Labor unions are surging. Will SCOTUS pull the plug?

A look at the state of working America

Welcome to a Monday edition of Progress Report.

How was your Labor Day weekend? I’m still hanging out in Denver, a pleasant and quiet city that is a jaywalker’s dream — I’ve never seen so little traffic in a major city. Maybe everybody is just avoiding me!

Given the holiday and the work I do on a daily basis, I figure it’s a perfect time to catch up on the state of organized labor and labor organizing in the US, as well as how it’s crossing over into politics this year.

Note: I’m holding a special Labor Day sale on paid subscriptions to Progress Report — 20% off for one day only. That’s just $4 per month. If you can’t afford that right now, please email me and I’ll put you on the list for free. Every paid subscription makes it easier for me to comp one while becoming sustainable.

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After decades in the doldrums and several years on the upswing, this Labor Day finds the union movement at a crossroads. There is much to celebrate: New organizing, democratized leadership, and almost unprecedented public support have fueled a renewed momentum and increasingly tangible gains for workers and some unions. At the same time, a hostile judiciary and a growing mountain of legal challenges threaten to wipe out key protections that make unionizing possible.

I have covered the labor movement for More Perfect Union since 2021, bringing attention to the pandemic-fueled, government-fostered union revival and closely observing the far-right’s awkward attempts to both co-opt and extinguish worker power. Here’s a view from the inside:

Actions, organizing, and corporate combat

Nearly half a million workers were involved in “major” work stoppages in 2023, as the number of such strikes rose by 280% compared to 2022. The spike restored strike activity to its typical pre-Covid level, and this year is likely to see that number increase yet again thanks to a new militancy and new NLRB rules.

Frustrated by low pay and the industry’s unnecessarily stingy new normal, over 10,200 workers in 25 cities nationwide have walked out on strike since Sunday morning; Represented by UNITE Here, their strike has sent management at Hyatt, Hilton, and Marriott-owned hotels scrambling to provide guest services in the increasingly untenable conditions that post-pandemic policy changes have created.

Impacted cities include Baltimore, Boston, San Diego, San Francisco, San Jose, Seattle, Honolulu, and Kauai. UNITE HERE could add another 12 cities to the strike, which is being mounted in part to unwind the pandemic-era shift away from automatic daily room cleaning. The change has led to reduced hours for housekeeping staff and bigger cleaning jobs without any adjustment to the time they’re granted to get the work done.

The strike is only supposed to last three days, but they could head out again should negotiations over a new contract continue to stall. There were more than 175 hotel strikes across Southern California and Arizona last year, and last week, 23 workers were arrested while picketing the Virgin hotel in Las Vegas.

More than 17,000 AT&T workers from across the Southeast hit the picket lines on August 16th after accusing the telecom giant of failing to bargain in good faith over a new contract. The prior contract, which covered linesmen, installation and repair techs, and customer service reps, expired on August 3rd.

The workers are repped by the CWA and are part of a bargaining unit that covers Georgia, Alabama, Florida, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina and Tennessee. They’re technically on strike over the unfair labor practice charge that the CWA filed shortly before the walkout, but it’s been a long time coming.

Like many unions, AT&T workers were in the early 2000s strong-armed into accepting a two-tier system of worker classification and compensation, with so-called wire technicians earning less than “core” employees. The company now classifies as many new hires as possible as “second-class” workers, as one callous executive described them during negotiations in mid-August, which has made ending this uneven system one of the most urgent goals of this negotiation.

To add insult to injury, AT&T offered these Southern workers a 2% raise after agreeing to a 5% raise with the west coast unit. I produced a quick report on the strike a few weeks ago:

Relatively lower-profile despite the number of workers out on the picket line, this strike touches on many of the issues that have animated contract negotiations and union mobilizations over the past three years.

Last year, both the Teamsters, in their negotiations with UPS, and the UAW, in the battle with Ford, Chrysler, and Stellantis, made eliminating two-tier their number one priority. Each had the schism imposed on them in bad contracts forced through by conservative and corrupt past leadership, leading to major declines in wages and benefits for new hires and even some long-time workers.

The good news is that prioritizing the reversal of that status quo paid off with contracts that phased out the second tier; the not-so-good news is that UPS said it planned to eliminate 12,000 jobs this year, while Stellantis is eliminating 2,450 manufacturing jobs. It has also delayed the reopening of a factory despite its resumption of production being part of the agreement.

