Unions’ golden age
This is quite a moment for labor in this country.
As Chrissy Lynch ascends to lead the Massachusetts AFL-CIO this week, a Gallup poll shows a whopping 71 percent of Americans approve of unions. You have to go way back to 1965 to find that kind of support. Lynch points out that young people — the future of the economy — are even more enthusiastic.
We’ve seen unions score spectacular victories in recent months: Teamsters won UPS drivers a super new contract, Hollywood writers stood firm and won huge concessions from corporations trying to squeeze them dry, workers at Encore Boston came close to a strike before the casino and Local 26 agreed to one of the most generous hospitality contracts in the region. We saw workers trying to organize at Starbucks and Amazon and, in a delightful instance of infectious, store-by-store awakening, at a strip mall in Hadley.
Then there is Shawn Fain, leading the United Auto Workers in their historic battle against the big carmakers, standing firm and using old-school, worker rights rhetoric we haven’t heard in this country for an awfully long time.
“If they’ve got money for Wall Street, they sure as hell have money for the workers making the product,” said the firebrand. “We fight for the good of the entire working class and the poor.”
The UAW has won some significant concessions so far. And President Biden, the most pro-worker, pro-union president in generations, has stood with them on the Michigan picket line.
“It gives me a lot of hope,” Lynch said in an interview shortly before she was elected president of the AFL-CIO on Wednesday afternoon. “Seeing it play out with the auto workers, seeing labor organizing happening in sectors where we have never seen it before … it is everywhere.”
We are here because, in recent years, folks have been pressed so hard that something had to give. The pandemic endangered millions of vulnerable workers, highlighting the lousy conditions under which they labored.
“We had to fight for the most meager protections for workers,” said Lynch, the first woman to lead the AFL-CIO. “This was happening when corporate profits were huge.”
Companies talked a good game in the beginning, but many withdrew the accolades and hazard pay they offered once the crisis passed. Unions have fought to regain the dignity some workers tasted for the first time, and all-too-briefly, a few years ago.
Workers are more fervent about organizing, too, because they’re being squeezed harder and harder in a changing economy: Actors are still on strike because AI threatens to steal their likenesses and make them redundant, for example; Lynch points out that all kinds of workers have fallen prey to apps and algorithms that turn employees into gig workers, and allow companies to avoid providing decent wages and benefits.
As Carlos Aramayo, head of hospitality workers union Local 26 points out, giant swaths of the economy are now run not just by corporations, but by investors, phenomenally wealthy real estate investment trusts and private equity firms. They are driven to stretch fewer workers further because stock prices and dividends, not workers or even customers, are all that matter.
“The people creating value aren’t being compensated for the products they are creating,” Aramayo said. “You can’t have a sustainable economy with everybody getting squeezed like that.”
So yes, we are seeing more organizing, more strident rhetoric, and more wins lately. But will it all last, and grow? We have had brief bursts of clarity on the scourge of inequality before — during the Occupy movement, and the pandemic — only to see them fade.
Lynch says her job is to make sure that doesn’t happen. She wants to capitalize on the fact that the labor movement has become younger and more diverse, to train up a new generation of leaders and those from under-represented groups to extend unions’ reach. And she wants to build alliances across and beyond the 800 labor organizations under the umbrella of the Massachusetts AFL-CIO, forging a powerful brand of solidarity with which corporations will not want to trifle.
“This is not just a moment,” Lynch said. “We are going to keep this up.”