We’ve heard a lot over the past few months about the White House promise to bring manufacturing jobs back into the country. “Jobs in factories will come roaring back,” DJ Trump announced as justification for tariffs. JD Vance regularly maintains that manufacturing jobs, with their good wages and benefits, lifted families into the middle class. Losing them left many communities struggling. The best way forward, we hear, is to bring back the kinds of manufacturing jobs that enabled families to become middle class.

These claims rest on a nostalgia, however, that completely ignores not only shifts from a manufacturing to a service economy, but also the significance of organized labor in pressing for the wages and benefits that enable families to buy houses, send their children to college, have access to health care, and generally live middle-class lives. Jobs do not come with a particular wage or benefit package attached. Employers have a vested interest in keeping wages as low as possible. Historically, workers have had to organize for better pay and working conditions, first in the manufacturing sector and later in the public service sector.

The public is being gaslit. We have an administration that is hostile toward organized labor, speaking to a public that generally supports labor unions but is pretty uneducated about their history and importance.

Despite its rhetoric about bringing back manufacturing jobs, the Trump administration (you know, the guy who routinely underpays or stiffs workers) has displayed hostility toward organized labor. During his first term, Trump’s National Labor Relations Board made it more difficult for workers to unionize. During his second term, he has left the NLRB without a quorum that would enable it to hear cases workers bring; as reported by the Century Foundation, “The agency currently has no way to compel employers to bargain with their workers’ union, or to stop unfair treatment on the job.” In the meantime, the White House has nominated management-side lawyers with records of anti-union work to key labor positions. In addition, it has issued an executive order ending collective bargaining for federal workers, including terminating the federal government’s contract with the Council of Prison Locals, which represented employees at the Federal Bureau of Prisons. Further, the pro-corporate Project 2025 aims to make it more difficult for working people to organize.

Americans generally have a positive view about labor unions. In August, 2025, Gallup found that 68% of Americans approve of labor unions, and Pew Research found that a majority of Americans see a decline of unions as bad for workers, with Democrats much more likely to share that view than Republicans. But despite generally positive attitudes toward unions, Americans are not well versed on what organized labor has accomplished historically, how they have done so, and what labor unions means for today.

Let’s look at how most schools teach labor history. I located five analyses of textbooks for their representation of labor unions, published between 1974 and 2011.

• In 1974, Irving Sloan produced an analysis of 19 high school American history and 8 high school government texts, in his monograph The American Labor Movement in Modern History and Government Textbooks, published by the American Federation of Teachers.

• In 1979, Jean Anyon published an extensive analysis of 17 widely used secondary school history textbooks in her article “Ideology and United States History Textbooks.”

• In 1993, Dorothy Sue Cobble and Alice Kessler-Harris reported their analysis of 7 college-level introductory U.S. history texts in their article “The New Labor History in American History Textbooks.”

• In 2002, Robert Shaffer reviewed 12 college U.S. history textbooks in his article “Where Are the Organized Public Employees? The Absence of Public Employee Unionism from U.S. History Textbooks, and Why It Matters.”

• In 2011, Paul F. Cole, Lori Megivern, and Jeff Hilgert reported their examination of 4 high school history texts published in 2009-2010 in American Labor in U.S. History Textbooks, published by the Albert Shanker Institute.

Essentially, the authors found that texts teach that labor unions came into existence about one hundred years ago to improve pay and working conditions in factories, but since the 1960s, their significance has declined. In other words, labor unions are a part of the past, but not particularly relevant today.

Wow, what a short and distorted history that leaves out a lot, particularly the potential power and significance of organized labor for this current moment. Here are three key problems in how organized labor is framed in textbooks:

Minimize and simplify union accomplishments: All of the analyses found texts to under-represent the range of accomplishments unions have brought about, and the ways in which unions have organized to do so.

• For example, Cobble and Kessler-Harris noted that texts framed working people as victims of an early industrialization process that happened to them, over which they had little agency.

• Anyon noted that texts said little about the kinds of strategies unions developed to press for changes, and that most texts either did not mention strikes or characterized strikes as violent and harmful to workers. Further, most provided little or no discussion of the contributions of immigrants to labor movements.

