Working on a revolution

The most promising moment for labor since the early 1980s

Sep 05, 2023

Welcome to a Monday night edition of Progress Report.

I wanted to send this story out much earlier on Monday, given the subject matter, but I was just too swamped with investigative journalism work to get it over the line. There’s an irony there, given the subject matter, but I’ll let you connect the rest of the dots — this is where a fair amount of my expertise lies, so please fire any questions my way!

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Finally, a Labor Day weekend worthy of its name and legacy.

The very first Labor Day was celebrated in 1882 in Manhattan, when an estimated 10,000 workers defied their bosses and paraded uptown to demand working better conditions and pay. It’s been a national holiday since 1894, and while for many decades the decline of organized labor reduced it to a day of history lessons and clearance sales, this Labor Day invokes some of the optimism and solidarity of that original march.

The data underscores that vibe shift: A recent Reuters poll found that nearly three-quarters of Americans support labor unions, which makes them as popular now as they were in 1936, when autoworkers in Detroit began the famous sit-down strikes that helped to create the middle class. New industries are organizing at a rapid clip, driving an explosion of representation petitions and unfair labor practice charges against employers submitted to the NLRB.

The number of strikes and walkouts have soared over the past few years, and in terms of total workers on strike, only the extraordinary Red for Ed public education strikes of 2018 and 2019 make the numbers look fairly average.

For there to be any significant rebalancing of economic and political power in the US, this moment must ultimately prove to be just a prelude to a much larger movement. Still, none of this would have been fathomable just a few years ago, and it took a rare confluence of events, personalities, and acts of bravery to get this point. Here’s how it happened, the challenges ahead, and the reasons to be optimistic about the future.

“Covid Changed Everything”

The Covid-19 pandemic didn’t cause the massive disparities in Americans’ economic security and working conditions, but no event in modern history did more to highlight and exacerbate those inequities.

While so many of us were quarantining at home, growing sourdough and watching Netflix docuseries, millions of service, retail, and logistical workers were forced to work straight through the worst days and months of the pandemic, when tens of thousands of people were dying from a mystery bug that nobody understood or knew how to prevent.

The surge in e-commerce meant that UPS and FedEx drivers had an expanded workload that often forced them to come face-to-face with new and unpredictable customers.

Starbucks quickly reopened its stores wherever possible, dragging its baristas back into the small kitchen spaces where the virus thrived and barring them from asking hostile customers to wear masks.

Amazon’s refusal to take any legitimate precautions in its Petri dish warehouses led to the deaths of multiple workers and a walkout organized by a worker named Christian Smalls.

Nurses donned hazmat suits around their overwhelmed hospitals, and when those weren’t available, which was often the case, they simply wore plastic garbage bags.

It’s no coincidence that nurses across the country have launched strike after strike for much of the past two and half years. Over and over, they’ve called for better pay, protection, and adequate staffing levels.

Starbucks workers in Buffalo told me back when they began organizing in summer 2021 that the store’s disregard for safety was one of their biggest concerns. That would later be superseded by other issues, including the virulent union-busting that seemed to come from the darkest and most vicious depths of Howard Schultz’s ego.

Flight attendants and pilots faced similar situations, with unruly passengers and uncertain schedules combining to make their lives hell.

The federal government also played a key role. The emergency spending packages passed by both parties included huge health care subsidies, big stimulus checks, and expanded unemployment benefits. Suddenly, millions of people had time to think about their lives and careers without relentless financial pressure, and when low-paid professionals began to reflect on their circumstances, they faced some ugly truths.

It also didn’t help that even as the world melted down and global economies tanked, the wealthiest men in the world grew exponentially wealthier.

Bad Bosses, Better Courts

It is technically illegal to fire somebody for organizing their workplace, but under the toothless current US labor law, doing so is actually a pretty a sound investment.

Amazon has spent millions of dollars on “union avoidance” fees, a ten cent term that means hiring outside consultants to terrorize workers out of organizing altogether. Howard Schultz oversaw a massive, reality-twisting union-busting campaign, which resulted in the firing of more than 200 workers and more than a thousand ULPs.

Instead of scaring people off, it only galvanized the young union organizers, who had little to lose in an economy that had already left them behind. The fact that they were able to expose the nasty side of a self-obsessed billionaire also fueled a fair bit of the defiance.

