It’s been a fast and furious few weeks for labor. First, 3,000 workers went on strike at 150 Starbucks, then 6,000 Los Angeles hotel workers walked out, and now 11,500 Hollywood writers and 160,000 television and movie actors have gone on strike. Not only that, 340,000 UPS workers seemed ready to walk out on 1 August, and the United Auto Workers (UAW) union is threatening to strike one or more Detroit automakers later this summer.
“It feels like it’s strike summer,” said Kent Wong, director of the UCLA Labor Center. “There’s tremendous energy within the labor movement, and there’s tremendous energy on the strike lines.”
“Tik tock #HotLaborSummer,” the Teamsters tweeted last week as they counted down to a strike at UPS that could have cost the company more than $800m and the country over $7bn, according to one estimate.
But on Tuesday a UPS strike was averted as the company increased its offer and the union declared victory in what could be a significant win for the labor movement. In announcing the settlement, Sean O’Brien, the Teamsters’ general president, said: “This contract sets a new standard in the labor movement,” adding that UPS “has put $30bn in new money on the table as a direct result of these negotiations”.
💥“WE’VE CHANGED THE GAME”: TEAMSTERS WIN HISTORIC UPS CONTRACT💥
— Teamsters (@Teamsters) July 25, 2023
Today, the #Teamsters reached the most historic tentative agreement for workers in the history of @UPS, protecting and rewarding more than 340,000 UPS Teamsters nationwide. #1u pic.twitter.com/4Ap3j4XUTD
Maite Tapia, a professor of labor relations at Michigan State, said: “It’s not just a hot, labor summer – we’re in a protest and strike wave. It’s fascinating and inspiring to see how these workers are leveraging their power against massive corporations.”
Employee frustration and anger have fueled the work stoppages. Many frontline workers are still fuming about how poorly they were treated during the pandemic, and many are upset that their pay increases have lagged far behind inflation.
“We are coming out of more than three years of pandemic where people felt that economic inequality has grown,” Wong said. “Many workers were called essential workers, but they often felt they weren’t respected or appreciated, yet at the same time they have seen all this outrageous corporate greed.”
But the corporations hit by strikes or threatened with them say they have made generous contract offers, although management and labor often seem to be talking past each other. Many unions argue that it’s only fair that workers receive larger-than-usual raises to offset the 9% inflation that coursed through the US economy, but many corporations resist giving raises of more than 3% a year.
Diana Rios-Sanchez, a housekeeping supervisor at the InterContinental Hotel in Los Angeles, said thousands of hotel workers walked out for three days at more than 30 hotels because they feel underappreciated and underpaid. “My co-workers don’t feel they’re treated with respect,” she said. “They’re treated like they’re just a piece of trash.”
Rios-Sanchez said that because of Los Angeles’ soaring rents, hotel workers are desperate for sizable raises. She makes $26 an hour, but she and her husband can only afford a one-bedroom apartment for themselves and their three children. “I might take home $3,500 a month with overtime, but a two-bedroom apartment costs $2,000 to $2,500 a month, and then there’s childcare and food bills,” she said.
The tight labor market helps make it a good time for workers to strike. Unions are more likely to strike when the jobless rate is low; that hampers companies’ ability to find replacement workers during a walkout. Also, strikes are contagious, emboldening other workers to walk out.
In California, the epicenter of today’s labor strife, 48,000 University of California graduate teaching assistants, researchers and other academic workers walked out last November and won a settlement that included raises of more than 55% for the lowest-paid workers. In April, 30,000 Los Angeles school district custodians, bus drivers, cafeteria workers and teacher’s aides struck for three days. They won a 30% raise. Those victories helped embolden LA’s hotel workers to demand a 40% raise.
Workers’ attitudes about going on strike have also changed significantly. “For many decades, unions wanted to avoid a strike because strikes could mean disaster,” said Nelson Lichtenstein, a longtime labor historian at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “That was certainly true in the 1980s and 1990s.”
