Will the Labor Movement Get its Sh*t Together?

Members of the United Auto Workers strike outside of a John Deere plant on Oct. 20, 2021, in Ankeny, Iowa. [Charlie Neibergall/AP photo]

By Samantha Grasso

Between the Great Resignation – the phenomenon of workers quitting en masse, sometimes for better jobs – and strikes at major companies such as Kellogg’s and John Deere, 2021 was a big year for building worker power, at least according to popular media outlets.

“Workers say [‘Striketober’] has been a long time coming,” read the headline of a recent NBC News piece. “Strikes are sweeping the labor market as workers wield new leverage,” claimed a Washington Post article. In The Guardian, former U.S. labor secretary Robert Reich opined that employees “have declared a national general strike until they get better pay and improved working conditions.”

But is there really a revolution afoot? Not everybody is convinced. “We're not looking at a wholly unprecedented strike wave,” labor reporter Michelle Chen told me recently. “I think that because the media doesn't follow the ins and outs of the labor movement on a day-to-day basis, it's kind of easy for them to look at two data points and be like, ‘It's a trend.’”

Nonetheless, 2021 did see some important labor developments, and 2022 could see them evolve even further. I interviewed Chen and her Belabored podcast co-host Sarah Jaffe about where the movement is headed.

Strike wave? Not quite.

The pandemic accelerated preexisting organizing efforts by art museum workers, journalists and nurses, while other health care workers and those deemed “essential” were among those leading the strikes of 2021.

But even then, “we’re nowhere near a general strike … a six percent quit rate among service industry employees is not a general strike,” Jaffe said. Though Americans’ approval of unions is trending upward, union membership is significantly lower than it was 20 to 30 years ago. In 1990, 16 percent of workers across the country were union members. In 2000, that percentage declined to 13.5 percent. In 2020, it fell even further to 10.8 percent.

The labor department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics recorded 12 strikes in 2021, though the bureau doesn’t track strikes of fewer than 1,000 people. Bureau data shows 29 strikes recorded in 2001 and 145 strikes in 1981. But both of those years are dwarfed by 1974, which saw 424 strikes — one of the highest in American history.

Strikes are still an essential tool of the labor movement, even if they’re not “trending,” Chen said. But a movement doesn’t have to be unprecedented to be important. “I think it's more important to look at what workers are experiencing in their day-to-day lives and whether or not they feel that they have agency and [are] willing to take collective action.”

“Striketober” has consequences

When done poorly, reporting on strikes can have an adverse effect on people’s understanding of the labor movement and their place within it. Jaffe said coverage of “Striketober” often skewed toward dramatic stories “rather than the particulars of agreements, demands, tensions and the realities of power. It skewed toward the new and didn't cover the places where good deals were struck before a strike, or where the strike dragged on for months.”

“I think the most important role of the labor movement is to help people at least feel that they're part of a bigger collective of workers in their day-to-day lives. That's work that is slow and sometimes painful,” Chen said. “I have to be somewhat modest as a labor reporter … looking for a big trend piece or … splashy breaking news item doesn't always serve the labor movement or the interest of workers who are really needing a commitment [from reporters] that may last years or even decades.”

Workers have realized that work really won’t love you back

Chen said during the pandemic she’s been drawn to stories of workers who have confronted serious public health issues for the first time and have been willing to challenge their bosses over “issues of life and death.”

At restaurants and retail stores like Sephora, she followed “workers who really started to question to what extent the bosses actually cared … whether they lived or died,” Chen said, adding that the pandemic forced people to confront choices “like whether or not they were willing to walk off the job in order to protect themselves, or […] to potentially be retaliated against if they stood up for a coworker.”

Stay or go?

The Great Resignation has given workers more individual leverage. But “just because […] a higher quit rate is good for bargaining power doesn’t mean it’s good for union organizing,” Jaffe said.

Recalling a conversation she had with a video game worker, Jaffe said that organizing happens in the space between someone loving their job and deciding to quit. “Good organizers will be looking at this going, ‘How do we get people to stay and fight rather than quit and move on?’” Jaffe said.

New work, new strategy

Discussing new models of employment, Chen pointed to “unconventional workforces” that have managed to organize outside the scope of traditional labor law. This includes home-based day care workers in California in 2020, and taxi drivers and delivery workers in New York City, none of which are recognized as employees under federal law.

“If the labor movement wants to get its shit together, it needs to look at organizing the working class, not just individual employees and workplaces,” Chen said. “A considerable slot of the workforce [is] perhaps looking not just for another job but maybe for the next stage of their lives […] and I think that those people are ripe for organizing.”

Mainstream outlets remain complicit

Meanwhile, mainstream media outlets are still underinvesting in the labor beat. You wouldn’t send a rookie to cover Congress, said Jaffe, but “people have no problem sending somebody who knows nothing about unions to go cover a major strike,” she said. “There's just little interest on the part of these publications in investing [in] and hiring labor beat reporters and letting them get good at their jobs.”

“We so often work in conditions similar to those we write about: precarious, underpaid, chasing the last paycheck while pursuing the next story,” Jaffe elaborated via email. “Ultimately, the thing that teachers say – our working conditions are our students' learning conditions – leads me to say that the conditions of labor reporters mirror the conditions of the people we cover. When America gives a damn about working class people, it will care more about labor reporting.”

(Chen is contributing editor at Dissent, and Jaffe is a reporting fellow at Type Media Center and the author of Work Won’t Love You Back.)