What Are U.S. Workers Up To? 10 questions and vignettes
+ a little levity at the expense of neoliberal economists
This issue of The Platypus features analysis and stories of workers on the move. We don’t fully understand the dynamics behind the “Great Resignation,” and it’s unclear whether we’re at the front end of a surge of labor militancy. But there are some intriguing and exciting signs that something important is afoot. Wages were up by the largest amount in 20 years in the three months ending in September, signaling greater leverage for workers. And Gallup reports that support for labor unions is higher than it’s been since 1968. While essential workers risked and lost their lives during the pandemic, the wealthiest 400 Americans saw their riches soar, and that glaring contrast is undoubtedly fueling some workers’ ire. Nothing would be a better antidote to plutocracy and rising authoritarianism right now than a multi-racial workers insurgency. To that end, here are ten questions and vignettes.
Is there a hidden upsurge of worker walkouts?
This deeply reported piece in The Washington Post, “It’s A Walkout: Inside the fast-food workers season of rebellion,” tells the story of workers who decided on their own to walkout of a McDonald’s in Bradford, PA. It’s a gripping read. While the number of strikes overall has increased, the rise hasn’t been dramatic. But scenes like this may be unfolding at a larger scale than the official statistics show.
Dustin Snyder was tired of the low wages, the 60-hour workweeks and the impossible-to-please customers, and so in early September the assistant general manager at a McDonald’s here drafted a petition that laid bare months of building anger and frustration.
“We are all leaving,” his petition threatened, “and hope you find employees that want to work for $9.25 an hour.” Nearly all of his two dozen employees had signed it. A few added their own flourishes.
“We need a RAISE,” one scribbled next to her signature.
“Piss off,” wrote another.
Dustin, 21, could feel his heart pounding in his chest as he fed the petition into the fax machine in the McDonald’s office, punched in the number for his bosses 80 miles away in Buffalo and hit send. Another low-wage worker rebellion in a season full of them. . . .
Definitive numbers on these small-scale walkouts do not exist. The Bureau of Labor Statistics only tracks major stoppages that involve more than 1,000 workers. But Mike Elk, a labor reporter and founder of paydayreport.com, has compiled a database of 1,600 walkouts since March 2020 that included as many as 100,000 workers.
What’s behind “The Great Resignation?”
Millions of workers have dropped out of the labor force. There’s convincing evidence that increased Unemployment benefits were not a factor (the quit rate was the same in states that ended benefits early as it was in states that continued benefits). In “Wonking Out: Is the Great Resignation a Great Rethink?” Paul Krugman suggests that
The experience of the pandemic may have led many workers to explore opportunities they wouldn’t have looked at previously.
I’d been thinking vaguely along these lines, but Arindrajit Dube, who has been one of my go-to labor economists throughout this pandemic, recently put it very clearly. As he says, there’s considerable evidence that “workers at low-wage jobs [have] historically underestimated how bad their jobs are.” When something — like, say, a deadly pandemic — forces them out of their rut, they realize what they’ve been putting up with. And because they can learn from the experience of other workers, there may be a “quits multiplier” in which the decision of some workers to quit ends up inducing other workers to follow suit.
I like this story, in part because it dovetails with one of the main discoveries of behavioral economics — namely, that people have a strong status quo bias. That is, they tend to keep doing what they were doing even when there might be much better alternatives. Famously, workers are far more likely to enroll in retirement plans when they have to check a box to opt out than when they have to check a box to opt in. Checking that box costs nothing, yet many people will fail to take advantage of a good deal unless enrollment is automatic.
So I can easily believe that there were many workers who should have quit their lousy jobs in, say, 2019, but didn’t because they weren’t really considering the alternatives. And it’s at least possible that the disruptions of the pandemic led to a great rethink.
Of course, we don’t know this. But if that’s part of what’s happening, it’s actually a good thing — a small silver lining to the horrors of Covid-19.
Is there a massive labor shortage?
It may be that there’s really a surplus of crappy jobs. In a superb piece in Bloomberg Businessweek, “Highly Paid Union Workers Give UPS a Surprise Win in Delivery Wars,” Thomas Black makes a telling comparison with FedEx.
The massive labor shortage that’s rocked the U.S. since the pandemic and disrupted long-established employment relationships hasn’t had much impact on UPS, which pays its unionized drivers the highest wages in the industry. That’s helped it maintain a stable workforce and rising profits throughout the current disruptions. Meanwhile, lower-paying, non-unionized FedEx racked up $450 million in extra costs because of labor shortages. And while UPS easily beat earnings expectations and predicted a rising profit margin in the U.S. for the fourth quarter, FedEx signaled that its profit margin will fall further. The lack of workers is taking a toll on its reliability, too. FedEx’s recent on-time performance for express and ground packages has sunk to 85%, while UPS has met deadlines on 95% of those packages, according to data collected by ShipMatrix Inc.
