Last year, organized labor showed it’s coming alive

Bill Knight column for 1-28, 29 or 30, 2019

Returning to the fundamentals of organizing and the basic tool of withholding work, organized labor in 2018 showed signs of renewed energy, despite U.S. union membership stagnating at a bit more than 10 percent.

Amazon workers made progress in gaining recognition at the multi-national company, for example. After Amazon workers in Europe engaged in a three-day strike, Somali-immigrant workers at Amazon’s Minneapolis facilities confronted management about working conditions, and now the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU) has stepped up organizing there and at Amazon’s Whole Foods subsidiary.

In organizing (despite a National Labor Relations system that over the last few decades has changed to operate against unions), union-recognition was achieved by bus drivers and nurses, service-sector workers in Silicon Valley. and more than 28,000 professionals, including adjunct professors and graduate/teaching assistants, journalists at the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune and New Yorker plus workers at other media firms such as HuffPost, MTV News, Slate, Salon and Thrillist.

“We may now be at a tipping point where the American workforce isn’t willing to swallow that status quo any longer,” said Bryce Covert, a journalist who’s written for The Nation and the New York Times. “Workers who went on strike this year didn’t just secure better pay and working conditions for themselves. They may be paving the way for others to follow and to raise standards across the economy.”

Speaking of strikes, the work stoppage in 2018 was revived as a useful instrument – again, despite recent years’ trend. For instance, in 2017, the number of private-sector strikes involving at least 1,000 workers was seven. That compares to an average of 288 in the 1970s, and even in the 1980s (when President Reagan made acceptable the use of “permanent replacements”) there were 83.

In 2018, dozens of work sites were struck, as teachers fought for education funding as well as pay, participating in effective work stoppages in six mostly “red” states where they’re technically not legally permitted to strike. The job actions included more than 20,000 teachers and other school workers in West Virginia, another 20,000 in Oklahoma, about 40,000 in Arizona, and walkouts in Colorado, Kentucky and North Carolina. Also, the Chicago Teachers Union conducted the country’s first work stoppage at 15 charter schools there, winning wage increases, smaller class sizes and protections for undocumented kids (and education services nationwide added more than 100,000 members).

Hotel workers undertook the biggest series of hospitality-industry strikes in U.S. history as almost 8,000 workers struck 23 Marriott hotels in eight cities over two months, winning demands of the world’s largest hotel company. In Chicago, another 6,000 local hotel workers went on strike against dozens of hotels there.

“I thought it was important to restore the strike to the arsenal of the labor movement,” UNITE HERE president Donald “D” Taylor told The American Prospect. “If you’re in a fight against powerful forces, why are you taking tactics off the table?”

Fast-food workers, led by the Fight for 15 movement, expanded beyond wages and fast-food employers, to advocating for workers at airports and hospitals, for child-care providers and professors, and also canvassed for the midterm elections in Illinois and 10 other states. In one of the highest-profile actions, McDonald’s workers engaged in the first multi-state strike about sexual harassment. (Likewise, some 20,000 Google workers walked out in November over how the company handled sexual harassment accusations against management.)

Also, the Southeast United States saw tens of thousands of new union members, the Communications Workers of America struck Frontier Communications last spring, and hundreds of Microsoft workers last summer engaged in “concerted activity” by signing an open letter demanding the corporation drop its $19.4 million contract with Immigration and Customs Enforcement for processing data and artificial-intelligence capabilities.

“America’s labor unions are not out of the woods, but throughout American history, when unions have been under attack and supposedly down for the count, they have bounced back,” former AFL-CIO political director Steve Rosenthal wrote in The American Prospect. “This time appears to be no different.”

Labor is helped by the public, which according to Gallup reached a 15-year high in its approval.

“Fully 62 percent of Americans support unions, according to the Gallup poll,” Rosenthal said. “That number has increased 14 points over the past 10 years. And, among young adults (18-29 years old), 68 percent hold a favorable view of unions compared to 46 percent who feel the same about corporations. As corporate power has increased and union membership has decreased, millions of workers have come to understand that the only way to get ahead is through collective action.”