The vote to unionize Amazon workers on Staten Island raises a few questions, with the broadest of them being, is this a harbinger of a renewed labor movement?
It certainly seems to be true that the turmoil associated with the Covid-19 pandemic has led to a jump in energy around union organizing. During the past year workers at not only Amazon, but also those at Starbucks, the New York Times, Google, the cannabis industry, and Kickstarter have unionized in a series of high-profile moves. Notably, rather than being restricted to the manufacturing sector, efforts to form unions are also occurring in the health care, retail and technology sectors.
And numbers from the National Labor Relations Board support the notion that we may be seeing the beginning of a new wave of labor activism. The NLRB announced that 1,174 union election petitions were filed in the U.S. during the most recent six months ending on March 31 of this year. That’s an increase of 57%.
But it’s important to remember that union membership is still far below its historical high water mark. The chart below shows the percentage of wage and salary workers who were unionized from 1948-2021. Membership peaked at nearly 35 percent of the paid workforce in 1954, then declined until the mid-1970’s, when it briefly trended upward. After that, membership began sliding again. When President Ronald Reagan fired members of the PATCO union in 1981, membership was at 21.4 percent. After that union membership dropped rapidly down to its current rate of just over 10 percent of the paid workforce.
So what will determine whether 2022 marks an upward inflection point in union membership? I think it will depend on the following factors: at the cultural level, the breadth and depth of union approval; at the political level, overcoming legal obstacles to union formation; and finally, a few changes will need to occur in the American economy.
Culturally, broad-based support for the effectiveness and utility of unions will need to rise to a high level and it will need to stay there. Recent polls by Gallup and the Pew Foundation have shown that approval of unions is on the upswing, but that’s largely driven by Democratic and Independent voters; approval among Democrats is twice as high as it is among Republicans. I would argue that broader approval from Republicans will play a necessary, but not sufficient role in increasing union membership.
And there is the open question about how long notoriously fickle Independent voters will continue to trend upward in their approval of unions: for example, what happens if press coverage of union activities changes from its mostly positive tone, which is where it’s at now, to one that is more negative? If union approval among Independent voters declines, the cultural zeitgeist around unions will be much more divided than it is now.
Political changes also need to occur. One change revolves around the reform of labor laws that would make it easier for people to actually organize unions in the first place. The National Labor Relations Board is in charge of certifying efforts to form unions and theoretically the process is straightforward, but with the way the laws are currently written the reality is that employers have more power and influence than employees do.
Last year Democrats introduced the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) act. It passed the House but is stalled in the Senate. If passed, it would do the following five things.
First, it would let unions override state-level right-to-work laws - which have also been called right-to-freeload laws - by giving them the ability to collect union dues from workers who opt out of membership. Currently those workers receive negotiated contract benefits without having to pay union membership dues.
Second, the PRO act would forbid employer interference in union elections. Right now company-sponsored meetings can be used to lobby against union organizing. Such meetings would be illegal in the future. Also, employees would be allowed to cast ballots in elections at a site other than one on company property.
The PRO act allows new unions to apply for arbitration in cases where a successful organizing drive fails to lead to a contract between labor and management. Currently there is no provision for that to happen.
Currently, employers can use an employee’s immigration status to determine their terms of employment. The PRO act would not allow this.
Finally, the PRO act “,,, would establish monetary penalties for companies and executives that violate workers' rights. Corporate directors and other officers of the company could also be held liable.”
These are the kinds of measures at the political and legal levels that would need to be put into place if the rate of labor activism we’re witnessing right now is going to have any long-term future. When the PRO act passed the House, business groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Retail Federation blasted the bill. As I noted, the bill is currently stalled in the Senate and unlikely to pass. Some type of bill similar to the PRO act needs to be put into place that will balance the playing field between employers and employees who want to form a union.
Finally, a range of economic changes in the American economy would need to happen to help drive labor activism. In the past union jobs were largely associated with manufacturing, but millions of those jobs were offshored to China and other countries during the last 40 years. Unless there’s a major change toward reshoring those manufacturing jobs to the U.S. in the future, as the bard of the common man Bruce Springsteen would say, "those jobs are going boys and they ain't coming back."
The increasing number of companies who rely on outsourcing and "gig economy" jobs that are extremely difficult to unionize also help to explain lower union membership rates. The numbers here are daunting for union activists: more than half of all companies use third-party (that is, non-union) firms to service their customers; there are currently 59 million freelance (non-union) workers in the U.S.; and about 300,000 jobs get outsourced from the U.S. each year.
Changing all of these conditions - the cultural, political and economic ones described above - can only be seen as a long-term project for labor organizers and their allies who are trying to maintain and build a stronger labor movement in the future. There’s a lot of work to be done before the U.S. gets back to even the Reagan years of the 80’s, not to mention the peak years of the 1950’s.
You’ll be able to find this post under the Economics section on the web site.
Thanks for reading. Until next time, take care.
Karl Pearson