Against the Machine: Why I No Longer Believe in Union Reformism

Matt Cavagrotti

August 14, 2025

Calling the Bluff

In 2016, I was studying at the University of Tennessee when I posted on social media looking for work. A friend responded: "How about a job with decent pay and incredible benefits, where you can build socialist revolution at the same time?"

It was a joke, but also not. That job was at UPS. And the implied revolutionary vehicle was the Teamsters. As someone who had been involved with the Platypus Affiliated Society — a Marxist group with chapters on many college campuses — I was more than a little skeptical. Platypus contends that the Left is not merely weak, but dead, and that any revival must begin from that recognition. So I was guarded against most forms of activism — including any attempt to reboot the New Left’s failed 'turn to industry' of the 1970s. But the job met my needs, and the historical tension intrigued me. So I took it. I called the bluff.

What Union Reformism Actually Is

The myth I walked into is an old one: that committed socialists can transform the labor movement from within. They can seize the unions back from calcified leadership and turn them into engines of class struggle. Whether it’s TDU, Labor Notes, or DSA-adjacent efforts, the idea is the same: join, reform, radicalize.

But the reality I encountered at UPS was not one of contested power. It was one absent of such. I was sent to the air operation — smaller and more isolated than the main ground hub — and found no visible union presence. No stewards. No accountability. Half my coworkers were dues-paying members, but that meant nothing in practice. When I met with my local union's president to say I wanted to build militancy there, he simply appointed me steward once I got seniority. It wasn’t a power struggle; it was a vacancy.

This, I came to understand, is what union reformism really involves: stepping into empty roles in structures that functionally do not want to be reformed, only managed. You will not fight your way into power. You will be given just enough of it to exhaust yourself.

The Human Cost

In 2022, I finally had the leverage to file a grievance against the company over Article 40, the section of the UPS-Teamsters contract that governs air operations. The language is vague and full of loopholes, and management has long used it to avoid providing rights and protections enjoyed by all other union-represented employees of the company. I knew from online chatter that air workers had been complaining about this article for years, but nothing had ever been done.

So I launched a campaign: Fix Article 40. I built a website, organized a national network of air workers across the country, gathered testimony, and drafted contract proposals for national negotiations. Initially, I expected support mostly from inside the air hubs. But as it turned out, air drivers (who shuttle volume from ground hubs to airports) were being hit even harder. Their jobs were being gutted. Many had no protections. Some were in tears on the phone. Their fear and desperation were visceral. My original goal was to get air workers from 100 cities across 50 states all to submit our proposals to the Teamsters headquarters in Washington. The final tally was 50 cities across 25 states. Not bad for a first stab.

This campaign took off precisely because it gave voice to a group long abandoned by union officialdom. But the success had a bitter aftertaste. There was no real infrastructure to support it. The union had mechanisms — committees, conferences, elections — but they weren’t built to listen. They were built to contain. You can do the work, raise the alarm, mobilize your coworkers — and still quietly disappear.

Burnout, disillusionment, or just quiet withdrawal is the norm. The union machine doesn’t punish you openly. It just absorbs you and lets your effort dissipate.

From Movement to Management

One of the most telling aspects of the Fix Article 40 campaign was its interaction with Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU). Thankfully, the staffer assigned to assist came from outside the Teamsters, so he wasn’t entrenched in the usual internal dynamics. He was sincere, and I think he genuinely tried his best to contribute to the campaign’s success.

TDU as an organization, however, was another story. By the time support was offered, most of the campaign’s groundwork was already done. TDU saw the initiative as a good look that didn’t require too much investment. When it came time to push for concrete outcomes, they offered gestures of support — but nothing that risked political capital or challenged the boundaries of their coalition.

The deeper issue was structural. Air workers make up only about 5% of the UPS bargaining unit, even though air operations generate a disproportionately large share of profit. From an electoral standpoint, one might argue that supporting our cause wasn’t worth the investment.

But that’s precisely the problem. A union should not be judged by what it secures for its most visible or strategically advantageous members. It should be judged by what it secures for its most vulnerable — those easiest to ignore, but most in need of protection. If a reform movement balks at defending those members because the numbers aren’t there, then it’s not a reform movement at all. It’s just a more efficient manager of the same exclusions.

Coalition or Capture?

This underscores a larger tension: the degree to which reform organizations like TDU actually influence the direction of the union, or are merely trying to preserve their place within it. What happens when a group like TDU — long the outsider voice of militant reform — actually gets a foothold in power? Does it maintain its militant posture, or does it start playing defense?

The OZ slate’s victory, with Sean O'Brien as President and Fred Zuckerman as VP, represented a historic turn. O’Brien was a former Hoffa Jr. loyalist, kicked off the 2018 UPS negotiating team only after he began pushing back internally. His reformist bona fides were shaky, and within TDU, his candidacy was hotly contested. TDU lacked a deep enough bench to fill a national leadership slate on its own. Thus, a compromise was born of necessity — but compromises come with costs.

One of those costs was that key positions in the international leadership were handed to holdovers from the very administration TDU had spent decades trying to dislodge. Figures like James Wright — lead negotiator of Article 40 — who agreed to co-chair a workshop on the article at the 2022 TDU convention. When Wright addressed us, he did so with the integrity of a ziplock bag full of water. Toward the end of his remarks, he said something telling: “certainly something about this article needs  to change... but as for what it is, and how far it goes, I guess that all depends on where you guys want to take things.”

In other words, he asked us to give him a mandate. But we’d already given him one: we built the campaign from the ground up, documented injustice, won support, and forced the issue into the open. We had done everything short of writing the new language for him. And still, the responsibility was pushed back on us — as if the point of rank-and-file action was to spare the leadership the burden of leading. 