Cynical cost-cutting efforts timed to follow new contracts absolutely do not invalidate the importance of the gains. But they aren’t isolated incidents, either.

In 2021, workers at four Kellogg’s plants spent the fall on strike in an effort to reverse their two-tier contract. There were tense standoffs in Battle Creek, Omaha, Memphis, and Lancaster, both with the company and between the local and international leadership of BCTGM, the union to which the production workers belonged. Workers and their local leaders in some cities were more militant than others, and all were far more geared up than the brass at the top of BCTGM, who were not prepared for the anger that underpaid and overworked rank-and file-felt after working through Covid.

(How do I know this? I got in touch with BCTGM international to cover the impending Frito-Lay strike, set to begin on July 4th, but their comms person couldn’t help because they were going on vacation. I worked with locals on all of these strikes instead.)

The UAW went on strike at John Deere manufacturing facilities across the Midwest that same fall, also seeking to end two-tier, which had really dominated union contracts throughout the prior two decades. Both the Kellogg’s and John Deere contracts ultimately eliminated egregious differences in compensation to the veteran and newer workers and staved off jobs being sent to facilities in Mexico. But Kellogg’s is now planning to shut down its Omaha plant and downsize some of its Memphis operations, while Deere just laid off some Iowa workers with the goal of rehiring for their jobs in Mexico in 2026.

The year’s biggest strike may kick off next week in Washington State, where embattled plane manufacturer Boeing is negotiating a new contract with a Machinists union (IAM) that’s hoping to take advantage of the company’s self-inflicted problems to make up for some bad contracts and win new power.

This is an inflection point for the 32,000-member unit, which hasn’t negotiated a new contract for 16 years and has a host of demands. Chief among them: a 40% pay increase over the life of the contract, a seat on the board to guarantee a role in safety-related decision-making, and a guarantee that Boeing’s next big plane gets built by the expert workers in Washington instead of being outsourced to non-union South Carolina.

Here’s my report on the build-up:

IAM held a strike authorization vote in Seattle’s T-Mobile Park (the home of the Mariners) in July, where an overwhelming percentage of workers agreed to walk out on September 13th should they not receive a satisfactory contract proposal. Negotiations are ongoing and will likely come down to the wire.

The better the contract, the more attractive unionizing becomes to other workers. With a 70% public approval rating, labor unions haven’t been this popular in well over half a century, and as I’ll explain below, new organizing has exploded over the past few years. Earlier this year, the UAW won a historic election at a Volkswagen plant in Tennessee, while the Machinists are now organizing tens of thousands of blue collar baggage handlers at Atlanta-based Delta, the only non-union major airline (yes, I covered this, too.)

The Supreme Court is the ultimate bad boss

For all the valid complaints about his time in the White House, it must be said that President Joe Biden really has been the most pro-labor president since FDR. Granted, that’s a pretty low bar, but his appointees at the NLRB have done everything possible to tilt back the massive imbalance in power between workers and employers in this country.

There are a few main ways that this has played out.

First, to set the context: the administration was fortunate to take power at a time when the same essential workers who risked their lives to keep hospitals, communities, and the economy afloat during Covid began to demand pay and treatment commensurate with that value. Nurses, exhausted from a year of front-line duty, began striking en masse for better contracts and safe staffing ratios, and factory workers, as I mentioned above, also began demanding more when it came time to negotiate new contracts. Their militancy encouraged workers in non-union workplaces, which is where the government really came in.

Amazon and Starbucks workers led what quickly became a wave of organizing in 2021 and 2022, encouraged and enabled by the NLRB’s aggressive administrative law decisions, rule interpretations, and policy shifts. Starbucks workers became very schooled in their workplace labor rights and moved quickly to file unfair labor practice charges against the company whenever they felt they’d been violated.

No small number of these workers were teenagers or in their early 20s, and the specter of state protection often gave them the confidence to stand up to management. Though the process is an inherently drawn-out, the administrative law judges frequently found that Starbucks had indeed violated their rights and ordered the company to hire vindicated workers back. To discourage the instant firings, the NLRB reexamined the NLRA and determined that companies would have to pay additional restitution to wrongly terminated workers.