• Cole and colleagues found that the texts “virtually ignore the vital role of organized labor in winning broad social protections, such as child labor laws, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and the Environmental Protection Agency; [and they] ignore the important role that organized labor played in the civil rights movement” (p. 6).

• Shaffer observed that union activity, when included at all in texts, follows a triumphal narrative in which a problem is identified, courageous people come together to address it and, after some struggle, solve the problem forever.

As a result of these omissions, students would not necessarily realize that wages in manufacturing jobs rose and conditions improved because of the demands and strategies of organized labor.

Pro-corporate bias: Textbooks’ selections of which unions to include and how to frame tactics such as strikes are generally biased in favor of corporate interests.

• For example, Anyon found texts to give far more attention to the American Federation of Labor than to other unions that used more confrontational tactics such as strikes, and unions that represented a more diverse and less-skilled workforce. She concluded: “The social philosophy regarding workers and unions transmitted by the textbooks benefits primarily those unions that have accepted the legitimacy of, and have been empowered by, the United States business establishment” (p. 379).

Ignore organized labor after 1960: Most texts suggest that the significance of organized labor has diminished over the past sixty years. Completely missing from this narrative is attention to public service unions such as teachers and postal workers.

• For example, Shaffer wrote: “I was at first surprised, and soon appalled, at the absence in virtually all survey textbooks, as well as in textbooks of the recent (post-1945) U.S., of any mention of the upsurge in public employee unionism in the 1960s and 1970s. This silence serves all of our students poorly” (p. 315). Not the least of which is the fact that many young people will work in service sector jobs, entering the labor force with no understanding of the processes organized labor has used to improve pay and working conditions there.

Ironically, while about 70% of teachers are members of a teachers’ union, by failing to mention the unionization of public service jobs, texts do not invite teachers to share their knowledge of unions today.

There are also young adult novels that address struggles of American workers, but in her analysis of how labor is portrayed in them, Deborah Overstreet found only eight that specifically focus on unions.

While textbooks portray labor unions as part of our nation’s past but not its present and future, the reality is that the work of unions is never finished and is essential to the well-being of workers and their families. Take car manufacturing, for instance. Car companies have been adding jobs, but not necessarily for the same pay level. The United Auto Workers has fought against two-tiered compensation systems in which newer workers enter at a pay scale that is lower than that governing the pay of veteran workers. Without the union, pay and benefits in jobs that used to pay well erode.

According to the Economic Policy Institute, “In 2023, 11.2% of workers were covered by a union contract. Survey data from 2017 show that nearly half of nonunion workers (48%) would vote to unionize their workplace if they could.” Barriers to unionization—to organized attempts to improve pay, benefits, and working conditions—are real.

How well are schools preparing young people to recognize the relationship between organized labor and worker pay? If these analyses of textbooks and novels are accurate, there is much work to be done!

But there are some excellent resources teachers can use. Here are some highlights:

• Howard Zinn’s A Young People’s History of the United States, adapted by Rebecca Stefoff for students in grades 6-9.

• Shift Happens: The History of Labor in the United States, about the development of labor organizing, for high school level.

• Viva’s Voice , about a bus driver strike, for grades K-2

• A Seed in the Sun, about farmwork labor organizing for ages 8-12

• Fannie Never Flinched: One Woman’s Courage in the Struggle for American Labor Rights, labor about union activist Fannie Sellins

• Missing from Haymarket Square, one of the few to include race and labor

• Kids on the March: 15 Stories of Speaking Out, Protesting, and Fighting for Justice\

• Bread and Roses, Too, historical fiction set within a major strike

• That’s Not Fair! Emma Tenayuca’s Struggle for Justice/¡No Es Justo!: La lucha de Emma Tenayuca por la justicia. Children’s picture book.

And several more on the Social Justice Books list of books about labor for children and youth.

As discussions of how manufacturing jobs might be brought back into the U.S. swirl around us, let’s not forget the work of organized labor in making sure those jobs pay works reasonably well. If you are a teacher, figure out how you can teach labor history. If you are a non-educator, figure out how you can educate yourself about labor history. Then support policies that actually support working people.