We don’t have a strike wave yet, but we need one. Do unions cause strikes or do strikes cause unions?
From Nelson Lichtenstein’s “Is This a Strike Wave?” in Dissent.
Are we witnessing a strike wave? The scale of the action is not, in fact, very large by historical standards. In 1979 there were 235 work stoppages involving more than 1,000 workers. So far this year there have been just twelve. But what may be even more significant is the cheerleading, the hope, and the expectation for a labor upsurge that has been manifest ever since scores of eager young journalists descended upon Bessemer, Alabama, last winter to cover the union effort there to organize an Amazon distribution center. American liberals know that something is missing from the body politic, and that something is a labor movement with sufficient strength to not only boost pay, but also wield the kind of political power that once pushed Midwestern Republicans to raise the minimum wage, vote for civil rights laws, and even increase social spending. If West Virginia had the union density today that it did at the start of Joe Manchin’s career, the mountain state would be solidly Democratic and its senior senator far more of an enthusiast for the social programs and tax-the-rich proposals he now scorns.
Non-union workers, no matter how aggrieved, do not go on strike. They can quit their job, even walk out together for a shift or two, but in the absence of some independent organization, almost always a trade union, their protest soon dissolves. Virtually every strike in today’s headlines, from that of the agricultural implement workers in Iowa, to the coal miners in Alabama, and the studio crews in Hollywood, are members of unions formed eighty years ago in the Great Depression. It does not matter if the union was once radical or conservative; organization is essential to any sustained and potent worker protest. And once the strike is over, that same organization does not fade away. It stays right there in management’s face, policing the contract, mobilizing the workers, lobbying politicians, and preparing for the next contract fight.
So, this isn’t a strike wave. We sorely need one, but that first requires the unionization of millions of new workers. Let’s therefore remember the words of Joe Hill just before he was executed by a firing squad in 1915: “Don’t mourn—Organize!”
Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward took a very different stance about the line of causation arguing that waves of worker militancy and strikes, organized outside unions, give rise to unions.
“For the most part, strikes, demonstrations, and sit-downs spread during the mid-1930s despite existing unions rather than because of them.” Their studies showed that “with virtually no exceptions, the union leaders worked to limit strikes, not to escalate them.” (quoted in Mark Engler and Paul Engler, This is an Uprising, p. 46)
There’s a massive new industry of “resilience workers” who clean up after climate disasters. These overwhelmingly immigrant workers are exploited, work in very dangerous conditions, and are organizing for change.
A thoroughly reported piece in The New Yorker by Sarah Stillman, “The Migrant Workers Who Follow Climate Disasters,” explores the shadowy world of “disaster-restoration” companies making a killing, the workers they exploit, and the heroic efforts of workers to organize a response through Resilience Force. A deeply moving, must-read investigation.
[Bellaliz] Gonzalez is part of a new transitory workforce, made up largely of immigrants, many undocumented, who follow climate disasters around the country the way agricultural workers follow crops, helping communities rebuild. She’d addressed damage inflicted by hurricanes, fires, floods, and tornadoes across seven states, scrubbing mildew blooms and clearing pools of toxic sludge from universities, factories, and airports. The work seemed meaningful and occasionally made her feel like a lucky tourist: she sometimes stayed in the shambles of beachside resorts she couldn’t otherwise afford. But it felt risky, too. In 2019, in Santa Rosa Beach, Florida, after Hurricane Michael, she gutted the insulation of a home without proper protective gear and felt little pieces of fibreglass cutting her skin. The same year, in the aftermath of Hurricane Florence, she helped demolish a serpentarium in North Carolina; the former owner, an eccentric herpetologist, had been murdered by his wife in the adjoining apartment. On the walls of the exhibits, placards had warned visitors of the effects of snake venom: “The bitten extremity swells to massive proportions . . . and your eyes weep blood.” Now the threat was the foul-smelling dust kicked up by the demolition, which left her coughing and wheezing. . . .