In 1981, President Ronald Reagan fired more than 11,000 striking members of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (Patco) union in a move that was seen as a devastating blow to organized labor – it led to that union’s collapse and discouraged other unions from striking.
“In the wake of the Patco strike, companies saw strikes as opportunities to weaken unions or even break them. That’s not the case today. Today there’s no fear that calling a strike will result in disaster,” said Lichtenstein.
“Today there’s a sense that unions are on the offensive,” Lichtenstein continued. “Take the actors. They say they don’t want just a good contract. They want a transformative contract.”
He said today’s younger generation of workers – often inspired by Bernie Sanders, often irked about high rents and student debt, often unfamiliar with labor’s setbacks in decades past – is more inclined to strike than older workers.
Several business trends have spurred the strike wave and increased worker anger. Like many companies, UPS has relied heavily on part-time workers to hold down costs, and many of those workers complain that their limited hours mean they earn far too little. Similarly, television writers increasingly say they’re not being given enough work to live on – they often used to work on series that had more than 20 episodes a season, but now they often work on series with just six or eight episodes a season. With the explosion of streaming, TV actors are upset that they’re earning far less from residuals than they did in the era before streaming.
Corporations are not happy about the increased labor militancy. The Association of Motion Picture and Television Producers said it “offered historic pay and residual increases”, adding that the actors’ union, by striking, “has regrettably chosen a path that will lead to financial hardship for countless thousands of people who depend on the industry”.
Eager to avert a Teamsters strike, UPS agreed to significantly increase wages for full- and part-time workers. The wage gains are double the increases from the union’s previous five-year contract and include a 48% pay raise for part-timers over the life of the contract.
“We’ve changed the game, battling it out day and night to make sure our members won an agreement that pays strong wages, rewards their labor and doesn’t require a single concession,” O’Brien said. He added that “this contract … raises the bar for all workers”.
The Teamsters win is likely to embolden the UAW as that union considers a strike, too. “Without a credible strike threat, the Teamsters could not have gotten this much,” said Joseph McCartin, a labor historian at Georgetown University, “In recent memory, we haven’t had three such large labor situations, one following the other, each of which has national implications and each of which could provide momentum for the other. A big strike that moves the needle for workers – we haven’t seen that in a long while at the national level.”
This summer’s strikes come as public approval of unions is at its highest since 1965, and some labor experts say the strike wave could increase support for labor organizing, even though strikes often inconvenience the public.
“When these actors go on strike, it has a huge impact way beyond their numbers; everyone knows who these people are,” said Lichtenstein. “It’s extraordinarily important when a star like Harrison Ford – 3 or 4 billion people know who he is – says I’m for unions. I back the strike.”
He noted that when 185,000 Teamsters walked out at UPS for 15 days in 1997, “that was a very popular strike. Everyone knows their UPS driver.” He argued that strikes by well-liked UPS drivers and Hollywood celebrities could boost support for labor. Indeed, Lichtenstein said that if the Teamsters and UAW are very successful in their contract negotiations, whether with or without a strike, that could help President Biden and other Democrats in 2024, especially in midwest states, where the UAW is strongest.
More militant union leadership is another catalyst for strikes. Over the past two years, insurgent candidates won the presidency of the UAW and Teamsters, having promised a more confrontational approach in bargaining and a greater willingness to strike.
Speaking about the UAW president, Shawn Fain, Michigan State’s Tapia said: “He seems to be gearing up the workers to strike. He has said the workers’ true enemy is multibillion-dollar corporations that refuse to give union members their fair share. The Teamsters and UAW leaders have talked about the significance of strikes not just for their members, but for workers across the whole country.”
In recent months, unions have shown significantly increased energy both in striking and in organizing, for instance at Starbucks. “What these two phenomena make clear is the importance of collective action,” McCartin said. “Historically, to move the needle for workers, they need to engage in collective action.”
