Tevita Uhatafe proudly wore a Texas union cap and shirt as he marched toward New York City’s Times Square in a rally on Labor Day. Lest people forget where he had traveled from, he periodically unfurled his Tarrant County labor flag to don as a cape.
Alongside him was Chris Smalls, the organizer who led the historic Amazon warehouse union vote earlier this year, shouting chants through a megaphone. Once they arrived at their destination, Smalls passed it off to Uhatafe.
“The South is ready to organize!” Uhatafe said, labor flag in hand. “And we are inviting … any damn person who wants to unionize — come to the South!”
This wasn’t the 36-year-old’s first time rallying workers at a demonstration.
He is part of a young cohort of labor leaders and organizers emerging in Dallas-Fort Worth and around Texas, fueled by a post-pandemic surge in support for unions and organizing activity. Whether young workers’ enthusiasm can reverse the past downward trend in union membership remains to be seen, particularly in states highly resistant to unions such as Texas.
“There’s this really spontaneous eruption of folks,” said Rick Levy, president of the Texas AFL-CIO. Much of the burst is being fueled by people in their 20s and 30s, he added.
A charismatic Tongan-American standing over 6 feet tall, Uhatafe said he first realized the value of unions in 2019. As a fleet service clerk for American Airlines, he is part of the Transport Workers Union, which joined General Motors employees in Arlington on a strike.
He remembers speaking with workers while picketing outside their plant in the evenings. “I can’t feel my hands,” he recalls one telling him about the toll building auto parts took on her body. After hearing story after story about what people experienced — reasons they were fighting for better job security and higher wages — it struck him how important it was to stand alongside them.
“You should be there physically so these people know they’re not doing this alone, that somebody does care,” he said. “These people are risking a lot to do this.”
Uhatafe has developed a national reputation for showing up to support people fighting for better job conditions around the country.
Whether it be Nabisco workers in Chicago and Portland, Ore., farmworkers in San Francisco or steelworkers in Beaumont, Uhatafe opens up his schedule and takes advantage of his airline benefits to be there with them.
“I bring these stories back to Texas,” Uhatafe said about his experiences across the country. “I want people to know that we can be a part of this, too.”
Young Texan labor leaders
Support for unions has reached its highest point in decades, according to a recent Gallup poll. The South is no exception: 66% of people in the region support unions, a percentage that tops national approval from just two years ago.
National support among workers ages 18-24, in particular, has skyrocketed: 72% now approve of unions, according to a recent White House report.
Texas isn’t immune to the shift. In the state, more petitions have been filed to form unions this year than all of 2021, National Labor Relations Board data shows. Successful union drives have taken place in workplaces ranging from Starbucks shops — including two in Dallas-Fort Worth — to a hospital in Austin and newsrooms such as the Austin American-Statesman and The Dallas Morning News.
Nikita Russell and her co-workers at a Starbucks in Dallas decided they needed a greater say in what happens at the shop after the store cut their hours earlier this year..
“It was like it all clicked in our heads,” said Russell, a 32-year-old mother of two. “We don’t just have to settle for what the company decides to give us.”
Since then, Russell and some of her co-workers have joined Young Active Labor Leaders, an organization under the Texas AFL-CIO that aims to galvanize young people and regularly provides strike aid around the state.
Marilyn Davis, the organization’s vice president and a Fort Worth native, points to the pandemic as a driving force behind the rise in union interest.
The historic levels of unemployment “kicked and escalated into high gear this massive, collective realization” that unions can help protect workers, she said. “People realize just how much they are expendable to these companies.”
Angi DeFelippo, the Young Active Labor Leader’s Dallas-Fort Worth-based chair, got into union work before the pandemic. She was employed at a duty-free shop in the George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston when a co-worker approached her about helping to organize a union.
“I was like, ‘You all are here?’ " said DeFelippo. “Where have you been the last decade of my life?”
DeFelippo’s grandparents were members of the United Auto Workers, something that primed her to view unions in a positive light, she said. Without them, she is unsure whether she would have been so open.
“You don’t learn about it in school,” she said about growing up in Texas. “If you didn’t have an outside reason to know that unions are good, or that unions are around, you’d be like, ‘What’s a union?’”
