This Labor Day is for Laborers

Union wins keep coming — let's keep the worker momentum surging

It’s Labor Day weekend and workers have turned it into a true celebration of labor. And I don’t mean the parades in the streets, I mean workers across this country making this the best moment for unions we’ve seen in years, decades even. SAG-AFTRA just announced a strike vote that could spread their work stoppage from Hollywood to the video game industry. The United Auto Workers could go on strike in less then two weeks, with 150,000 union members shutting down anywhere from one to all three of the big U.S. auto makers. The National Labor Relations Board just ruled that if a majority of workers show support for a union and a company engages in any union busting, the election is scrapped and the bosses will simply be forced to recognize and bargain with the union. Overall, the first half of this year saw more new union members than any time in over twenty years, and an overwhelming majority of the country supports unions and sides with striking workers.

But this isn’t just a roundup of great labor news. I want to go beyond celebrating this moment and make a few points about momentum and the contagious energy of worker power. There is an energy in the air. It’s in our unions and our workplaces and all over the news and it has the power to transform our economy and our country. So this is both a celebration of the workers who have gotten us to this point, and an expression of hope that we can collectively build the labor movement into an unstoppable long-term force that can radically change society for the better.

Photo by Christopher Burns on Unsplash

This growing union wave didn’t come out of nowhere. Workers have been organizing to change some of the biggest labor unions in the country and start new unions for years. The reformers in the Teamsters have just shown us a hint of what’s possible from within major unions, and will hopefully build an even more powerful and democratic and militant union in the coming years, and the folks over at United Auto Workers seem like they’re about to show us even more. Baristas at Starbucks have also schooled us on organizing from the ground up as they’ve built a union spanning over 350 stores, despite rampant union-busting, at a company that had zero unionized stores just a year and a half ago. And while some people say that everything we’re seeing still isn’t enough, I don’t see that as a criticism which runs counter to this string of victories, but rather a sign that everything won so far is just the beginning. For instance, when people say the Teamsters should have gone on strike, or that thousands of UPS part-timers need more from the company, it shows that there’s more work to do within this major union. We have to remember that the labor movement and workers in this country are coming out of the Reaganite dark ages. We can acknowledge victories while knowing we still have a ways to go.

At the same time the raises and concessions that the Teamsters just won from UPS have already started to have a ripple effect. As Luis Feliz Leon wrote recently in Labor Notes, Amazon workers have heard about the Teamster wins, and it’s added fuel to their fire. It’s hard to ignore that many part-time UPS workers will now start off making more than Amazon workers make after three years on the job. As UPS Teamsters, and part-timers in particular, continue to organize and fight for more, the work they’ve done so far is already inspiring others. There’s a beautiful line in Luis’s article where an Amazon workers spells it all out, “The UPS workers have raised the standard, and we know that’s going to put pressure on Amazon from outside, but if we want to make the gains UPS workers have shown us can be made, we Amazon workers have to be organized from the inside to push this company to treat us with respect, with our wages, with our working conditions.”

We all know that Amazon is and has been a hard place to unionize. Their union-busting is notorious; they spent at least $14 million fighting labor organizing last year alone. But we also know that workers won the first union at Amazon two years ago, and now the Teamsters have been making new inroads in unionizing drivers at Amazon. In fact, coordinated picket lines of Teamsters and Amazon workers and other folks showing up in solidarity have sprung up at sites across this country in the last few months. Now the Teamsters’ deal with UPS has more and more workers talking about winning unions and better deals.

And the momentum of the labor movement, the excitement generated by worker action and power, isn’t limited to any one industry right now. Striking Hollywood writers and actors are also showing other workers what’s possible. Seeing famous people on strike, seeing actors and writers join Amazon picket lines and support flight attendants’ pickets, and seeing other entertainment industry workers inspired by their organzing is powerful. Visual effects workers have announced their first and second union drives since the Hollywood strike began, and now SAG-AFTRA is about to vote on video game voice actors striking as well. The labor movement is contagious because for the first time in many of our lives we’re seeing workers exercise our power on a scale and with a forcefulness that has real transformative power.

Perhaps no one exemplifies workers flexing their muscles and showcasing a vision for labor power and societal change right now like Shawn Fain. The recently elected president of United Auto Workers ran explicitly on a reform platform. The rank-and-file wanted someone willing to fight and build a more militant union, and he certainly seems to be that guy. Just days ago, in a livestream talk with membership, he flat out said “billionaires have no right to exist.” And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. He doesn’t shy away from class war, and is demanding 46% raises for workers to match the raises that CEOs of the big auto companies have gotten in recent years. Fain is also proposing a 4-day workweek in the new contract, with no reduction in pay.

Fain and the UAW may or may not win all their demands, but they’ve made clear that they’re ready to strike. 97% of the union members who turned out to the strike authorization voted yes, and observers expect them to strike at least one of the Big 3 automakers. And the ripple effect of a successful strike, plus a great new contract for 150,000 workers, could be massive. We’ve already seen in just the past year a powerful example of how victories can have a domino effect.

