Steve Marcus/Las Vegas Sun via AP
Union members listen to then-candidate Joe Biden during a town hall meeting at the Culinary Workers Union headquarters in Las Vegas, December 11, 2019.
On Labor Day 2021, the prospects for American workers are both hopeful and ominous, depending on which metric we choose to look at. Earlier this week, Gallup’s annual poll showed that unions had a 68 percent approval rating, the highest they’ve enjoyed since 1965. Among the young, approval stood at 77 percent, and even Republicans were evenly divided, with 47 percent (drawn disproportionately from low-income Republicans) approving and 47 percent disapproving. Of course, a poll of Republican elected officials would come down 100 percent on the disapproval side; that’s not a scientific analysis, but one based on years of listening for so much as one pro-union peep from a Republican member of Congress and hearing instead only venomous rants.
In terms of how workers are doing in the actual economy, the evidence is temporarily and fitfully hopeful. The refusal of millions of workers to return to the shit jobs that our economy has generated, even in the face of lingering high unemployment, has compelled even many of the most callous employers to raise wages and improve working conditions, to keep former, current, or prospective employees from jumping to better gigs. Last Thursday, even Walmart raised its hourly minimum to $12 and announced additional increases for hundreds of thousands of other employees.
It’s notable that wages saw few if any such significant increases during the last years of the pre-COVID recovery, despite unemployment being lower than it is today. It’s only now, when workers themselves have concluded that they have some power to redirect their lives and ask for more, that wages have taken this jump.
In a nation where workers had a right to join unions that their government actually enforced, a concomitant surge in union membership would build on this dynamic. And in industries where workers can’t be easily replaced, the past year has seen just that, with a host of previously non-union media outlets, think tanks, and nonprofits recognizing the decisions of their employees to go union. Such industries, of course, encompass just a sliver of the overall workforce. In industries that employ tens of millions of largely low-wage workers, the ability of management to cow their workers into rejecting unionization remains intact, as Amazon’s victory over unionization efforts at its Bessemer, Alabama, warehouse made depressingly clear.
In terms of how workers are doing in the actual economy, the evidence is temporarily and fitfully hopeful.
By the metric of government changing course to actually help American workers in their struggles for decent living standards, the three branches of federal government are charting radically different courses. Together, the Biden administration and the Democratic Congress seem bent on moving the nation in a more social democratic direction, though how far will depend on how much of the $3.5 trillion reconciliation package they can persuade their most conservative members to support.
The PRO Act, which would rewrite much of the National Labor Relations Act to enable workers to join unions without fear of reprisal, has been endorsed even by the Senate’s most right-wing Democrat, West Virginia’s Joe Manchin. By refusing to abolish the filibuster, however, Manchin also ensures that it won’t be enacted. It’s conceivable that one provision of the PRO Act—increasing the fines on employers who violate the NLRA by, say, firing workers trying to form a union—will be squeezed into the reconciliation package. But, as Larry Cohen, the former president of the Communications Workers of America (CWA) and current chair of Our Revolution, tells me, “it won’t affect many organizing campaigns. The New York Times [currently opposing the efforts of 700 of its tech workers to join a union] doesn’t care if it’s fined; it can afford it.”
Moving from Congress to the administration itself, labor leaders are encountering something that none of them have ever seen before: a truly pro-union administration. “President Biden is either the most pro-worker president since FDR,” says American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten, “or the most pro-worker president ever.”
The pro-worker tilt is personified by the host of progressive labor activists and experts whom Biden has put in positions of power. They include Katherine Tai as the U.S. trade representative and Thea Lee as the Labor Department’s deputy undersecretary for international affairs, who have reversed more than three decades of pro-corporate trade policy by compelling our globe-trotting corporations to respect worker rights or risk tariffs on their imports. They include Deputy Labor Secretary Julie Su and Biden appointee (awaiting senatorial confirmation) David Weil, who both bring strong records of clamping down on worker misclassification and bid fair to compel companies like Uber to treat their drivers as employees. They include the new pro-worker majority on the National Labor Relations Board. And perhaps most consequential of all, they include the new NLRB general counsel, Jennifer Abruzzo.
Labor leaders are encountering something that none of them have ever seen before: a truly pro-union administration.