Their group regularly fields calls and emails from young people looking to unionize their workplaces, she said, which is something they encourage people to do with the support of established unions, not least because of the risks involved.
Going at it on your own is “incredibly difficult,” she said.
Challenges and an unclear future
Whether majority support for unions will translate into a long-term increase in their membership is unclear.
Unions have historically put upward pressure on wages and job security for workers, said Chad Pearson, a labor historian at the University of North Texas, and the benefits they provide are still evident today: Private and public union workers, on average, receive better pay and benefits than their nonunion counterparts, and unions help raise the wages of women workers and workers of color in particular, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Despite the advantages, union membership has steadily declined since the 1950s, when it peaked at 35% in the country and more than 10% in Texas. Today, only 1 in 10 workers in the U.S. is a union member. In Texas, the density is 3.8%.
Michael Z. Green, a professor at Texas A&M University School of Law who specializes in labor law, partly attributes the decline to an erosion of legal protections for unions.
The teeth of legislation like the National Labor Relations Act, which was passed in 1935 to protect private-sector workers’ right to form unions, have been worn down over the decades through anti-union amendments like the Taft-Hartley Act and declining levels of enforcement by the National Labor Relations Board, he said. Meanwhile, proposed legislation that might buff up protections, such as making it easier for workers to unionize, usually fails to pass.
“Even though there is a law that gives some credence to labor organizing, a lot of those protections are gone,” he said. “Today ... most of the people who lead these organizing campaigns, there’s a strong chance they’ll be retaliated against and fired.”
The offshoring of unionized jobs in the industrial sector, as well as generally “fierce opposition” among business leaders and politicians are major reasons for the decline as well, said Pearson. He added that resistance across the South and in Texas is especially strong, where he cited Jim Crow-era laws as a major factor that historically helped restrict union activity by sowing racial division among Black and white workers, making it harder for them to unify along shared interests — something that would have been necessary to form unions.
Additionally, between the state’s business friendly atmosphere, which Green said is largely opposed to union activity because it can disrupt business operations, and “right-to-work” laws that weaken the function and expansion of unions, organizing activity in Texas is especially limited, said Green.
Glenn Hamer, president and CEO of the Texas Association of Business, said a healthy job market explains Texas’ low union density rather than repression of the organizations.
“Happy workers, satisfied workers, workers with opportunities and a chance to get ahead with their employer” are the main reasons unions have never taken off in the state, he said, adding that a better path to improved job conditions is to communicate directly with management rather than going through unions, which he said can use funds for activities workers aren’t comfortable with.
A recent report by Oxfam America, a nonprofit that aims to end poverty, ranked Texas as one of the least hospitable in the country for workers when taking wages, benefits and organizing rights into account.
Younger Texans who want to form unions will have to learn to grapple with the challenges, Pearson said.
“I think it’s going to be a learning experience for the participants in these union campaigns,” he said. “They want a union … but they’re also seeing the stubbornness of the opposition. I mean just outright lawbreaking.”
Hopeful despite limitations
Dallas Starbucks employees staged a walkout in June after one barista was fired in what workers say was retaliation against their unionization drive. Starbucks spokesperson Reggie Borges said the store had been following its policies.
Over 50 people showed up to support the employees in the over 100-degree weather — DeFelippo, Davis and Uhatafe among them.
Uhatafe gripped a megaphone while the crowd gathered on the corner of Mockingbird Lane and U.S. Highway 75, cars zipping around the corner and occasionally honking in support.
“We are gonna stand here in this heat, and we are going to show these workers how much we care!” he exclaimed.
The store successfully unionized four weeks later, and though Starbucks initially resisted bargaining with the over 200 stores that have done so, the company recently announced it will start contract negotiations in October.
Russell, who is still working there, said she plans to continue being involved in local union work regardless of what happens at the shop.
“The conversation has begun,” she said. “Our social trust is improving and generations after us will benefit from the efforts of workers today.”
Uhatafe points to the stories of people like Russell as a major motivating force for him.
“They’re heroes to me,” he said. “It’s nice to talk about local heroes, or regular folks who are doing tremendous things.”
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