The image that defined American labor for much of the twentieth century was the industrial union: tens of thousands of workers in a single factory or a single industry, organized under a single contract, capable of shutting down production through collective action in ways that forced capital to negotiate. That model declined for forty years, driven by deindustrialization, anti-union legislation, the rise of service work, and an ideological consensus that treated union membership as an economic inefficiency rather than a social achievement. What is happening now does not look like the industrial union era. The campaigns that have generated the most attention, at Amazon warehouses, at Starbucks stores, at university campuses and hospital systems and video game studios, are smaller, more dispersed, harder to coordinate, and operating in industries that the labor movement of the mid-twentieth century never organized or never needed to. But they are winning, at a rate that seemed improbable five years ago. The Amazon Labor Union's 2022 victory at a warehouse on Staten Island was the most symbolically significant event in American labor in a generation. Amazon had spent enormous resources on union avoidance, and the labor movement's established institutions had largely written off the logistics sector as unorganizable at scale. The campaign that succeeded was not run by the established unions; it was run by current and former Amazon workers who had organized themselves, raised money through crowdfunding, and argued their case to coworkers who were skeptical of institutional unionism but receptive to the specific grievances being articulated. The Starbucks campaign, which unfolded more or less simultaneously across hundreds of stores, demonstrated that service workers at a national chain could organize shop by shop and maintain enough momentum to compel a company to engage. The pace of individual store unionization was remarkable; at its peak, votes were being won at multiple stores per week. What is driving it? Several things appear to be operating at once. The labor market tightness of the post-pandemic period gave workers leverage they had not had in years; employers who would have responded to organizing campaigns by threatening layoffs found themselves in a position where they needed workers more than workers needed them. The pandemic itself, by making visible who was essential and how they were being treated, appears to have shifted some workers' sense of their own value and their employers' obligations. There is also a generational dimension. Young workers, particularly those entering the labor market in the years after the 2008 financial crisis and the pandemic, have come of age during a period in which the social contract that their parents understood, work hard, stay loyal, and advancement will follow, has visibly frayed. They are more skeptical of corporate authority and more open to collective action than the workers who built their careers during the anti-union consensus of the 1980s and 1990s. The victories have not translated automatically into strong contracts or into the kind of durable institutional power that sustained labor's mid-century strength. Many Starbucks stores that voted to unionize have spent years in contract negotiations without reaching agreements, dealing with a company that has used every available legal mechanism to slow the process. The Amazon Labor Union's initial victory was followed by failed elections at other facilities. Organizing a unit is the beginning of a campaign, not its conclusion. But the direction of travel has changed in ways that feel qualitatively different from the episodic upsurges that punctuated the long decline. Public approval of unions is at its highest level in decades. Workers in sectors that had no labor tradition are building one. The question is no longer whether the labor movement can organize new industries; it is whether it can translate individual victories into the kind of structural power that changes how work is compensated and governed across the economy.