All of this, along with a boycott and falling sales, helped grind Starbucks into submission (here’s my report on that), and the company is now in serious talks with the union on a national framework for a store-by-store contract. People with the union tell me that there really is a good chance that they’ll have an agreement in place by the New Year, which would be a remarkable turn of events.

Earlier this summer, workers at an Apple Store in Maryland became the first to win a union contract from the company (following my report on the negotiations).

Last fall, the NLRB finalized another major rule change, known as the Cemex decision. For years, employers have been able to push back and sometimes even indefinitely delay union elections, then intimidate workers into voting against unionizing. Cemex changed the equation by forcing employers to either voluntarily recognize a union or file for a prompt election themselves. The new rule also forbids the employer from interfering in the election process, and if they’re found to be doing so, the NLRB can certify the unit and order the employer to bargain a contract.

Thanks to this decision, filing for new elections skyrocketed in the first half of the fiscal year, jumping 35% by the end of March. Last year, the number of workers participating in union elections jumped up to 93,000, an increase of around 30,000 from 2022. This year it’s likely to rise another 14,000. These are not large numbers, but they’re trending in the right direction, and could be boosted by new contracts and additional NLRB decisions.

One of the NLRB’s other big decisions came more recently, when it found that Amazon delivery drivers are indeed Amazon employees. Technically, they’re employed by a third party, but Amazon controls essentially all aspects of their work, which the NLRB said satisfies the requirements for joint-employer standard. It’s a huge finding, and not only because the board was forced to abandon a larger joint-employer rule after business interests sued in a friendly court. The NLRB’s ruling gives the green light to the Teamsters to kick what has thus far been a tentative effort to organize Amazon into full gear.

These major decisions have buoyed workers nationwide, but they’ve also drawn the ire of the billionaire strongmen who hate the idea of representative democracy in general, much less in their workplace. Starbucks, SpaceX, and Amazon have all filed lawsuits not just over their own losses, but in hopes of blowing up the NLRB altogether.

Nearly a century’s worth of caselaw, including an original case heard by the conservative Roosevelt-era court, has affirmed the NLRB’s structure and power, but the current Supreme Court has proven historically hostile to the administrative state. Its decisions this past spring dealt a devastating blow to agencies’ in-house administrative law judges and blew up the Chevron deference, which empowered federal agencies to interpret laws.

Experts are uncertain just how far the Loper Bright decision will end the courts’ deference to the expertise of the labor board on rules, but employers have already shown an eagerness to find out. Similarly, the Jarkesy decision that dealt a blow to administrative law judges may also strip the NLRB’s internal courts of the ability to levy the aforementioned already-weak fines to employers.

Where politics come into play

Labor unions have long been a key part of the Democratic constituency, often without receiving much in return. This election, however, there really is an immense amount at stake for workers: Democrats are promising Supreme Court reform that could eventually lead to re-litigating cases like Loper Bright and Jarkesy, while a Trump presidency would bring even more extreme judges up and down the judiciary.

As I’ve examined in detail, Project 2025, which still very much remains the policy bible for an incoming Republican administration, would ravage labor law in ways that would devastate workers and their right to organize.

How Project 2025 Targets Workers and Endangers Kids

With so much on the line, union leaders have by and large come out strong for Vice President Kamala Harris, none more so than the UAW’s Shawn Fain, who has taken to calling Donald Trump a scab and wearing a shirt that hammers home the point. It’s an important line of attack, as Trump had made major inroads with union members, to the point that he and Biden were running neck and neck.

Harris’s entrance into the race has largely restored the advantage that Biden had in 2020. In Pennsylvania, Trump was beating Biden by five points among union workers but now trails the vice president by nearly 15 points.

Some unions have memberships more predisposed to supporting Kamala Harris, who has enjoyed close ties with health care workers and domestic workers since her time in California. The Teamsters, on the other hand, is a historically more conservative union and has heavier proportion of white, male, blue collar members, which is undoubtedly part of why its president, Sean O’Brien, has been flirting with Republicans and Donald Trump.

Whether it was ever smart to bet that Donald Trump would reward the Teamsters in a second administration is highly debatable, and now O’Brien’s gambit seems to be backfiring. He’s alienating himself from an administration that rescued the Teamsters’ pensions and a vice president who has a much better chance of winning in November, and his own members are starting to actively push back and discuss changing directions in the next union election.

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