Today, the structure of the industry has radically transformed. For much of the twentieth century, many disaster-restoration businesses were mom-and-pop shops; they earned mostly modest revenues for repairing mostly modest problems (a house burned down by a stray cigarette, a chimney felled in a storm), and occasionally got windfalls when an outsized catastrophe struck. The work was done mainly by local laborers. In recent years, though, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, greenhouse-gas emissions from human activities have made extreme weather more common and more intense. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration noted a new U.S. record in 2020: a total of twenty-two “billion-dollar disasters.” Insurance companies paid out at least seventy-six billion dollars for repairs that year, and the government paid more than a hundred billion. “We’re going to spare no expense,” Biden told the Federal Emergency Management Agency this past May, announcing that he would double its funds to prepare for extreme weather.
As money poured in, companies consolidated, and began to chase extreme weather across the country, competing for insurance payouts and government contracts. . . .
In the past year, I followed Resilience Force through more than twenty disaster recoveries during one of the fiercest periods of extreme weather on record. I spoke with more than a hundred workers, storm survivors, advocates, and climate-change experts, and reviewed thousands of pages of Department of Labor records, death-and-injury reports, and documents emerging from worker-mistreatment litigation. All told, I found more than two thousand credible claims of harm to workers, including instances of fatal or injurious working conditions, stolen wages, assaults, and labor trafficking. I often thought of a worry that preoccupied Gonzalez in Midland: that news cameras descend when a storm or a fire arrives but move on before the work of recovery—often its own disaster—begins.
Taxi drivers in NYC won a huge victory on November 3rd.
As Mother Jones reported, after a two-week hunger strike, workers won a breakthrough to address the crisis of unsustainable debt the city had helped create. The New York Taxi Workers Alliance, led by the brilliant Bhairavi Desai, mounted a strategic, disciplined, imaginative campaign to win the breakthrough.
Two weeks ago, New York City taxi drivers and their supporters launched a hunger strike. Their goal was to pressure Mayor Bill de Blasio and the city to guarantee the loans they took out to purchase medallions required to operate Yellow cabs.
On Wednesday, they achieved a near total victory.
In a course reversal, de Blasio has agreed to have the city serve as a backstop for the debt past administrations loaded onto drivers. That will allow the cabbies, many of whom still owe more than $500,000, to reduce their debts to $170,000 at most. Their loan payments will also be capped at about $1,100 per month. So far, the agreement covers drivers who owe money to Marblegate, which became the largest holder of medallion loans after the bubble burst.
Thousands of fast-food workers in California staged a one-day strike to support the passage of state legislation that would allow workers to engage in sectoral bargaining with employers.
From the LA Times reporting
When you pass a McDonald’s you might assume it’s operated by the global mega-corporation. But in many cases, it’s a franchise owned and run as a small business.
This model has been a pathway for entrepreneurs — many of whom are women, immigrants and minorities — to build wealth and become upwardly mobile. But it has also left workers in one of America’s largest industries with little formal recourse for poor wages or unsafe work conditions.
Fast-food workers at stores scattered across California plan to walk off the job Nov. 9 and rally outside McDonald’s locations in San Diego, Los Angeles, San Jose, Oakland and Sacramento in a push to expand legal liability beyond individual franchisees to their corporate franchisers and to protest workplace health and safety conditions.
The protests aim to pressure state lawmakers to support AB 257, a proposed law that would establish a statewide Fast Food Sector Council made up of workers, corporate representatives, franchisees and state officials that would meet every three years to negotiate industry standards on wages, work hours and other conditions for fast-food workers.
The California Assembly is due to vote on the AB 257, also known as the “FAST Act,” in January.
Workers at Starbucks are holding an election in Buffalo, and may very well win.
As the Associated Press reported in “Rare Starbucks union vote set to begin in Buffalo,”
Dan Graff, director of the Higgins Labor Program at the University of Notre Dame, said many workers are burned out and tired of playing by the pre-coronavirus rules. They were deemed essential during the pandemic, but find they are still struggling with inflation, child care and disrespect from employers and customers.
“It’s a fraught public space that we live in right now and more workers have had the opportunity to reflect and think about these issues,” Graff said.
Pro-union workers say they deserve more from Starbucks, which reported record sales of $29 billion in its 2021 fiscal year. They say the company had chronic problems even before the pandemic, including understaffed stores and faulty equipment. They want greater say in how stores are run and how much workers are paid.
“I think if we raise the bar at Starbucks, not only do we make it a better company, a better workplace, but we make the industry better since it is the leader in the industry,” said Jaz Brisack, who has worked for about a year at a Starbucks in downtown Buffalo. Brisack also helped organize a successful unionization effort at Spot Coffee, a small Buffalo chain, in 2019.
In a bizarrely inappropriate anti-union soliloquy, former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz said this.
Media coverage of workers’ organizing is on the rise.
