Chris Smalls, who led the historic effort to unionize a massive Amazon warehouse. Jaz Brisack, the Buffalo barista who sparked the Starbucks revolution that has now unionized more than 200 outlets. Sara Nelson, the dynamic president of the Association of Flight Attendants, who’s heading the campaign to organize the more than 20,000 flight attendants at Delta.
On Thursday, July 28, these leaders of the most encouraging efforts to build American labor anew spoke with Prospect Editor at Large Harold Meyerson and former New York Times labor reporter Steven Greenhouse about how they and their co-workers have been able to breakthrough the wall of employer opposition that’s thwarted American workers’ efforts to gain a voice on the job and a fair share of the rewards for their work for the past 40 years. They laid out where they’re headed and what they need—from established unions, from consumers, from all of us—if their efforts are to lead to a rebirth of the nation’s most essential progressive movement. They were joined by Georgetown University historian Joseph McCartin, who put their efforts in the context of American labor history and assessed what was distinctive about this new wave of workplace militance coming chiefly from millennials and Gen Zers.
The catalyst for this event was a Prospect article by Greenhouse and Meyerson that looked at how established unions like the Mine Workers and the Clothing Workers devoted huge resources to organizing new industrial unions in auto, steel, and electronics during the 1930s and suggested that their successes offered a lesson that today’s long-shrinking union establishment should heed. This was one of the topics that the panel participants assessed.
Co-sponsored by the Prospect and the Century Foundation, this roughly hour-long event was conducted over Zoom, and is available for viewing here.
