Good union jobs for all

By Workers Strike Back. Published September 1, 2023

For decades billionaires and corporations have been making record profits, yet workers’ buying power is stagnant or falling because our pay is eroded by inflation.

This is why a majority of US residents – 67% according to a recent Gallup poll – approve of and recognize the need for unions. Unions are the key institutions in society right now that can remedy our falling living standards. 

There is no good reason that all workers can’t have unions – but there are plenty of obstacles. 

Joe Biden claims that he’s “the most pro-union president” in history. The bar is incredibly low. Throughout history, Democrats and Republicans alike have broken strikes and undermined unions Not even a year ago, Joe Biden broke a strike of railroad workers who were fighting for paid sick leave and safety on the job. Workers have decades of experience that show us that we can’t rely on electing Democrats if we want to rebuild the labor movement.

What will it take to win good union jobs for all?

We’re witnessing a wave of union organizing. Between October 1, 2021 and September 30, 2022, workers filed 2,510 union representation petitions with the National Labor Relations Board – a 53% increase from the 1,638 petitions filed the previous year. In addition, workers and their unions filed 17,988 unfair labor practice (ULP) charges, overwhelmingly against employers for using illegal tactics to intimidate their employees. Total case intake at the NLRB increased 23%, to a total of 20,498 cases – the largest single-year increase since 1976.

And workers are winning. Unions had a win rate of 77% in NLRB elections during the first 6 months of 2022. This is in spite of rampant, often illegal union busting by employers. Three-quarters of employers facing union drives brought in union-busting lawyers to try to stop workers from organizing, 45% threatened workers with workplace closures or outsourcing, and 49% made illegal promises of improvements at work in return for workers voting “no”.

Winning a union election, however, is only the first half of the battle. Next comes winning the first contract. Most unions working under the present system still don’t have a contract twelve months after winning their recognition election, and about a third never get one.

And in those contracts, we have to fight for concrete, bold demands like $30 an hour or a 32-hour week for 40 hours pay. This is true on pay and every other issue, because when we win, our wins need to be life changing – not just “a seat at the table” or “a foot in the door”. The attacks on workers in recent decades have been historic. We need equally historic victories to reverse this trend.

The bosses will do whatever it takes to stop a union drive, including firing union supporters as a way to intimidate other workers. Every time an employer fires workers for union activities, rather than just filing with the NLRB and waiting months – sometimes years – for a ruling, unions should go all-out to shut them down. Starbucks has gotten away with firing over 200 union organizers. A wait-and-see approach gives momentum to the bosses. Instead, what’s needed is to build solidarity rallies, coordinate escalating workplace actions, and politically appeal for financial solidarity for the affected worker so they don’t have to accept a new job while they’re fighting for theirs back.

The unions that exist today were built by mass pressure. The National Labor Relations Act was only passed after three city-wide general strikes, led by Socialist and Communist organizers, in 1934. The auto industry was only organized after a series of massive, totally illegal sit-in strikes beginning in Flint, Michigan in the freezing winter of 1936-37.

It’s that fighting energy that will be needed in UAW’s upcoming battle against the Big Three automakers. With recent polls showing that three out of four Americans support the workers in their contract fight, it will be crucial for the union to leverage that support, alongside the strike readiness of autoworkers themselves to extract urgently-needed concessions like a four-day workweek and union protections at new Electric Vehicle plants, many of which are in the South.

Unions also can’t afford to ignore major global threats like climate change, which inevitably hit workers the hardest. Climate catastrophes like the Maui wildfire underscore the urgency of the situation. We need a massive green jobs program, which could create millions of good-paying union jobs in clean energy and infrastructure projects. Winning this would be no easy task, especially with the rotten relationship between many labor leaders and the Democratic Party – a party connected by a million threads to the fossil fuel corporations profiting off climate change. The labor movement needs to make a clean break from the Democratic Party and fight for democratic workers’ control of big energy corporations. Because we can’t control what we don’t own.

Workers Strike Back is dedicated to reigniting the fighting spirit that first built the labor movement. “Good Union Jobs for All” is one of our core demands. That’s why we are helping workers build the most significant organizing drive in the U.S. today: the struggle for $30/hour and a union at Amazon’s most important facility worldwide, the KCVG Air Hub in Northern Kentucky. That’s why we supported workers who wanted to fight for a stronger contract at UPS, and it’s why we stand with workers everywhere who are organizing to fight for more.