Maybe no industry shows how worker wins at one company can lead to other victories like the huge contracts that unions have won in the airline business. Last December, the pilots’ union at Delta won a 36% raise. They had voted to authorize a strike to raise the stakes in negotiations, then the company caved. Next pilots at United authorized a strike, and won a 40% raise in July. American Airlines pilots also authorized a strike in the midst of their negotiations, then won a 46% raise in August. Now, flight attendants at American Airlines have authorized a strike, with 99.4% of the union voting yes. Southwest pilots were also seen picketing this past week at five major airports after three and a half years without a contract. You can imagine that they’re aiming for a pretty damn big raise after the results they’ve seen at other companies. And they should. They should strike while the iron is hot and the precedent undeniable. In fact, we all should.

Photo by Manny Becerra on Unsplash

This is not a news dump, or at least it’s not intended as one. It’s a call to organizing and action. The flood of wins discussed so far is an attempt to show the scope and significance of what is happening in the labor movement right now, and to give you a feel for what’s possible. Delivery drivers, pilots, auto workers, actors, flight attendants, writers, not to mention the baristas and thousands of academic student-workers and warehouse workers and more are all agitating and building power. I don’t think the full scale of what’s within reach right now can easily be summarized, but I hope some portion of it has been conveyed here. Understanding the magnitude of this moment, and what we could be on the precipice of, can allow us to ensure that this is a sustained movement, to orient ourselves towards organizing and building for long-haul transformative change rather than just celebrating a flash in the pan.

Thousands and thousands of people are already engaged in this work and in this movement. But to make it last, and to make sure it leads towards systemic and structural change, we all have to be organizers in some way, and the organizing we do must be rooted in class struggle unionism. I’ve written about this topic before, and I’ll write about it again, but the core of the idea is that we’re aiming for worker ownership and control of our workplaces. Raises are great, benefits are great, and bringing workers into the labor movement is vital. But if we want to avoid yet another boom and bust cycle where unions win victories, things get better for a while, maybe even a long while, but then they inevitably get worse again, we need to aim for a transformation of the class system so that it’s no longer just a few people with the vast majority of money and power while most people are iced out of political control and wealth. (The book “Class Struggle Unionism” by Joe Burns spells it out better than I can.)

I bring up the need for this radical, transformative approach to the labor movement because we need to strike while the iron is hot. Change is in the air because of the great organizing being done, but also because people are tired of the status quo. People are tired of the price of food going up, rent going up, and wages not keeping pace. There’s an appetite for big thinking, militant organizing, and solutions than can really turn things around. And people see unions as a big part of that answer. This Labor Day already marks several months of people cheering on workers more loudly and aggressively than we’ve seen in a long time, if they’re not among the workers taking action themselves. We can seize this moment. We must seize this moment. If we don’t, someone else will.

If you ever think you don’t have a role to play, or that you can’t make a difference, the end of this piece is for you. I was reading “Fight Like Hell,” Kim Kelly’s book of lesser known but utterly fabulous U.S. labor history yesterday, as one does on Labor Day weekend, and something jumped out at me. I’ll let Kim do the talking for a moment, “On July 30, 1877, fifty Black day laborers struck for higher wages, and their ranks grew as they paraded through the streets—recruiting others from a sawmill, a cotton farm, a construction site, and elsewhere along the way.” From this moment of action sprang, “The Great Railroad Strike of 1877, a series of often violent work stoppages in which more than one hundred thousand railroad workers struck over wages and dangerous working conditions,” which, “temporarily brought the railroad barons to their knees and unleashed a roving spirit of dissent that captured the imaginations of workers across industries from coast the coast.”

Photo by Javad Esmaeili on Unsplash

I see the imagination of workers being sparked every day, and I see a great and growing readiness to struggle against bosses everywhere. I’m fortunate enough to be able to read and write and do social media about strikes and worker organizing at my job. I get to hear daily from people trying to form a union at their workplace, or further the labor struggle with their coworkers in numerous other ways. And the reaction of millions of people to news of labor agitation and strikes and union wins has shifted rapidly in just a few years. People are ready. They’re expressing more and more solidarity with other workers, they want to organize their own workplaces, and they’re eager to build a powerful labor movement. Are there big hurdles and pitfalls? Are bosses and billionaires ready to spend like hell to stop this growing wave in its tracks, if they can? Of course. But are conditions such that a sleeping giant is waking up and people are more ready to do battle than they’ve been in decades? Most definitely.

So this Labor Day is for laborers. There’s an abundance of reasons to celebrate today and tomorrow and the next day and every day from here on out as long as we organize to keep winning against the bosses and the owners. I believe that there are many ways to enter into the work of changing the world. From community organizing to defunding police to protecting abortion to climate justice. The list is nearly endless. But I also believe that every person who works can and should organize their workplace and help others to do the same. And none of us can deny the leverage and worker power that comes in the form of militant and democratic unions, especially when united together into a movement. We see that power growing all around us every today, and as it grows we see that we are not alone, nor are we powerless. More and more of us are realizing that there is power in a union, and that with that power comes hope for the working class and for our collective future. So I wish you a truly happy Labor Day, and as Walter Crane once wrote: "The cause of labour is the hope of the world."

Cheers, and Solidarity!