Do you get a daily lunch break? Do you receive overtime pay for long work weeks? Are you protected from unsafe conditions on the job? If so, you might want to thank labor organizers!
Ahead of the Labor Day holiday on Monday, Novel Hand is enthusiastically launching a new (and long-awaited) Impactfull series on labor. We’re looking forward to sharing research on the history of the labor movement, including the conditions that led up to the establishment of Labor Day as a federal holiday and the emergence of the modern union, as well as podcasts, Impactfull buttons, and a deep dive on the fraught relationship between Amazon and its union(s!) to follow up on our 2021 Impactfull series on the company.
Labor Unions in 2022
Before digging into these topics, let’s take a look at the state of labor organizing today.
Companies across the country are grappling with recent unionization campaigns sparked in response to working conditions during the COVID-19 pandemic and a rising cost of living. From Amazon and Apple to Chipotle and Starbucks, some of the largest — and most vocally anti-union — corporations across the country now count one or more unions among their thousands of storefronts, offices, and factories.
These companies not only produce some of the greatest profits in the country, but also employ millions of members of the labor force, yet only 10.3 percent of Americans were union-members in 2021 according to the National Bureau of Labor Statistics. More unionization means the opportunity for millions of workers to seize bargaining power and force their employers to heed concerns about working conditions and pay.
Beyond corporate organizing, students unions also notched several key successes in the last year. Graduate and undergraduate students at private colleges and universities who receive compensation for their work won the right to organize and unionize as employees only in 2016, with Yale being the most recent university to take up union cards. In only a few short years, organizers spread the student labor union movement across the country, where they have the support of 54 percent of likely voters, according to a recent Data for Progress survey.
These wins demonstrate the momentum building behind the American labor movement in 2022, and point to a broader resurgence of support for workers. Gallup recently reported that support for labor unions is at a 57-year high, with 71 percent of Americans indicating they approve of labor unions. However, some pain points for organizers persist, and not all unions are created equal.
Growing union membership means the opportunity to enact stronger protections for workers, but only if employers come to the table for fair negotiations. Massive corporations and well-endowed universities can withstand many of the tactics that enhance the power of workers, like strikes and walkouts, through the outsize power, influence, and funding they wield. Critics of these organizations point to the lack of good-faith bargaining efforts as major obstacles for these recently-developed unions.
Take the case of Starbucks: while over 200 Starbucks unions formed during the recent wave of labor organizing efforts, Starbucks only started negotiating with three of these unions. Delaying negotiations serves as one of several concurrent union-busting strategies the corporation has adopted. Current and former employees also accused Starbucks of firing organizers in its stores, delaying or preventing raises illegally for unionized workers, and threatening to eliminate gender-affirming and reproductive healthcare for workers at unionized storefronts.
However, these union-busting strategies show that corporations fear the momentum building in the labor movement in 2022. Adopting aggressive anti-union tactics in response to the growing tide of workers who demand more for themselves demonstrates that labor has the upper hand. With remote work, low unemployment, and high demand for labor, worker bargaining power continues to surge. These are the factors that should inspire hope in organizers, though the obstacles they face are many.
In the following weeks, stay tuned for the rest of this Impactfull series on labor and enjoy a restful, well-deserved, and hard-fought-for Labor Day.
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