hotel since 2019. Like her, almost all of her co-workers are first- or second-generation immigrants who found in Texas a place in which they hoped to start a new life for themselves and their families.
When she gets off work, Bustamante comes home to her two daughters and mother, for whom she is the sole caretaker. When new management took over at her job, bringing with it an abrupt reduction of hours and increased workloads for Bustamante and her co-workers, she understood her family’s future was on the line if they didn’t organize.
In July 2024, after months of coming into work early and staying late in order to have organizing conversations between shifts, Bustamante and her co-workers won their union election with Unite Here Local 23. Since then, hotel management has engaged in targeted retaliation against members of the organizing committee. Attempting to make them give up on their union is a fool’s errand, Bustamante tells me. “We didn’t fight for this for so many months just to stop now. We deserve to have our voices heard.”
I asked Bustamante what she would say to someone who’s just beginning the effort to unionize their workplace in Texas. “Vale la pena, vale la pena luchar,” she says. “It’s worth it, it’s worth fighting for.”
Each new union member in Texas is a worker that is empowered to make real change in a state that actively resists social progress of any kind—the power of a union doesn’t stop at the workplace. In January 2024, rank-and-file delegates from affiliated unions across the state submitted a resolution calling for a ceasefire in Gaza to be heard on the floor of the Texas AFL-CIO Committee on Political Education (COPE) Convention.
After nearly two hours of intense, emotional floor debate, the decision to vote on the passage of the resolution by roll call was made, the first such instance in more than two decades. The vote itself took the better part of an hour, as the full convention room of delegates voiced “aye” or “nay” for their respective local. The resolution passed with a vote of 52,858 to 43,003, making the Texas AFL-CIO the first state federation in the country to call for a ceasefire.
At the time, the national AFL-CIO had remained silent on Gaza, to the frustration and heartbreak of outspoken affiliated members across the country. A little over a week after the Texas AFL-CIO convention, the AFL-CIO issued a national call for a ceasefire.
“There is a civil rights and human rights consciousness that people dismiss in Texas that has existed here for a long time,” Jason Lopez, president of the Austin Central Labor Council and one of the joint authors of the resolution, tells me. “We have an obligation to each other as union members to act in moments like this. Our movement may not be as big as other states, but we’re powerful because we’re a real community.”
That community is punching above its weight by any standard. Rank-and-file union members in Texas are not just beating the odds; they’re spearheading national campaigns, winning historic contracts, and calling for justice beyond the borders of their state and country.
The cruel political theater of our state’s elected officials presents Texas as a cursed anchor attached to the rest of the nation, doomed to drag everyone else down with it. Workers now organizing are offering an alternate vision, one where Texas leads progress. In 2023, union membership increased in Texas even as the national figure fell.
For decades, the American labor movement has failed to seize organizing momentum in the South—and suffered the consequences. Now we have a chance to act differently. Where Texas workers are being given dedicated organizing resources, they are winning. Meeting this moment demands a movement-wide commitment to organize in Texas, and all Southern states, that matches the will of the workers here.
The Texas labor movement has a fighting heart in large part because our state has failed working people so completely. It’s what organizers say at the beginning of every campaign: Nobody is coming to save you. You have to decide if you’re going to stand up and demand better or do nothing and hope things will change on their own. Texas workers have shown us their choice. We should listen, and join in.