George Walker IV/AP Photo
Volkswagen automobile plant employee Kiara Hughes celebrates after employees voted to join the UAW, April 19, 2024, in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
Last Friday’s Wall Street Journal ran a front-page story documenting that American companies are now hiring workers for tens of thousands of dollars less than they were offering for the same jobs last year. In today’s cooling job market, new hires in retail are making less than half of what they would have made had they been hired for the same job last year. This pattern now affects workers in most of the economy’s sectors, though it’s not always so pronounced. New hires in what this survey terms the “science” sector are making about 25 percent less than peers who were hired last year.
This is precisely what one would expect, I should note, when the rate of unionization in the private sector is a paltry 6 percent. That’s not because American workers don’t like unions. The Gallup Poll’s annual public opinion survey of unions, conducted over August and released last week, found that 70 percent of Americans approved of them—close to the highest level of popularity unions have enjoyed since the mid-20th century—with just 23 percent disapproving.
Despite the steadily higher rates of approval, which have been growing throughout the past decade, unions still struggle to win new members in nonprofessional jobs. When workers on assembly lines and behind sales counters try to form or join a union, the near-universal response of American employers is to fire them. This is blatantly illegal behavior, but there are not even remotely serious penalties for it. That explains why it’s only workers who can’t be readily replaced, and thus can’t simply be fired, who’ve been successfully joining unions in the past several years: university teaching assistants, hospital interns, museum docents, software writers for gaming, think tank researchers, et al. As I noted in a previous article, college and university student-workers have voted to unionize over the past few years at rates of nearly 90 percent.
For workers who can easily be shown the door, however, voting in a union entails the steepest of uphill climbs. This year, however, we’ve seen two such groups of workers make it, provisionally, to the top. In April, the United Auto Workers won a decisive victory at Volkswagen’s plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee. This was the UAW’s third such effort at the factory, by which time it had established a reputation as a skilled advocate for workers’ interests. It hadn’t sunk comparable roots among the workers at a Mercedes plant in Vance, Alabama, when it lost an election to represent the workers there one month later. Neither had it secured an agreement with Mercedes not to oppose their organizing campaign. At Volkswagen, by contrast, the union had secured just such an agreement, something it had failed to fully get in its earlier efforts at that plant, and which required some pressure from VW’s very powerful German union to secure it this time around.
The second group of at-risk workers who nonetheless prevailed—maybe—have been Starbucks’s baristas. Beginning in 2021, workers at a handful of outlets braved concerted management threats and opposition to organize a number of stores. In February, when the number of stores that had voted to go union was roughly 200 (out of the 9,000 U.S. stores that Starbucks owns), company management, in the person of then-CEO Laxman Narasimhan, abruptly changed its approach, agreeing to sit down with the union on a monthly basis to come up with a “foundational framework” for contracts with its various stores. Even as those meetings have proceeded, the company has also ceased opposing baristas’ new efforts to unionize their particular stores. Since that switcheroo, the number of outlets that have voted to join the union has risen to 480.
In both instances, the decision by management not to oppose organizing was by no means the only factor in the successful campaigns; the baristas were already winning most of their efforts before the company changed course. But neither has employer neutrality been a negligible factor, which underscores just how decisive American business’s normal mode of union opposition—firing workers—can be.
I note as well that Starbucks’s recent firing of one worker (Narasimhan, the CEO) and replacing him with Brian Niccol, who opposed unionization efforts in his former job as CEO of Chipotle, could lead to the company’s reversion back to its stance of adamant opposition. Starbucks and its union are still meeting; Workers United gave a somewhat nondescript update on those bargaining sessions last week. As well, one veteran organizer told me on Friday that an outlet in Vermont just successfully voted to go union without encountering any employer opposition, but added that there was as yet no way to know what the change at the top of the company might mean for the ongoing campaign.
For the moment, then, union growth remains concentrated among disproportionately young professionals, a number of whom are more audibly progressive, with more time for political activism, than many of their blue-collar counterparts. That’s reflected, as New York Times labor reporter Noam Scheiber has noted, in their success at helping prod some unions, most notably the UAW, to oppose the continued shipment of U.S. offensive arms to Israel, at least as long as its war on Gaza rages. Fully one-quarter of UAW members are university grad students, though the UAW also has a long history of dissenting from the old AFL-CIO’s Cold War rigidities, at a time when virtually all of its members were autoworkers.
This isn’t limited to professional unions or unions with large segments of professionals, however. Last week, Painters’ Union president Jimmy Williams made an impassioned plea at the union’s convention for the U.S. to stop funding the Israeli military.
The Biden-appointed leaders of the National Labor Relations Board have done all they could to restore the act to its original intent of enabling workers to organize, reversing decades of pro-employer court decisions. But unless congressional Democrats can amend the National Labor Relations Act itself, so that workers no longer need to fear getting fired if they organize, the prospects for significant union growth remain dim.
That would, of course, require the Democrats to win trifecta control of government in November’s election—a main reason why helping the Democrats do just that is virtually, and rightly, all that the unions will do between now and November. The UAW has initiated its largest member-to-member election drive in its history; on the sidelines of the Democratic National Convention, president Shawn Fain told me and other reporters that he would like to increase numbers for the Kamala Harris-Tim Walz ticket above the 65-35 Democratic-Republican split achieved among UAW members in past elections.
Democrats actually had trifecta control in the opening years of the Carter, Clinton, and Obama presidencies, but they could never overcome the requirement for a 60-vote supermajority in the Senate to pass a labor law reform bill. This time around, the most optimistic scenario has them with a majority of perhaps one vote. If they do have that majority, it’s likely they’ll suspend the filibuster to enact bills that secure both abortion and voting rights. If they do so, they also need to extend that suspension to the current version of labor law reform, the PRO Act. Otherwise, they’ll have to tell unions that some parts of their agenda are simply more important than fighting for an underpaid and powerless working class, which Harris has placed at the center of her efforts rhetorically.
If this appeal falls short, or if the votes don’t materialize to make it easier to unionize, our towering levels of economic inequality will grow more towering yet, and our union movement will morph a little more each year to one that increasingly represents professionals and, despite its best efforts, leaves most American workers behind.
