[Data on whats new — and why unions should turn to new
organizing]
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LABOR’S UPSURGE ISN’T JUST HYPE  
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Eric Blanc
May 8, 2023
Labor Politics
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_ Data on what's new — and why unions should turn to new organizing
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, Fred Wright

 

Is the current labor uptick just more hype than reality? Numerous
articles have recently made this
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pointing to the continued decline in union density in 2022. This
skepticism also appears to be the prevailing view among most national
union leaders. Though rarely stated publicly, labor’s continued
routinism suggests that few people up top see our moment as
particularly novel or urgent.

But contrary to these skeptics, there _is_ compelling data
indicating that things really are_ _changing — and, therefore, that
unions should immediately make a major turn to new organizing.

Consider, for instance, the statewide 2018 educators’ strikes, which
were largely begun over viral rank-and-file Facebook groups. These
were the first US strike wave since the 1970s, impacting millions of
students and involving hundreds of thousands of school workers. Strike
activity in 2018 rose to its highest peak since the mid-1980s and it
remained high in 2019 as the wave spread to blue cities like Los
Angeles and Chicago. The qualitative shift was even more significant:
unlike in the Reagan era, the red state revolt consisted of work
stoppages that were mostly illegal, statewide in scope, offensive in
their demands, and generally victorious in their outcomes. 

NUMBER OF US STRIKERS, 2002-2019 (IN THOUSANDS)

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Work stoppages involving 1,000
or more workers”

Union membership numbers present a grimmer picture. According to the
Bureau of Labor Statistics, 273,000 workers joined unions last year.
Yet because total employment rose at a faster rate, union density fell
from 10.3 to 10.1 percent from 2021 to 2022. Clearly, we are not
currently in an upsurge analogous to the 1930s. As exciting as recent
campaigns may be, we should be sober about their very real
limitations. 

Dwelling only on the continued decline of union density, however,
misses the forest for the trees. One of the reasons why recent
worker-driven campaigns are so qualitatively important is that they
have won union elections at some of the largest corporations in the
world. Amazon’s 1.1 million employees, for example, constitutes the
country’s second largest workforce and Starbucks’ workforce is the
eighth largest. 

Winning elections at these types of firms is a major development that
is not captured by membership rolls alone. National unions have for
decades generally avoided pushing for union elections at such large
companies, believing not unreasonably that they were simply too
powerful to defeat — at least under our current, threadbare and
barely-enforced, labor laws. As such, the vast majority of years since
the Fortune 500 was established in 1955 have witnessed zero, or at
most one, union drives at the non-union companies on the list. In
contrast, 2021 saw three such drives and 2022 saw eight. 

Given labor’s overall risk-aversion, it is not surprising that a
majority of those organizing efforts were instances of what I call DIY
Unionism — strikes and union drives that are initiated by
self-organized workers and/or in which workers take on key
responsibilities traditionally reserved for union staff.

FORTUNE 500 COMPANIES TARGETED BY UNIONIZATION, 2021-2022

Labor’s opponents are well aware of this increase in
worker-to-worker organizing. In a 2022 report
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notorious union-busting firm Littler Mendelson sounded the alarm:

“There has been a shift in how people are organizing together to
petition for representation. What was once a top-down approach,
whereby the union would seek out a group of individuals, has flipped
entirely. Now, individuals are banding together to form grassroots
organizing movements where individual employees are the ones to invite
the labor organization to assist them in their pursuit to be
represented.”

To be sure, workers at Amazon, Starbucks, Apple, Google, and other
mega-corporations are still a long way away from winning a first
contract. That will likely take many years, more intervention from
state actors, and greater resources from established unions towards
boosting, and defending, new organizing. But it is a major historical
development that unionizing the US private sector’s biggest players
no longer seems like a distant fantasy. 

The fact that these recent drives have won elections against such
economic heavyweights helps explain why news coverage of unions shot
up in 2022 — as does the fact that media outlets have become one of
labor’s most dynamic growth areas.

YEARLY PRESS COVERAGE OF UNIONIZATION

Source: Newspapers.com. Salience of the term “unionize” by year,
in over 22,000 archived US newspapers

Increased publicity about David versus Goliath workplace organizing,
and negative publicity about union busting, is bad news for corporate
America. Stories of ordinary workers taking on billionaire CEOs tend
to spur copycat attempts. And coverage of illegal (or morally
reprehensible) union busting tarnishes company brands, while
increasing pressure on elected officials to defend and enforce labor
law. 

When it comes to fomenting today’s pro-union zeitgeist, the growth
of pro-union sentiment over social media is no less significant. To
cite just a few examples: Antiwork — a misleadingly named Reddit
group focused on exposing bad working conditions and promoting
unionization — shot up from 80,000 members in early 2020 to 2.3
million members by late 2022. The labor-focused media outlet _More
Perfect Union_ has received 150 million views on its YouTube and
TikTok videos. And videos of Starbucks workers walking out in response
to illegal firings now regularly go viral, racking up millions of
views and exposing the hypocrisy of a nominally progressive
corporation. Starbucks’ Vice President of Partner Resources thus
recently admitted
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she had to turn off social media because it “has been very
disheartening. And yet perception is reality in some way shape or
form.”

Media attention on its own will not turn things around for unions, but
it is nevertheless critical for keeping up momentum and bringing
“the labor question” back to the center of US politics. Millions
of workers are finally beginning to see that non-union jobs
can_ become_ union jobs — and that they personally could play a
role in making that happen. No less important, coverage of recent
union drives among white-collar and (largely female) pink-collar care
workers has undercut the still-common myth that unions are just for
white men in hard industry. Multiple worker organizer interviewees
explained to me that the first thing they had to do was disabuse
themselves and their colleagues of the assumption, to quote a _New
York Times_ tech worker named Vicki, that “unions are just for coal
miners or something — not for us.”

Google analytics allows us to measure the increase in search queries
last year asking the question: “How do I form a union?” The
following graph captures a surge in bottom-up unionization interest,
particularly in the wake of the highly publicized union win at
Amazon’s JFK8 warehouse on Staten Island. Today’s active interest
in unionization constitutes a major contextual difference from the
1990s and 2000s when labor’s halting turn to new organizing stumbled
over the high staff resources required to spark workers to unionize.

GOOGLE SEARCHES FOR “HOW DO I FORM A UNION?” 

Source: Google Trends. Data collected on January 17, 2023.

Qualitative data also indicates that there has been an increase in
individual workers directly reaching out to unions asking them to
organize them — what unions usually call “hot shops.” To quote
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cannabis industry worker turned Teamsters organizer in Illinois,
“these workers are reaching out to us for help, so that’s unusual.
It used to be we were seeking them out and now they’re coming to us.
Our phones are ringing constantly with workers who want protection,
higher wages, better benefits and accountability from these
companies.” 

Put simply: despite the immense power of the forces arrayed against
them, rank-and-file organizers today are continuing to take big risks
to win power and democracy at work. Unions should follow their lead.

_Reposted from LABOR POLITICS with permission._

_ERIC BLANC is an assistant professor of labor studies at Rutgers
University. He is the author of Red State Revolt: The Teachers’
Strike Wave and Working-Class Politics
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Democracy: Working-Class Politics Across the Russian Empire
(1882-1917)
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His substack newsletter is Labor Politics
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_Subscribe to Labor Politics [[link removed]]and
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