Strikes, union campaigns, mobilizations and other collective actions by workers, including those of 115,000 railroad workers, nearly 50,000 University of California academics, thousands of nurses, flight attendants, warehouse workers, cafeteria workers, supermarket workers, journalists and more from around the country are part of a Wave of actions promising a revival of the labor movement.
In this city, more than 1,000 New York Times editorial staff are preparing to go on strike this week after feeling fed up with their bosses negotiating a new contract for over 20 months, while 1,500 part-time academics on strike at the gates Marching from New School University and simultaneously across the harbor from New York to Staten Island, more than 8,000 workers who were the first to unionize at an Amazon warehouse are attempting to sign their first collective agreement while also unionizing their colleagues supporting other parts of the mega-corporation are just a few local expressions of what is happening nationally.
Actions range from new efforts to unionize companies in the service sector to new offensives involving strikes to secure better bargaining terms in traditional industries. And they’re winning: unions won more elections (to form a union) in 2022 than any year since 2000. To date, more than 288 strikes have broken out, involving three times as many workers as in all of 2021.
In addition, according to the latest Gallup poll, the American public’s support for unions is 71 percent, its highest level since 1965.
Perhaps most notable is the rise of new independent unions in highly anti-union companies, such as the Starbucks workers who managed to unionize 250 stores in one year – despite the company still refusing to negotiate collective agreements – as well as the new ones Union trying to unionize more Amazon facilities in supermarket chains like Trader Joe’s.
The weakest moment in almost a century
At the same time, unions in sectors such as railroads, hospitals, airlines, ports (dockers), parcel companies, universities, museums, supermarkets and public schools are feeding the vitality of a labor movement that has stagnated and at its weakest in nearly a century as a result of a neoliberal offensive, unleashed by the Washington political establishment and business community from the Reagan presidency in the 1980s to the present day.
That year, according to data from the Cornell University School of Labor Relations (https://striketracker.ilr.cornell.edu), there were at least 630 industrial action actions in 980 locations across the country. The number of applications for elections to form new unions rose 53 percent in fiscal 2022 compared to 2021, the highest rate since 2016, official data said. Some experts comment that the level of trade union activity and other collective action by labor organizations is reaching levels not seen since the 1940s.
These actions include what is now the largest college strike in history, involving 48,000 academic staff – including graduate students – across the University of California’s nine-campus system, which has now lasted three weeks and has demanded support from students and Students enjoy faculty, which could have far-reaching implications for the future of industrial relations in the United States. At the moment, the authorities of this public university are trying to divide the strikers by offering concessions and benefits to some and not to others.
Accompanying this wave of union activism, some observers point out, is the arrival of a President who has pledged to be “the most pro-union President in history”. In fact, Joe Biden’s presidential campaign began in a Pittsburgh union, and he has since repeated his anti-neoliberal slogan: “Wall Street didn’t build this country, the middle class built this country, and the unions built the middle class.” “.
Despite reversing the official assault on unions and workers’ rights, appointing a pro-union Secretary of Labor and repairing ties with national unions in his first two years in the White House, Biden last week angered some of his union allies by calling for federal intervention urged. to halt a nationwide strike by more than 100,000 rail freight workers planned for December 9 on the grounds that it would severely damage the economy.
Leaders of some of the unions involved condemned the removal of their right to strike by passing a law forcing them to accept a collective agreement that the majority of their members had rejected in a protracted dispute over working conditions, including the right to sick leave in an industry that generated record profits of $20 billion last year while reducing its workforce by 30 percent. Biden “will go down as one of the greatest disappointments in the history of the labor movement,” tweeted the all-union Railroad Workers United.
rebellion against inequality
This new wave of action is in part a rebellion against the consequences of the neoliberal agenda of the past four decades, which has led to levels of economic inequality unprecedented in almost a century.
Various academic studies have shown that the decline in unionism is directly related to the increase in economic inequality in the United States. Only 10.3 percent of the working population – 14 million workers – are unionized (in the private sector only 6.1 percent); In the 1940s and 1950s almost a third of workers had a collective agreement.
Sara Nelson, President of the 50,000-member Association of Flight Attendants recently commented: “Ever since workers in general were granted the right to strike (to encourage collective bargaining) in 1935, companies and their political cronyism have campaigned day in and day out to take it away. As a result, we cannot impose any widespread policy and our democracy is as good as dead.
“After decades of struggle, we are at a tipping point filled with enthusiasm, energy and hope,” the AFL-CIO President said recently while announcing a new $11 million-a-year fund for union organizing campaigns.
D. Taylor, President of the national union Unite-Here – which includes hotel and restaurant workers – commented: “There has never been a hotter time to organize than now. Fed up with extreme inequality and exploitation, workers are willing to fight to improve their conditions.”