Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call
Starbucks workers union advocates are seen at the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee hearing on Starbucks' alleged illegal union-busting March 29, 2023.
Here’s a Q-and-A to begin the week:
Q: Is today’s American labor movement a working-class movement?
A: Less and less so with each passing day.
Consider the numbers, which the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports on every January. Of the 14.3 million union members in 2022, 5.3 million were professionals, with a little over 3 million of them teachers and a little over 1 million healthcare professionals. There were 200,000 architects and engineers, and just shy of 200,000 software nerds and out-and-out mathematicians.
By contrast, there were roughly 900,000 production (mainly factory) workers, 300,000 retail sales workers, 1.1 million construction workers, 577,000 maintenance and repair workers, and 1.4 million transportation workers (truckers, plus rail and airline workers).
This is a far cry from the years of union power, when the largest unions in the land were the United Auto Workers and the United Steel Workers, both of which have shrunk by well more than half in recent decades, and the Teamsters, who’ve managed to maintain somewhat more of their membership, but partly through their success in organizing workers who’ve never driven a truck. (The UAW has also supplemented its dwindling ranks with non-auto workers).
This epochal shift in the class composition of American labor has never been more apparent than it’s been in the last couple of years, which have seen many thousands of professionals and proto-professionals successfully organizing and winning contracts, while organizing efforts in non-professional occupations has yielded precious few victories (and even when it has, as with Starbucks and Amazon and Chipotle and elsewhere, these courageous efforts have yet to result in any contracts).
The basic reason for this shift has little to do with unions themselves, and everything to do with the different levels of worker-replaceability that American employers confront when their workers want to go union. Teachers and grad student TAs and RAs, or doctors and nurses, can’t easily be fired and replaced. Workers on assembly lines or at cash registers commonly are, though when employers do this when those workers are trying to form a union, that’s illegal—though with negligible penalties for the scofflaw bosses.
Two other factors have intensified this disparity. The first is the proletarianization of professionals. More and more doctors, for instance, find it difficult to compete as independent practitioners against investor-owned medical groups and, not being able to beat them, then join them. The second is the surge of union support among the young, which has been apparent both on university campuses and at Starbucks. The difference is that universities ultimately can’t afford to dispense with their student employees (who themselves save their employers money by enabling them to have fewer tenured faculty), while Starbucks can routinely engage in illegal suppression of its disproportionately young employees who’ve voted to unionize. Starbucks has been withholding company-wide raises from those who’ve gone union, while refusing to bargain any contracts. These are tactics that university administrators couldn’t pull off.
Accordingly, the past two years have seen a host of union victories among workers on campuses, in museums, in foundations, at all manner of enterprises staffed by workers not easy to replace. Even when you know that polling shows record-high levels of union support among millennials and Gen-Zers, the results of the union recognition elections at universities are still stunning.
The starkest challenge for unions as their memberships morph into these cross-class institutions will be reconciling the needs of their production workers with the imperatives of going green.
Since the start of 2022, the National Labor Relations Board has conducted elections at 17 colleges and universities. (All of them are private; what happens in public higher education depends on whether the individual states have legalized collective bargaining for public employees. Where they have, you can be sure the grad students have unionized.) Those 17 include MIT, Yale, Northwestern, USC, the University of Chicago, Dartmouth, Johns Hopkins, Grinnell and Rensselaer Polytech. At all 17, the vote was overwhelmingly to unionize. Adding up the total votes, we find that 15,631 of the students voted to be represented by a union, while just 1,698 voted not to be, which comes out to 89.1 percent support.
Is there any reason to think that today’s young workers in blue-collar or retail jobs wouldn’t also vote to go union if their employers didn’t use the gaping loopholes in labor law to threaten them if they did? What polling we have suggests: not much.
The newly organized workers on those 17 campuses are represented by nine different unions, including UNITE HERE (at Yale; otherwise, it’s the union of hotel workers), SEIU, CWA, the United Food and Commercial Workers, the Office and Professional Union (originally, the union of office workers at unions), the Teamsters, the United Electrical Workers, the AFT (the only union of the nine that represents K-12 teachers, more than 1.5 million of them), and the UAW. The grad-student employees at USC followed the lead of the nearly 50,000 grad students at the University of California’s ten campuses by voting by a 1599-to-122 margin to unionize with the UAW. As an old Angeleno who remembers the USC that was a bastion of Republicanism and whose alums dominated Richard Nixon’s dirty-tricks operation, it’s particularly gratifying to see today’s Trojans affiliating with a union that once was the nation’s most powerful social-democratic institution.
With the UAW adding its new members at USC to its members at UC and other campuses, roughly one-quarter of its current members are academic workers. The specific effects that might have on the union’s campaigns outside academia remain to be seen. With the union set to strike one of the Big Three legacy auto manufacturers later this year, it’s at least possible that some of its California campus members could form picket lines at that company’s dealerships.
More broadly, the rising share of professional workers in American labor could portend an acceleration of the ongoing shift to liberal professional worker causes and concerns within labor, on a host of social, cultural and environmental issues. Historically, a number of blue-collar unions took progressive stances on such issues long ago, even when more middle-class organizations rejected them. Those unions strongly backed civil rights despite the opposition of many of their white members, embraced the pro-choice cause, and moved from opposing immigration to supporting it. (The AFL-CIO reversed its longstanding opposition to more immigration at its 1999 convention.) Some of these shifts were accelerated when John Sweeney became AFL-CIO president in 1995, backed by a coalition of progressive unions that ousted his predecessor, Lane Kirkland, and the ancien régime that had steered clear of potential allies in the feminist, antiwar, environmental and other presumably untrustworthy movements.
The starkest challenge for unions as their memberships morph into these cross-class institutions will be reconciling the needs of their production workers with the imperatives of going green. There’s no question that the academic members of a union like the UAW will strongly support “just transition” measures for workers who lose their jobs in the course of going green, but there’s also no question that employers and conservative lawmakers will oppose such measures. A wave of unjust transitions could inflict some very hard choices on a union like the UAW. For its part, the Biden Administration is trying to make those choices less hard by its efforts to make green jobs union jobs—an uphill climb, but one that, if successful, could reduce these potential intra-union conflicts.
In a sense, the shifting class composition of American labor mirrors the shift in the Democratic Party, and in center-left parties throughout the West. There is a very obvious and growing working-class (particularly white working-class) hole in the universe of Democratic voters, as there is in those of the historic parties of the left in France and the UK and elsewhere. In fact, the class shift in labor is one of the primary causes of the class shift in those parties. Since the early 1970s, unionized blue-collar workers have been voting for Democratic candidates at a rate that’s roughly ten percent higher than their non-union counterparts. Assuming that a union has an effective political/economic messaging system—which requires an active and skilled steward system, something that only some unions have managed to preserve or create—a union member can receive a drumbeat of factual information that can counter the likes of Fox News.
Had unions been able to organize non-professional workers with the same rate of success they’ve had in organizing professional workers, the working-class hole in the Democratic Party wouldn’t be as large, and as damaging, as it is today. It’s great that unions are organizing so many workers on campuses and in like institutions, but building a center-left powerful enough to win enough elections to dominate politics requires working-class organizing, too. That, in turn, requires changing labor law so that employers are actually forbidden by law, as they were before the courts and Republicans weakened that law, from firing workers seeking to organize—those “disposable” workers who can be replaced. That’s why making working-class workers as non-replaceable as their counterparts on campuses is the linchpin of any efforts to build a majoritarian American left.
