A journalist reflected on his experience as a labor activist and stressed the importance of unionization at a Georgetown University Law Center event Oct. 27.

Hamilton Nolan, a labor journalist and activist who has written for Gawker, Deadspin and The Guardian discussed his 2024 book, “The Hammer: Power, Inequality, and the Struggle for the Soul of Labor,” and spoke to students and faculty about labor organizing. At the event — which the Georgetown University Law Center Workers’ Rights Institute and Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor hosted — Nolan encouraged attendees to view contemporary political issues through a socialist class-based lens and argued that union power offers a strong path toward revitalizing the U.S. working class. 

Nolan said unions were instrumental in securing decent wages and benefits for workers in the 20th century. 

“In the 1950s, the peak of union power in America, one in three workers in this country was a union member,” Nolan said at the event. “It created, ironically, the golden age of America that Republicans are always talking about going back to.”

“Unions are still the single most important tool to fix the single most important problem in this country,” Nolan added. 

Nolan said big business and efforts from conservative politicians have contributed to the recent decline in union membership within the United States. 

“Today, the portion of workers in unions fell under 10% for the first time in 100 years,” Nolan said. “It’s more accurate to say that union power was assassinated than it declined. It was a product of a sustained assault by corporate America and their political allies.”

Nolan said President Donald Trump’s administration has escalated the existing attacks on unions.

“Before Trump, the air traffic controllers fired by Reagan, 11,000 workers, was considered the worst act of union busting by a president in my lifetime,” Nolan said.  “That looks like child’s play compared to what Trump’s already done in his first six months. He’s fired hundreds of thousands of federal workers, tearing up union contracts.”

Since January 2025, over 211,000 federal employees have been terminated or forced out of their federal jobs. Trump also issued an executive order in August to eliminate collective bargaining with several unions representing employees of the federal government. 

Nolan’s activist career began while working as a journalist for Gawker, a now-dissolved online blog focused on celebrities and the media industry. He partnered with the Writers Guild of America East, an existing union of print journalists, to help him and his coworkers unionize, which was uncommon for online journalists at the time. 

Nolan said the unionization campaign was a swift success, sparking a wave of similar collective action across the online journalism industry. 

“We ran a campaign, and in six weeks, we had a union,” Nolan said. “And after we unionized, a big wave went through not just the online media industry but also parts of the traditional media that hadn’t been organized yet.”

In 2024, Nolan published “The Hammer: Power, Inequality, and the Struggle for the Soul of Labor.” The book argues that the United States’ growing wealth inequality stems from the collapse of organized labor and that rebuilding union power is crucial to strengthening democracy. 

Nolan also publishes content on a Substack blog titled “How Things Work,” which has amassed over 40,000 subscribers.

Heather Steffen, an adjunct professor in Georgetown’s Master’s in Engaged and Public Humanities program who joined Nolan on the panel, said the event was meant to help launch a new reading group which plans to cover Nolan and other pro-labor authors. 

“I organized Hamilton’s visit today, not only to bring him into conversation with labor figures at Georgetown, but also to inaugurate a new organization on campus, the Georgetown Labor Studies Reading Group,” Steffen said at the event. 

Nolan said his book details how unionizing has been the most effective way for workers to improve their conditions and rise into the middle class, highlighting the Las Vegas Culinary Workers Union as an example.

“I have a chapter in my book about the Culinary Union in Vegas, one of the strongest local unions in the U.S.,” Nolan said. “They have the entire casino industry in their union; they are the union that created the middle class in Las Vegas and in Nevada.”

Nolan said social and political victories mean little without economic change, and strengthening the working class through organized labor is the only path forward. 

“You cannot win the political war without winning the class war,” Nolan said. “So what do we need to do? Unions need to organize.”