Organized labor still faces challenges after series of major union wins

Nick Schifrin:

This has been the season of organized labor's discontent, but also big labor gains from Hollywood to the United Auto Workers. And picket lines continue, including hundreds of Macy employees planning to strike in Washington state tomorrow, on Black Friday, and the ongoing teachers union strike in Portland Oregon.

John Yang examines what it all means.

John Yang:

There have been a number of high-profile strikes this year, autoworkers, Hollywood writers and actors and health care workers, and other work actions have been averted by last-minute deals, UPS drivers and Las Vegas hotel workers, for instance.

All of them resulted in major gains for members of those unions.

Lauren Kaori Gurley covers labor for The Washington Post.

Lauren, why do you think the unions are on such a winning streak at the bargaining table these days?

Lauren Kaori Gurley, The Washington Post:

There are a lot of different reasons this is happening. I want to highlight two of them.

One is that we have historically a very tight labor market right now. So, coming out of the pandemic, there have for much of the past few years been two job openings available for every unemployed worker. And this means that workers have a lot of leverage with their employers right now, which makes it more likely that they feel willing at this moment to sort of take risks, to demand more, because they know, if they get fired, that they can go out and get another job.

At the same time, you also have inflation, which has been scorching hot over the past few years. And so workers are really feeling sort of the pinch on their pocketbooks. Their earnings aren't going as far. And so that's one reason why we have seen a lot of labor activity.

I would say the other thing started before the pandemic, which is that there has just been really broad, positive popular support for unions. Popular support for unions actually hit an all-time low during the Great Recession, and it's been on the rise subtly since then. And I think there's just this heightened awareness about inequality in this country.

So, now, like, you have about 67 percent of Americans saying they support unions. And in a lot of the major labor disputes this summer, UAW, the Hollywood union, Americans said, a vast majority of Americans said in a Gallup poll that they support workers in these labor disputes.

John Yang:

You say that workers seem more willing to take risks.

I think we have seen new tactics from the unions on this one. The UAW strike, they did some things they'd never done before. You're also hearing them being a little more strident. Do you think there's a new generation of union leader and that this is sort of reflecting their new role?

Lauren Kaori Gurley:

Totally.

So, workers have been democratically electing new sort of more radical leaders to have their unions. There was all — there were many decades throughout the '90s and 2000s, where the sort of style of union leadership was a little bit more chummy with big business.

I think we have seen workers sort of oust the old leadership and bring in these new leaders, especially at the Teamsters and the United Auto Workers. They have elected these new leaders who are a lot more aggressive. They're making way more ambitious demands. And they're also involving the workers a lot more in their negotiations.

These aren't sort of behind-the-scenes deals. These are deals that workers are very much involved in for the first time. And workers' expectations are very high. And so, when workers have very high expectations, union leaders do not want to disappoint. So they take workers out on strike, and they sort of just don't back down until they get much higher wage increases and victories into their contracts than they had in the past.

John Yang:

And these companies who've been on the losing side of this, what do they say about these new contracts they have agreed to? How is it going to affect their bottom lines? How is it going to affect the prices they charge consumers?

Lauren Kaori Gurley:

Yes, so I think prices are going to go up. We know that's true in Hollywood. I believe it's also true with the auto industry.

Executives have threatened that, with these really strong new contracts, they might — workers might start to see fewer jobs. They could have jobs sent overseas. They could see more workplaces close down. We haven't seen that yet, and it's yet to be seen. But I think this is sort of the way that business has sort of been describing the situation from their perspective.

They also say, coming out of the pandemic, there have been severe supply chain shortages and labor shortages, and they're already grappling with that, as well as a lot of industry transformations. Hollywood has transformed massively with the rise of streaming platforms. The auto industry is trying to deal with sort of the transition to electric vehicles.

There are a lot of moving parts for the companies as well.

John Yang:

And while these unions seem to be doing well, other workers are having trouble organizing, for instance, Starbucks, Amazon. What are the hurdles they're facing that they're having a hard time with?

Lauren Kaori Gurley:

Yes, so I would say that it's very important to remember that a lot of these unions, like the Teamsters, the United Auto Workers, the union that represents Hollywood, those unions have been around for close to 100 years.

You're seeing a lot more difficulty with that, Amazon and Starbucks, because those are nascent unions, right? Those are two massive American employers that historically have not been unionized, that are very anti-union, that are sort of pulling all the shots to sort of crush unionization at their companies.

And so that process takes a lot longer to unionize all of their work forces. I mean, they have barely even started. And so I think that there's a lot more to go, and it's yet to actually be seen whether workers will be able to organize Amazon and Starbucks.

John Yang:

As you said earlier, public support for unions has been growing, but the proportion of workers who belong to unions has been going down steadily for the past several decades.

How do you reconcile those two things?

Lauren Kaori Gurley:

Yes, it seems sort of like a contradiction, right? Labor unions are extremely popular, people love them, yet no one is in them.

I think, last year, union membership in the United States fell to a historic low at 10.1 percent. And that's only actually 6 percent of workers in the private sector. That, like you said, has been in decline since the 1980s. And I think the process, like we're seeing at Starbucks and Amazon, of organizing workers into unions is totally different now.

Workers who are already in unions going on strike were already very organized. But those are two separate things. And so what will be extremely interesting, I think, to see here, whether the labor movement can capitalize on this moment and actually bring new workers into unions and sort of rebuild what they have lost over the years since the 1980s.

John Yang:

Lauren Kaori Gurley of The Washington Post, thank you very much.

Lauren Kaori Gurley:

Thank you so much.