[ America is in the midst of the biggest surge in labor activity
in a quarter-century. Auto workers, writers, actors, Starbucks
workers, Amazon workers, UPS drivers, flight attendants – labor
isn’t a ‘special interest’. It’s all of us.]
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STRIKES AREN’T BAD FOR THE US ECONOMY. THEY’RE THE BEST THING
THAT COULD HAPPEN  
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Robert Reich
September 19, 2023
The Guardian
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_ America is in the midst of the biggest surge in labor activity in a
quarter-century. Auto workers, writers, actors, Starbucks workers,
Amazon workers, UPS drivers, flight attendants – labor isn’t a
‘special interest’. It’s all of us. _

‘As I travel around the country, I hear from average working people
an anger and bitterness I haven’t heard for decades.’, Photograph:
Matthew Hatcher/Agence France-Presse (AFP)

 

America is in the midst of the biggest surge in labor activity in a
quarter-century.

The United Auto Workers (UAW), the Writers Guild of America, the
actors’ union known as Sag-Aftra, Starbucks workers, Amazon workers,
the Teamsters and UPS, flight attendants. The list goes on.

More than 4.1m workdays were lost
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stoppages last month, according to the labor department. That’s the
most since 2000. And this was before the UAW struck the big three.

Some worry about the effect of all this labor activism on the US
economy, and view organized labor as a “special interest”
demanding more than it deserves.

Rubbish. Labor activism is good for the economy in the long run. And
organized labor isn’t a special interest. It’s the leading edge of
the American workforce.

What accounts for this extraordinary moment of labor activity?

Not that workers enjoy striking. Even where unions have funds to help
striking workers offset lost wages, they rarely make up even half of
what’s forgone. Large corporations whose operations are hobbled by
strikes often lay off other workers, as the big three and their
suppliers are now threatening to do.

The reason workers go on strike is their expectation that the
longer-term gains will be worth the sacrifices.

Today’s labor market continues to be tight, despite efforts by the
Fed to slow the economy and make it harder for workers to get raises.
So employers (like UPS) are more inclined to give ground to avoid a
prolonged strike.

But something far more basic is going on here. As I travel around the
country, I hear from average working people an anger and bitterness I
haven’t heard for decades. It centers on several things.

The first is that wages have barely increased while corporate profits
are in the stratosphere.

Average weekly non-supervisory wages, a measure of blue-collar
earnings, were higher in 1969 (adjusted for inflation) than they are
now.

The American dream of upward mobility has turned into a nightmare of
falling behind. Whereas _90%_ of American adults born in the early
1940s were earning more than their parents by the time they reached
their prime earning years, this has steadily declined.
Only _half_ of adults born in the mid-1980s are now earning more
than their parents by their prime earning years.

Nearly one out of every five American workers is in a part-time job.
Two-thirds are living paycheck to paycheck.

Meanwhile, executive compensation has gone through the roof. In 1965,
CEOs of America’s largest corporations were paid, on average, 20
times the pay of average workers. Today, the ratio is over 398 to 1
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Not only has CEO pay exploded. So has the pay of top executives just
below them. The share of corporate income devoted to compensating the
five highest-paid executives of large corporations ballooned from an
average of 5% in 1993 to more than 15% today.

Corporate apologists claim CEOs and other top executives are worth
these staggering sums because their corporations have performed so
well. They compare star CEOs to star baseball players or movie stars.

But most CEOs have simply ridden the stock market wave. Even if a
company’s CEO had done nothing but play online solitaire, the
company’s stock price would have soared.

Stock buybacks have also soared – a huge subsidy to investors that
further tips the scales against working people. The richest 1% of
Americans owns about half the value of all shares of stock. The
richest 10%, over 90%.

Why don’t corporations devote more of their income to research and
development, or to higher wages and benefits for average workers? In a
word, greed.

Small wonder that unions are more popular than they’ve been in a
generation. A Gallup poll published in August found that 67% of
Americans approve
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unions, the fifth straight year such support has exceeded the
long-term polling average of 62%.

Joe Biden has pitched himself as the most pro-union president in
recent history. More surprisingly, Republican politicians are trying
to curry favor with union workers as well. Both parties know that much
of the working class is up for grabs in 2024.

American workers still have little to no countervailing power relative
to large American corporations. Unionized workers now comprise only 6%
of private-sector workforce – down from over a third in the 1960s.

Which is why the activism of the UAW, the Writers Guild, Sag-Aftra,
the Teamsters, flight attendants, Amazon warehouse workers and
Starbucks workers is so important.

In a very real sense, these workers are representing _all _American
workers. If they win, they’ll energize other workers, even those who
are not unionized. They’ll mobilize some to form or join unions.

They’ll push non-union employers to raise wages and benefits out of
a fear of becoming unionized if they don’t. They’ll galvanize
other workers to stage wildcat strikes for better pay and working
conditions.

For far too long, America’s top executives, Wall Street traders and
biggest investors have siphoned off almost all the economic gains.
This is unsustainable, economically and politically.

It’s not economically sustainable because the only way businesses
can sell the goods and services American workers produce is if workers
have enough money to buy them. If most gains continue to go to the
top, the economy will become ever more susceptible to downdrafts and
crashes.

Today’s mainstream media emphasize the feared negative effects of
the current wave of strike on the US economy, forgetting that the wave
of strikes in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s helped create the largest
middle class the world had ever seen – the key to America’s
postwar prosperity.

Stagnant wages and widening inequality are politically unsustainable
because they foster anger and bitterness that’s easily channeled by
demagogic politicians (re: Donald Trump and his enablers in the
Republican party) into bigotry, paranoia, xenophobia and
authoritarianism.

The current wave of strikes isn’t bad for America. It’s good for
America.

Labor is not a “special interest”. It is, in a real sense, all of
us.

_[ROBERT REICH, a former US secretary of labor, is a professor of
public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and the
author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few
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Common Good
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His newest book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It
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is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is
at robertreich.substack.com [[link removed]]]_

* Labor
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* unions
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* Labor Movement
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* Trade Unions
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* Strikes
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* UAW
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* autoworkers
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* WGA
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* Writers
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* WGA Writers Strike
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* SAG
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* SAG-AFTRA
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* federal contractors
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* IBT
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* Teamsters
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* Starbucks
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* Amazon
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* Amazon Workers
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* UPS
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* Flight Attendants
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* labor upsurge
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