April 2022 was a big month for union organizing. Workers at an Amazon warehouse on Staten Island, New York—the largest fulfillment center in New York City employing 8300 workers) voted to unionize with the newly established Amazon Labor Union and workers at a Starbucks in Manhattan voted to unionize being the largest store (with over 100 employees) to join Starbucks Workers United with the dozens of stores that have voted to unionize in the past several months.
Amidst these waves of new and growing unions, there has also been an increase in the potential for teacher strikes. With low pay and staffing shortages amidst managing Covid protocol while also trying to educate children, teachers are stretched thin and advocating for what they deserve.
Unions seem to be having a moment and it only looks to become an ever-increasing wave of labor organizing.
For so many issues, the pandemic shone a bright light on stark realities: poor working conditions, low pay, lack of stability, and a general lack of respect for workers. All in the face of outlandish profits in the private sector. And this spotlight is helping to show the opening of a door to one of the most important mechanisms that workers have through collective bargaining. This resurgence of unions shows a lot of hope as well in rallying together diverse and multi-racial groups of people to see their fate bound with one another.
The Cost From the Fall of Unions
The power and the popularity of unions writ large has declined significantly in the past few decades. Researchers at the Brookings Institute note that in the peak of unions in the 1950s, about a third of private-sector workers belonged to unions. Today, however, union membership is at 6 percent. Along with this fall in unionization, so has wage premiums for union members. This decline in non-union workers' "power to share in profits."
This decline has been bad across the board for our country. Nicholas Kristof noted in a 2015 New York Times column that a number of studies found that the decrease in unions contributed to an increase in economic inequality among men by one-fifth and some even noting an increase by one-third. He quotes Jake Rosenfeld, University of Washington labor expert and author of What Unions No Longer Do: “To understand the rising inequality, you have to understand the devastation in the labor movement.”
The fall of unions can be attributed to a number of factors. First, as this Economic Policy Institute paper notes, "Employers were able to defeat unions so effectively because, over the years, labor law had become heavily tilted against workers and toward employers," which they really began to take advantage of in the 1970s.
But also there's something to be said for the effectiveness of companies to create a system that divides employees enough to reduce their collective power. One way they're able to do this quite well: good 'ol racism.
In her incredible book The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together, Heather McGhee dedicates a whole chapter on unions. She writes: "In the two-hundred-year history of American industrial work, there's been no greater tool against collective bargaining than employers' ability to divide workers by gender, race, or origin, stoking suspicion and competition across groups. It's simple: if your boss can hire someone else for cheaper, or threaten to, you have less leverage for bargaining."
What these current union efforts are doing show that the division can be pushed through and can be done incredibly effectively.
The Recipe to This New Labor Movement
The union organizing in Staten Island is an excellent example of incredible organizing in action. This Jacobin interview with one of the organizers, Angelika Maldonado, the chair of the ALU's worker committee, highlights their processes. She talked specifically about the divisions among the workers noting that while there was significant racial diversity among workers, the biggest division was age. "The culture at Amazon is very intense and intimidating, so when a lot of older workers first saw a bunch of young people trying to organize something so big, it was hard for some of them to grasp that we actually knew what we wanted and that we knew how to get there," she said. "That’s why we had to educate ourselves — and then educate our coworkers — on how exactly this can be done. We explained what we can do as a unit, all of us together."
They also paid close attention to the diversity among the workers and made sure to have people on their team that looked like and were able to relate culturally to a lot of the workers. For example, they needed Spanish-speaking workers on their team. They also found ways to connect to some of their African colleagues by having an African caterer bring in food that connects to them.
And the message they gave was always personal. Maldonado says, "The face-to-face conversations were how we connected. I’d let people know that I was a single mom, that I work twelve-hour-and-thirty-minute shifts, and that I’m here on my off day, you know? Being vulnerable too — I’d explain what I was sacrificing, what we were all sacrificing, being there to make sure that everyone in the building can have better working conditions."
(Shoutout to Garrett Bucks from The Barnraisers Project for bringing up this conversation in a recent cohort meeting noting that while incredible it is to have young people organizing like this, it was their skills in organizing, not their youth that made them successful.)
Beginning of A New Movement
The success of the Staten Island ALU workers movement doesn't look like it's going to be a one-off. There was a setback recently when the warehouse across the street voted down the union. Nonetheless, their tactics and the lessons that they learned in the hard-won battle for unionization is spreading. Chris Smalls, the president of the union, said soon after the successful union bid that he had already heard from workers at 50 warehouses.
Big corporations are always going to be fighting unions and it's becoming clearer there's a reason for that. There is power in working together and there's power in unions. These movements and the pandemic have also shown the need for labor policy reform—
the changes can still happen from all sides.
"The world is definitely paying attention now, workers are paying attention now," Smalls said in an NPR Twitter Spaces forum, "Which is a good thing because once we finish up here in New York, we're absolutely going to help every last person that we can."
With the pandemic receding—or at least transforming to a more endemic issue—there are still turbulent waves, like the political polarization, economic impacts from the Ukraine war that continues to push an already high inflation, supply chain issues. To cope with all of these dynamics, we need strong and resilient communities.
Of course there's a perception that some union leaders look for their own interest and not the workers'. And although there may be some basis for that perception, what is relevant about these new union formations is that they seem to be built around a diverse and plural, yet organized community. And we believe that with a strong community we have an opportunity to build a better world for all.