Labor Day 2022 – Freedom Basis prognosticators, and their conservative fellow-travelers, will revel of their drained prediction in regards to the demise of the U.S. union motion. Whereas there could also be a seeming kernel of reality of their detrimental statistical information – “organized labor solely represents 6.4 % of the private-sector workforce” – the “information” doesn’t acknowledge at the moment’s unfolding story of a newly invigorated union motion.
It’s time these naysayers modified the channel. Seventeen million TikTok viewers have watched a video of a Starbucks’ supervisor firing a SBWorkersUnited (SBUnited) organizer in Buffalo. Each barista left Mocha Cookie Crumbles and Java Chip Frappuccino’s on the counters and walked out.
After years of decline, labor is experiencing a resurgence on two fronts. The primary is rising militancy and resistance amongst members of current commerce unions. Over the previous yr, discontent amongst tens of 1000’s of working-class Individuals crested in a wave of strikes, walk-outs and protests as union represented staff flexed their muscle mass, confronting the proudly owning class with ever extra militant resistance.
• At Kellogg’s, 1.400 union staff struck the corporate’s cereal vegetation after working seven days every week, 12 hours a day.
• 1,000 union staff struck Nabisco for 40 days.
• A whole lot of UAW staff at John Deere struck for a month.
• 60,000 Kaiser Permanente unionized well being care nurses and staff engaged in a sympathy strike for 2 days to help 700 placing engineers.
• 1,100 United Mineworkers have been on strike in opposition to the Warrior Met Coal in Alabama since April 2021.
The second entrance is a quickly spreading motion fueled by youthful activists organizing new sectors of the unorganized. The primary 9 months of this yr noticed a 58% enhance in petitions for union elections.
Bolstering this resurgence is a dramatic shift in public opinion – the latest Gallup ballot discovered help for labor unions at its highest level since 1965, with 68% help. The surge in organizing is being fueled by a quickly spreading, youth-driven, viral motion typically by means of social media.
At present’s motion is being nourished by rebellious staff at locations like Amazon, Starbucks, IT corporations, REI, Chipotle, Dealer Joe’s, Apple, and Greenback Common (to call a couple of), with new organizing efforts popping up with regularity.
The brand new technology of youthful activists are preventing not only for higher wages and dealing situations however are struggling for dignity and humane remedy on the job.
SBUnited has organized over 225 shops (since final December), regardless of a vicious anti-union marketing campaign together with some 85 discharges of union organizers. As of mid-July, staff at over 300 extra shops in 36 states have filed to unionize. Moreover, staff at Starbucks have held over 55 strikes in a minimum of 17 states.
Is historical past repeating itself?
Within the Nineteen Sixties and Seventies one other younger, idealist technology of New Left activists left faculty campuses with the aim of spreading our revolutionary motion. We left behind campuses the place we had fought in opposition to the Vietnam Battle, supported the battle for Black liberation and fought to help staff’ struggles just like the United Farmworkers boycott of desk grapes and non-union lettuce.
Within the Nineteen Sixties, I used to be a kind of radical scholar activists who believed that the one option to impact transformative change to the inequities of the exploitative capitalist system was to construct a class-conscious staff’ motion.
Whereas employed at American Motors for 13 years, I confronted termination, dodged the FBI, outwitted collaborators within the UAW and have become a central determine in a multi-year defamation lawsuit by American Motors in opposition to our store publication Combating Instances.
The lesson for organizers of yesteryear and at the moment is that we have to be artistic, hearken to peoples’ considerations about their jobs and lives and be keen to take up the battle to enhance situations on all fronts. Solely with an organized, class-conscious staff’ motion can we reverse the destruction of the planet and produce to beginning a system that isn’t primarily based on exploitation, however justice for all.
Jon Melrod is the creator of “In Combating Instances: Organizing on the Entrance Strains of the Class Battle” (PM Press).
