A big, unruly and complex animal, New Jersey Labor threatens a fight around every corner and seldom presents the prospect of getting unified in the face of a common enemy. Typically, the old divide chopped public and private sector organizations in half, a fracture deepened when then-Senator Steve Sweeney – an ironworker by trade and lifelong Building Trades member – advocated an overhaul of the public worker pension system. That was near the beginning of the millennium, and the Communications Workers of America (CWA) and others never forgot, even after Sweeney struck a deal with the New Jersey Education Association (NJEA) to win gains for the organization.

Indeed, public sector workers largely greeted with glee and vindication Sweeney’s dead-last finish in the Democratic Primary for Governor (59,811 votes, compared to 286,244 for winner Mikie Sherrill). If Sweeney’s 2021 reelection loss to the senate revealed significant South Jersey trendlines away from Democrats, 2025 in part demonstrated the continuing split at the heart of Labor. The results came with a catch, of course. They always do. For on election night, sprawled in that same pile of casualties with Sweeney was Sean Spiller, President – of all things – of the New Jersey Education Association (NJEA).

Public sector and private sector labor as embodied respectively by Spiller and Sweeney, the candidacies of two old warhorses never entirely able to refrain from pawing each other’s turf, snorting over past transgressions on both sides, had both expired. Spiller finished the primary season in second to last place, with 89,472 votes.

Now obviously one can’t simply conflate the two critical arms of the labor movement into Sweeney and Spiller in one election cycle and draw hard and fast conclusions about the movement. But the failure by both men to gain deeper traction revealed – or rather confirmed - alarming problems for labor in New Jersey during the Trump era. A movement defined finally by organization found itself challenged by its opposite, namely chaos perpetrated by the same president who fired the Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) when the latest jobs report failed to confirm his lies about jobs.

But of course, many rank-and-file workers favored Trump over the Democrats, especially in the Building Trades and law enforcement. It didn’t matter that President Joe Biden funded the Gateway Tunnel project, which all but guaranteed area trade worker employment for up to a decade, signed an executive order requiring federal agencies to put project labor agreements on projects worth $35 million or more, or helped with the development of the area Navy yards and the Monroe Energy Plant. When Biden hobbled onto a national stage last year and failed to perform in the country’s first presidential debate, he dropped the equivalent of a saturation bomb in the arms of the labor movement, especially among the ranks of the Trades. Just look at the results in North Philadelphia, south of Biden’s hometown of Scranton and a key Biden support system undergirding his 2020 victory in battleground Pennsylvania, where hard hats voted for Trump instead of Biden’s successor Kamala Harris of California. Of course, it went deeper than just Biden’s implosion, as the GOP won critical messaging battles in the areas of security and public safety, with many police officers – previously apolitical or willing to see both sides – driven to the GOP by liberal extremism. Among the ranks of public sector unions, progressive members decried Democrats’ muddled policies on the Middle East and felt betrayed by a seemingly remote party unable to pivot from the confused-looking Biden.

A million members strong and already historically divided at the core, the labor movement in New Jersey appeared in danger of slipping into Trump’s concocted chaos, as leaders – many of them past their prime – found it difficult to keep in step with the times, and looked – in some cases – more willing to protect a few rather than risk their own careers to save the many.

In short, the movement here seemed to suffer from a crisis of leadership, not from local to local, regional group to group, or even necessarily at the upper echelons of operations, but statewide, and in that vacuum existed the possibility of one of the two candidates stepping into the breach as a champion. It came down to Republican Jack Ciattarelli and Democrat Mikie Sherrill vying outside their comfort zones for not exactly the soul of labor – but for the labor vote. Neither had the conviction of labor (however divided) or Spiller or Sweeney. But they had enough galvanizing traction, each in his or her respective party, to begin a more concerted play for labor organizations in the general election.

As disjointed as its ranks had become, Labor – to offset its own apparent identity problem - would put the candidates to work, mostly a consequence of polling showing a single digit race and the very real prospect of a turnout election. If the Labor movement knew how to mobilize bodies on Election Day, the candidates could augment their advantages with troops they knew could handle the streets. Labor was coy, an attitude perhaps best on display by the Building Trades, muscled up for Sweeney in the primary and now coquettish at best, but also expressed on the more progressive public sector side, where several key organizations backed the primary candidacy of Ras Baraka. When the Laborers backed Sherrill, and the Operating Engineers backed Ciattarelli, other Building Trades members quietly applauded the offsetting of the terrain as a way of hedging Labor’s bets. Still others fumed.

It wasn’t just that Trump as President threatened labor leaders who had grown complacent. Governor Phil Murphy left behind a strong labor record, which went far in uniting the classically fractured strands of private and public sector labor in New Jersey. The record included a minimum wage hike from $8.60 in 2018 to $15 in 2024, paid sick leave, equal pay, and strong support for Project Labor Agreements (PLAs). For all his accomplishments, however, Murphy, eight years in office and at 43% favorability in a July Rutgers-Eagleton Poll, presented a polling liability to Sherrill, repeatedly tagged by Ciattarelli as a Murphy third term. Early in the contest, Sherrill aggressively counter attacked by underscoring Ciattarelli’s Assembly votes failing to support critical labor initiatives, including minimum wage, project labor agreements, and prevailing wage laws. Ciattarelli made his own early statement by backing Cost of Living Adjustments (COLAs), a key initiative prized by the New Jersey Fraternal Order of Police.

Both candidates recognized the need to make government run more effectively, as New Jersey voters remained skeptical about the true aims and ends of the political classes in the Garden State. Certainly, the Democrats welcomed Trump as a tyrannical albatross around Ciattarelli’s neck, many of them convinced that the fear factor alone of the Republican MAGA brand would put the lights out on Jack’s candidacy and propel Sherrill to victory. But a StimSight Research Poll for InsiderNJ identified factors more pressing for NJ voters. “Affordability (53%) and taxes (43%) are the themes of this election,” according to the poll’s director Patrick Murray, “rising to the top of a list of 13 different issues that voters say are most important to them in choosing a candidate for governor. Among voters who name affordability as one of their top issues, Sherrill (36%) and Ciattarelli (34%) run about evenly on who can better handle it, but the Republican has an overwhelming advantage among those concerned with lowering taxes (50% to 15% for Sherrill). The Democrat has a small edge on being able to provide economic opportunities for New Jersey families (54% to 49% for the Republican).”

Whoever could corner Labor – that big unruly animal, snarling in the corner, even with all the gains of the Murphy years, doubts stoked by message machines, and Trump’s infernal chaos (as economists kept watch over the election time impact of his tariffs) – and figure out how to make the system – the laws and the divided turf – work for the workers, stood to find a critical toehold and a big leg up statewide.

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