In the early 20th century, when the American labor movement was being built, striking was the way that workers won unions, won concessions from employers, won legal rights, won everything. (This book or this book or this book are good entry points into the wild world of US labor history.) Eventually, after decades of strikes and sacrifices, laws were passed to provide a legal framework for the relationship between workers, unions, employers, and government. These laws have many flaws, and are tilted against organized labor in many ways, and are always an ongoing legal battlefield, but the underlying takeaway here is that since 1935, unions in America have existed not in a Wild West world where the strike was the only way to get things done, but in a world where there are intelligible laws and government agencies that mediate the employer-labor relationship. Contracts and laws and NLRB regulations became the dominant playing field of union power. Strikes still happened, but an overriding purpose of labor law has been to encourage “labor peace”—to minimize the need for work disruptions.

Today’s labor movement is the product of 90 years of this dynamic. Today’s big unions have been built to operate and wield power in the context of these rules. Most major unions are more commonly engaged in legal fights (where courts and regulators decide the limits of worker power) and political fights (to pick the referees who will ultimately write the government’s rules) than in strikes.

The Trump administration, which cares only about power and not at all about the traditional niceties of law and public relations, has begun simply throwing union contracts in the trash and declaring that existing federal unions do not exist after all, because the boss says so. This is the worst thing that a boss could possibly do to a union. It should prompt the strongest response. If anything should cause a union to strike, it is this. Yet the unions in question have not struck. Why? On a surface level, because they are not legally allowed to strike. But on a more basic level, because they have been built from the ground up as entities that do not consider strikes to be within their purview. The law, in other words, is not their deepest weakness; their deepest weakness is the fact that they do not imagine themselves to be capable of striking and therefore have not done the constant organizing work that would enable them to strike and therefore have little capability of carrying out a strike even if they wanted to. This is true not just of AFGE, the federal union that has absorbed the brunt of Trump’s attacks so far, but of most (not all) public sector unions in most (not all) red states. It is also true of many major private sector unions that have leadership that is lazy and/ or unimaginative, who have accepted that their power rests mostly in politics and lawyers, and who, because of this, likewise fail to do the internal organizing and training and education and mobilization work necessary to create strike-ready unions.