by Andrew Moss
American workers made great strides in 2023. Autoworkers, UPS drivers, Kaiser health workers, screenwriters and actors all scored significant gains in earnings and benefits as a result of their respective unions taking tough, assertive stances in strikes and other forms of workplace activism. The agreements emerging from these actions will mean substantial improvements in the lives of hundreds of thousands of workers and their families.
But daunting obstacles face millions of other workers who’ve been attempting to unionize their workplaces or simply secure a fair and just contract when a previous contract expired.
A major problem, particularly for workers seeking to unionize their workplaces for the first time, is that U.S. labor law places workers at a serious disadvantage with respect to employers. The latter can, for example, subject employees to “captive audience” meetings that promulgate anti-union messages and can indefinitely drag out collective bargaining with virtually no penalties — a process that can simply wear workers down by attrition.
In a broader sense, however, the U.S. — unlike many advanced industrialized countries — is pervaded in its political culture and institutions by a deep anti-union ideology. Extending in the modern era as far back as passage of the 1935 National Labor Relations Act (Wagner Act), this ideology has guided a wide range of efforts to unravel the New Deal endorsement of government as a regulator of corporate power and as a protector of workers’ rights to organize and bargain collectively.
As early as the 1940s, business groups and conservative politicians advanced “right-to-work” legislation and litigation undermining unions by preventing them from requiring membership or dues from workers at sites where the unions represented all workers in collective bargaining. These legislative and judicial efforts portrayed right-to-work as a defense of workers’ rights and as a counter to union racketeering and corruption. Since then, 26 states have adopted right-to-work legislation.
However, the public approval of unions has shifted significantly upward in the wake of a major recession, an ever-widening inequality and a devastating pandemic. In these altered circumstances, therefore, it’s instructive to read a recent Harvard Business Review (HBR) article entitled “The Labor-Savvy Leader,” written by three management experts associated with the Aspen Institute and MIT’s Sloan School of Management.
These experts (Roy E. Bahat, Thomas A. Kochan and Liba Wenig Rubenstein) argue that companies choosing greater collaboration with labor can reap such benefits as improved employee satisfaction and retention, while companies seeking to bust unions can expose themselves to “existential risks,” including harm to their corporate brands.
However, a glance at the boiler plate language of corporate annual reports will find that corporate management perceives unions themselves as the existential risk.
For striking workers, the “increased demands” are for contracts that ensure meaningful levels of economic stability and security. In this regard, the workers are striking on behalf of the union idea, a concept that, by and large, informs all struggles for economic justice.
The union idea translates into the right to enough compensation that one needn’t sleep in one’s car or work two or three jobs to make ends meet. It means having time and resources enough to care for an elderly parent or a disabled family member, time and resources enough to be with one’s children and see them grow.
At the individual, human level, this is what’s at stake in the struggle for the union idea today.