As deputy NLRB general counsel during the Obama presidency and then as the CWA’s general counsel during Trump’s, Abruzzo built a record of creative and militant support for workers’ rights. It is one of the many things to the late Rich Trumka’s credit that he lobbied strenuously, and successfully, for her appointment to the NLRB post. As general counsel, Abruzzo sets the specific guidelines that direct all the board’s staffers and attorneys across the nation in handling the cases that come before them, and in her first few months in office, she’s sent out directives that should level the playing field for workers, as the drafters of the NLRA originally intended.
On August 12th, Abruzzo issued a memo that included more than 60 advisory directives to staff, an utterly normal process for a new general counsel. What went beyond normal, however, were some directives that put teeth back in the nation’s labor code.
One of those concerned instances in which a majority of workers had demonstrated through signing union affiliation cards that they wanted to join a union and where employers had used unfair labor practices in attempts to block those efforts. In 1949, Harry Truman’s NLRB ruled, in its Joy Silk Mills decision, that this kind of behavior so violated workers’ rights that the company would as a result be ordered to recognize the union and enter into collective bargaining with it. In 1969, however, the Supreme Court watered down Joy Silk in its Gissel Packing decision.
Since 1969, companies have effectively been freed to violate the law without fear of serious consequences. Predictably, the number and frequency of unfair labor practices employers have used to squelch unionization have skyrocketed. Given the rise in employer misconduct, Abruzzo in her directive told NLRB staff to go by the standards of Joy Silk, not Gissel. Assuming that the Bidenized board upholds that standard when an employer challenges it, that could actually give unions the freedom to wage organizing campaigns without fear of employers’ illegal (but unpunished) obstructions.
The un-Bidenized courts aren’t likely to go along with this, but until it reaches that level, Joy Silk may be revived for a time before right-wing judges have at it. Furthermore, Abruzzo’s action sets a marker that Joy Silk restoration should be in any labor law reform bill that Democrats promote.
Finally, in considering how workers are faring this Labor Day, we must consider the labor movement itself, which like the rest of the country has gone through very challenging times during the ongoing pandemic. Despite the massive unemployment it brought about in certain sectors, most particularly hotels and restaurants, membership, according to both Pew and Gallup, has largely remained steady. But at the individual level, there’s been a lot of churn.
Rich Trumka’s sudden and completely unexpected death certainly shook the labor movement, but the new leadership of the AFL-CIO—President Liz Shuler and Secretary-Treasurer Fred Redmond, the first woman and the first Black person in their respective positions—appears, at first glance, to be one of continuity rather than significant change. Trumka was going to step down at next year’s AFL-CIO convention, and many thought a contested election for the presidency would ensue, pitting Shuler against a more avowedly progressive opponent. Now, says one AFL-CIO insider, “there won’t be a contest: Unions representing 90 percent of the members will back Shuler and Redmond.” Incumbency matters.
The new leadership certainly personifies labor’s increased commitment to racial and gender diversity, a commitment that increased (though sometimes just verbally) in the wake of the George Floyd murder and the Black Lives Matter demonstrations. At last Tuesday’s debate for the presidency of the Teamsters (where I was one of the three question-posing panelists), both (white male) candidates repeatedly stressed how their tickets’ candidates for executive board slots were by far the most diverse the union had ever seen. Such comments were absent from the Teamster presidential debates of 2016, 2011, and 2006, at which I was also a panelist.
By one key measure of commitment to the goals of Black Lives Matter, however, the union movement has been largely missing in action over the past year. Many leading unions have police local affiliates. None of them have stated that having those locals in their ranks effectively compromises their commitment to eradicating systematic racism, nor have they severed their ties to those locals.
Despite the movement’s own limitations, labor leaders and activists are cautiously hopeful about the movement’s future, with hope rooted fundamentally in growing public support for the workers’ cause. Surveying the wave of worker activism in institutions and industries, like the media, that had previously not been unionized, Cohen says, “I haven’t seen this level of self-organizing in the private sector in my lifetime. But how does the political structure of the United States, along with what’s left of the labor movement, support it? In other countries, there’s a government structure that supports organizing. We don’t have that, yet.”
Adds Weingarten, “The more we win on the ground and in public opinion, the better the chance we can change the rules.” Administration officials like Abruzzo have begun to make such changes, but it will require a good deal more power, both on the ground and politically, to ensure that they will continue and endure.