The Limits of Inclusion

The real issue surrounding Article 40, however, wasn’t simply poor treatment of one category of workers. It was the way part-timers, despite being the majority of UPS’s workforce, were systematically excluded from the actual machinery of union democracy. Even in the 2023 UPS contract campaign — which delivered significant gains for part-timers — they were cast more as a constituency to be spoken for than a force to be organized with. The demands were made for them, not by them. 

That distinction matters. It’s what ultimately led me to help co-found Teamsters Mobilize, a caucus originally created to promote part-timer demands in the run-up to the 2023 UPS contract negotiations. Our core demand was straightforward: a $25/hour base wage for part-timers. But the deeper issue we were organizing around was structural: the relative disenfranchisement of part-timers in the union itself.

It didn’t take long to realize that TDU’s hostility toward our efforts would render that goal unattainable through existing reform channels. When we proposed even modest interventions — like the creation of a working group to examine part-timer engagement — we weren’t invited into discussion. Instead, we were given a choice: either water down the resolution to a vague affirmation with no call to action, or present it as written and face organized opposition from the leadership. That wasn’t a negotiation — it was a warning. The message was clear: challenging the organization’s strategic blind spots, even gently, would not be tolerated. I left the group shortly thereafter, disillusioned with the possibility of working inside a space that refused to even entertain the question of its own limitations.

It became impossible to ignore: even within reform spaces, inclusion has limits. The union doesn’t want the responsibility of governing a large majority, because doing so would raise problems of political integration. Part-timers threaten that balance, not because they’re unruly, but because they’re too many. To integrate them politically would destabilize the consensus that sustains institutional control.

And this isn’t just a Teamsters problem. Across organized labor, real membership engagement is not only rare, it’s often unwelcome. Despite having more direct impact on workers’ lives than electoral politics, unions routinely see lower participation. Most are content to mobilize a loyal activist core and with just enough turnout to ratify decisions made from above. In that sense, low participation isn’t a crisis — it’s the model.

To my surprise, Teamsters Mobilize didn’t fade after the UPS contract’s ratification. Instead, it transformed into something more. It began articulating a broader vision rooted not just in contract language, but in democratic accountability and working-class power. In short, it became a new militant tendency within the union.

I have doubts about Teamsters Mobilize’s ability to reach a broad base, but its persistence speaks volumes. It endures because of the vacuum left by TDU’s integration into union officialdom through the O’Brien-Zuckerman administration. In stepping into power, TDU stepped away from the oppositional posture that once defined it — critical, insurgent, bottom-up — leaving others to rebuild that space from scratch.

That retreat isn’t just a matter of having too much to lose. It’s that the very orientation TDU once championed — rank-and-file initiative, public pressure, dissent from below — now threatens the cohesion of the coalition they’ve joined. To remain militant would be to put strain on the very structure they now help govern. And so the insurgency is not only abandoned — it becomes unthinkable.

Who Benefits?

The people who survive inside this apparatus are not the ones who take risks. They’re the ones who come to identify with it. A layer of semi-professional operatives, staffers, and ideologues — many unelected, many unaccountable — continue to set the tone and direction of the “labor left.” These individuals are not necessarily malicious, but their continued relevance depends on a performance of struggle that never goes too far. Their identities, careers, and routines are anchored to a movement that does not move.

And so they maintain a strategic orthodoxy — not because it delivers, but because it keeps them in business. If it worked too well and actually produced the rupture they fantasize about, they’d be out of a role. Reform becomes lifestyle. Organizing becomes a kind of professionalized self-narration. And new idealists are brought in to keep the gears turning.

I don’t want to be unfair. There are people embedded in the union who do real work. Some local officers are responsive. Some campaigns create real leverage. If you’re already inside, if this is your long-term terrain, I’m not saying you should walk away. By all means, I wish you nothing but the best.

But if you’re standing outside, thinking of stepping in — don’t. At least not lightly. Don't do it on someone else’s pitch, and especially not for political reasons.

Beyond the Shop Floor

I don’t have a roadmap. I’m suspicious of anyone who claims to. But I do think we’ve neglected a vital terrain, one that earlier generations of socialists understood intuitively, and which we’ve allowed to rot: the civil-social sphere.

At its height, the American socialist movement was not just about parties or unions. It was about independent schools, newspapers, mutual aid societies, reading rooms, cultural associations — institutions that built a shared life outside the state and outside the market. They weren’t just tools for organizing workers; they were spaces for organizing meaning. They created a material and imaginative infrastructure for socialism to be lived before it could be won.

Today, that terrain is mostly abandoned. Civil society has become the domain of churches and charities, or it’s been hollowed out altogether. We don’t build our own institutions anymore. We try to plug ourselves into existing ones, even when they are hostile to us. And we call this “strategy.”

But what if the task of the 21st century is to reclaim that space? Not by mimicking old blueprints, but by creating new forms of association that neither depend on nor submit to legacy institutions. Forms that foster real solidarity, not performative resistance, and that cultivate political imagination rather than exhausting it.

From this perspective, labor unions—as they exist today—are not likely to be allies. If anything, they will resist such efforts. They have too much to lose. A revitalized civil-social sphere would expose their irrelevance, undermine their authority, and challenge their monopoly on “legitimate” working-class representation. It would provoke a crisis.

And maybe that’s exactly what we need.

No More Martyrs

So no — I no longer believe in union reformism as a viable political project. It may yield occasional tactical wins. But as a path to meaningful social change? It costs too much and gives too little.

Protect your time. Protect your mind. Protect your spirit. Don’t throw yourself into a machine that survives by wearing people out. You don’t owe that to anyone — not even "the working class," if such a thing still exists in coherent form.

You owe it to yourself to live fully, think clearly, and refuse roles written for you by institutions that will not change.

Call the bluff. Then walk away.