Over time, Starbucks workers learned to contact their lawyers and begin the ULP process as soon as they were threatened, mistreated, and/or fired. Within a few weeks, they were giving testimony before the NLRB, nervous but very aware that Biden’s labor board was designed to give workers the benefit of the doubt.

The wheels of worker justice still take impossibly long to turn, but the NLRB and its judges have become increasingly aggressive in defending the wrongly fired and avenging the harassed.

The board has also made a number of significant, precedent-setting decisions intended to further protect workers’ rights to organize without interference.

While prohibited from forcing employers to pay punitive damages or fines, the board has begun ordering them to compensate wrongly fired workers for lost income and any expenses they may have incurred while looking for a new job.

The NLRB also ruled that employees cannot be fired or punished for expressing emotion during a labor dispute and that advocating for non-employees (such as fired workers or contractors) is protected behavior.

The most significant of these new rulings hangs a mandatory bargaining order over the heads of employers that try to interfere with fair union elections. This one will be the subject of considerable litigation, and the conservative takeover of the courts always makes things dicey, but the history behind the rule should satisfy those strict originalists.

Democrats Woke Up

For many years, Democratic politicians tended to see unions as ATMs and sources of ready made local campaign infrastructure.

Complacent labor leaders may have largely gone along with it, but many rank and file members showed little interest in staying loyal for milquetoast politicians. Donald Trump wooed and converted many of them with his special kind of pseudo-populism, which sent Democrats on an odyssey to figure out how to win back the blue collar workers abandoned them.

There was no silver bullet solution, but they were smart to look at the crowds that followed Sen. Bernie Sanders during his run for president and embrace economic populism. President Biden lent his support to the unionizing Amazon workers in Alabama, invited organizers to the White House, and pursued a gigantic new industrial policy that emphasized the creation of good-paying manufacturing jobs in once-abandoned communities.

Pursuing full employment instead of behind fooled by the Chamber of Commerce’s “nobody wants to work” narrative has helped to keep the job market right and wages rising, too.

The unions themselves, meanwhile, habe begun to assert their own political muscle. In Michigan, the AFL-CIO, UAW, and Teamsters went all-in to flip both chambers of the state legislature, and when they got the job done, the new Democratic majority repealed the union-sabotaging “Right to Work” law that Gov. Rick Snyder pushed through in a late night session a decade earlier.

Change from the Inside

For all the external factors that have contributed to the revitalization of the American labor movement, it’s been the rank and file members who deserve the most credit for ushering in the new dawn.

When I began covering the labor movement in 2021, it quickly became clear that some unions did not have the most capable or motivated national leadership. In some cases, they were stuck in a permanent defensive crouch after years of being picked apart by globalization and private equity; in others, comms directors went on vacation the evening before a significant strike at a major manufacturer.

Back in 2018, former Teamsters general president James P. Hoffa struck a sweetheart deal for UPS. The more than 300k Teamsters who worked at UPS hated the deal, which instituted unfair pay tiers and opened the door to mass layoffs, and more than half of them voted to reject it. Hoffa used a loophole in the union’s bylaws to push the contract through to ratification anyway.

Hoffa’s blatant act of corruption led to his retirement and the emergence Sean O’Brien, a former top lieutenant who broke away him over the bad contract.

Much the same happened to the UAW, where leaders were never able to undo the crappy tier system put into place during the 2008 financial crisis.

With the help of a very credible and eager strike threat, O’Brien and the Teamster negotiators were able to win a significantly improved contract from UPS in July. New UAW president Shawn Fain is working to do the same in tense negotiations with all three major American carmakers. A strike authorization vote has already sailed through with 97% of participating members indicating that they’d be willing to hit the pickets.

The UFCW is now the subject of a major leadership challenge from members frustrated by a lack of aggression and organizing, as well.

Even with an aggressive posture, there is no shortage of challenges ahead. Uber and Lyft have managed to trick voters and threaten politicians into accepting that its drivers are independent contractors. FedEx workers would love to unionize, several have told me, but the company is governed by the same national raileway act that stopped the train strike last fall. Even when there is a mass unionization movement, like what’s happened at Starbucks, the law still can’t force the company to negotiate a fair context. They can and will delay forever.

Conservatives and corporations will use the courts whenever possible to prevent workers from accessing their free and fair rights. For the first time in a long time, workers are primed to push back.

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