Matthew Umstead/The Herald-Mail via AP
Members of United Auto Workers Local 1590 picket near the GM Martinsburg Parts Distribution Center in West Virginia, September 2019.
My friend Joe McCartin, the terrific labor historian who also runs Georgetown University’s Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor, has been known to argue that the level of strikes is a better index of labor’s health than the percentage of workers enrolled in unions—particularly since enrollment is greatly limited by the deficiencies of labor law.
By Joe’s metrics, the data on strikes that the Bureau of Labor Statistics released last week reveal a labor movement with a lot more potential energy—and kinetic energy, too—than the membership numbers reveal. During the two-year period of 2018–2019, the BLS reported, a yearly average of 455,400 workers engaged in major work stoppages, which, as the Economic Policy Institute pointed out, is the highest two-year average since 1983–1984. It was in the mid-’80s that workers generally stopped striking, reacting to President Reagan’s mass firing of striking air traffic controllers, which led many large private-sector employers to fire their striking workers, too (for which required reading is Joe’s Collision Course, his account of the controllers’ strike and firing).
Today, strikes are back—among teachers, hotel workers, autoworkers, supermarket employees, and disconsolate Google-ites, among others. (The walkout of roughly 20,000 Google employees, protesting the company’s treatment of sexual harassment, didn’t even make it into the BLS numbers due to the bureau’s definition of what constitutes a work stoppage.) As I write, more than 20,000 workers are preparing to take a strike vote at Safeway markets in the D.C./Maryland area.
The return of the strike reflects two somewhat anomalous realities that together constitute the state of the American economy. Low unemployment makes the prospect of striking less terrifying. And the fact that wages lag behind housing, education, and medical costs, despite the low unemployment, makes the prospect of striking more necessary. Of such factors is labor militancy (and, one hopes, good election outcomes) born.