Ben Smith wrote a fascinating piece (with a title that vastly overstates the case!) for the New York Times titled “Why the Media Loves Labor Now”
. . . at a moment of political turmoil, economic change and a pandemic-driven focus on how we work, labor has become a hot news beat.
That’s evident in the new energy of the niche publications Labor Notes, Strikewave and Payday Report. There has also been a recent expansion of labor coverage at major publications.
Steven Greenhouse, a former labor reporter for The New York Times, told me that for a time in the 2000s, he was the “the only full-time daily labor reporter.” Now, there are at least a dozen at legacy outlets and digital ones like Vice and HuffPost.
The change is also evident in how some of the biggest economic stories are covered. Reports on companies ranging from Amazon to Uber are not as likely to fall under the boosterish genre of gee-whiz technology stories these days. And the tales of heroic entrepreneurs have given way to coverage focused on their employees — stories documenting the complex and sometimes damaging effects of the digital transformation on warehouse workers, taxi drivers, delivery workers and white-collar employees.
There’s also a new organization, More Perfect Union, devoted to telling workers stories to the public — stories like this: Frito-Lay Worker Electrocuted, Denied Medical Care & Surveilled by Company Agents
Further evidence of the cultural resonance of labor comes from New York Times Op-Docs picking up the funny, trenchant, and horrifying 13-minute film Jobs for All! by Swedish filmmakers Maximilien Van Aertryck and Axel Danielson.
New data on working-class voters point to the centrality of labor organizing to save multi-racial democracy.
We have some problems with the approach and framing of the new YouGov/Jacobin poll that’s gotten so much attention this week, and with David Leonhardt’s piece about it in the New York Times, which implicitly adopts the false frame that “working class” voters are white. But Bhaskar Sunkara’s conclusion here seems right.
Political pundits often talk about swing voters as if they were upscale suburbanites, like “soccer moms” or “office-park dads.” And some are. But many are blue-collar. They are the successors to the so-called Reagan Democrats, who let Republicans win the White House in the 1980s and Democrats retake it in the 1990s.
This century, blue-collar swing voters helped elect Barack Obama twice, Donald Trump once and Joe Biden in 2020. They have also played a deciding role in congressional and state elections, including in Virginia last week.
In the current polarized political atmosphere, many college graduates follow politics obsessively — almost as if it were a sport — and identify with one of the two parties. Many working-class voters, on the other hand, vote for both parties and sit out some elections.
Figuring out what moves these swing voters is a crucial question in American politics. It has become an urgent question for the Democratic Party, which is struggling to win working-class votes in many places, including some Asian and Latino communities.
This morning, a creative new poll exploring these issues is being released. It asks working-class respondents — defined as people without a bachelor’s degree — to choose between two hypothetical candidates. The candidates are described both personally (their gender, race and job category) and politically (including a sound bite in which they talk about their views).
A central conclusion is that infrequent voters are not a huge Democratic constituency just waiting to be inspired by a sufficiently progressive economic message. “That’s just a fantasy,” Bhaskar Sunkara, the founding editor of Jacobin, a socialist magazine and one of the poll’s sponsors, told me, “and it’s a fantasy we ourselves have engaged in.” (In fairness, numerous other people — including Trump and, well, me — have believed that same misplaced idea.)
The poll instead finds that working-class swing voters hold a swirl of progressive and conservative views. “To mobilize these voters will take a lot of grass-roots organizing efforts, particularly more labor-union-centered organizing,” Sunkara said. “There is no simple programmatic solution” — for either party.
We close The Platypus this week with Mary Beth Maxwell’s inspiring report on the Kellogg workers’ strike in Omaha
What blows me away about the Kelloggs strikers (and many of the strikes happening across the US right now) is that they are not fighting only for their own paychecks and benefits. They are saying NO to “two tier” systems: management says to the current workers — “hey you can keep your wages and benefits, but for the next round of folks hired we will make cuts, ok?” and these workers are saying NO — we’re on the picket line to make sure these are good jobs for new workers hired who come after us — we all need good jobs and we’re not going to sell the younger folks out.
Similarly several of these strikes have been workers putting themselves on the line to reject a two-tier system that gives temp workers a raw deal — they do the same job, work side by side with others making better pay and benefits, every three months they wait to see if they get re-signed and still have work.
The union workers on strike are just asking for their fair share and they are looking out for each other not just themselves. At a time in our country of so much division and strife, I find these worker actions to be such a ray of hope — we are all in this together, we are our brother’s and sister’s keeper. This is what unions do and this is why public opinion about unions is at an all time high. All workers deserve what these union workers have; a way to speak up and bargain for their fair share.
Oh, and this video sending up the mainstream economics profession made us laugh.