Francis Chung/POLITICO via AP Images
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) speaks during a press conference calling for increased funding for the National Labor Relations Board, December 13, 2022, outside the U.S. Capitol.
After nine lean years during which its budget had not increased by so much as a penny, the National Labor Relations Board has finally secured an increase in the 2023 funding bill that Congress will vote on this week. That doesn’t mean that nine fat years for the nation’s labor relations regulator are about to commence, but it does mean the NLRB will not be compelled to furlough staff and can make some badly needed hires in the coming year.
The funding, which Senate and House appropriators sent to their respective floors today, includes an increase of $25 million for the agency, roughly 9 percent higher than last year’s (actually, the last decade’s) level. That’s still $20 million less than the agency and the administration had requested, but it’s $25 million more than the amount the Board has had to work with since President Obama’s second term.
And it comes not a moment too soon. Over the past several years, as the public’s approval rating for unions has risen to its highest level (71 percent) in nearly 60 years, the number of organizing drives and strikes have both sizably increased. In 2022, according to Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations, there have been 374 strikes—a 39 percent increase over 2021—running the spectrum from University of California teaching assistants to the bakers at Kellogg and Nabisco. Cornell tallies 78,000 workers who walked off the job in the first half of this year—nearly three times the 26,500 who struck in the first six months of 2021. With 48,000 academics walking the UC picket lines in recent weeks, that number is likely considerably higher for this year’s second half.
Union organizing has increased as well. The number of requests to the NLRB to conduct union recognition elections rose by 57 percent from the first six months of fiscal 2021 (when there were 748 such requests) to the first six months of fiscal 2022 (when there were 1,174). That latter number includes the landmark victory of Amazon workers on Staten Island, and the first set of Starbucks baristas to win recognition (as baristas at nearly 250 Starbucks outlets have now done). An unprecedented share of those requests to the NLRB are coming from college students and graduate employees at private universities, museums, think tanks, nonprofits, and their like—workers whose skills give them a degree of immunity from the common employer response to workers seeking to unionize, which is to fire them.
In the year’s largest strike—that of the 48,000 TAs, RAs, postdocs, and academic researchers at UC—a number of those workers are still on the picket lines, as the proposed contracts for the TAs and RAs have yet to be voted on. The proposed contracts would raise the annual wages for those workers from the mid-20 thousands to the mid-30s, but provide a couple thousand more for those working at UC Berkeley and UCLA, due to the stratospheric costs of housing in the Bay Area and L.A. That disparity has rankled a number of the grad students at UC’s eight other campuses, and the vote within the bargaining committee to send the contracts to members for an up-or-down vote was split largely along those lines. While more militant members on all campuses are urging fellow workers to reject the contracts, this split seems at least as much a function of geography as it is of ideology.
The split may also be a function of the union leaders’ failure to grasp the full importance of the historic bargaining strategy of their parent union, the United Auto Workers. When the UAW bargained with what we nostalgically call the “Big Three” automakers of yore, they demanded and won a uniform wage increase for their members despite whatever regional or local economic disparities may have existed. Only then could the local unions separately attempt to craft supplemental deals, if they wished, at individual factories, though these tended to concern factory-specific working conditions rather than wage issues. The UAW leaders at UC might have diminished the non-coastal discontent in their ranks by following this pattern.
The University of California, of course, is a governmental institution, and thus not under the jurisdiction of the NLRB, which oversees labor relations in the private sector. But the activism of the young UC workers, like the activism of growing numbers of young workers everywhere, is the reason why the NLRB has needed to grow in order to serve this expanding market. This week’s funding bill is a good, if long overdue, start, but it clearly needs to grow some more.
