Stagnant wages, high inflation, a tight labor market and the new threat of artificial intelligence are sparking aggressive worker movements from Hollywood to Detroit.
Today’s workforce is “much more militant" about having a voice in the workplace amid difficult economic conditions, especially following a string of recent labor successes, Thomas Kochan, co-director of the Sloan Institute for Work and Employment Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s School of Management, told The Messenger.
“Workers are more aggressive now,” Kochan said. “They see that there's a possibility of negotiating for better terms. They see successes in some settlements that are coming in, that wage settlements in negotiation are higher than they've been in decades. And so they're emboldened, and they're taking more direct action,” he said.
United Airlines and its pilots union struck a deal on July 14 that will raise members' salaries up to 40.2% over four years. Last month, the West Coast International Longshore and Warehouse Union came to a tentative agreement with the Pacific Maritime Association after more than a year of tense negotiations that will reportedly raise employee pay by 32%. And in early June, NewsGuild members at The New York Times ratified an agreement that set a $65,000 salary floor, with an immediate 10.6% salary boost for all members.
Workers are leveraging their power within the tight U.S. labor market as growing discontent with wages adds fuel to their fire. Inflation increased by 3% from June 2022 to June 2023, while real average hourly earnings increased just 1.2% over the same period, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ (BLS) June 2023 data.
“People have really felt that they've fallen behind, and now is the time for them to try to take advantage of tight labor markets," Kochan said. “We've seen enormous upsurge in worker activism and organizing around the country at a magnitude that we haven't seen since the 1970s.”
Since 2019, workers at major corporations, including Starbucks, Amazon and NBC News Digital, have voted to unionize. Michelle Eisen, a national leader of the Starbucks Workers United movement, told The Messenger she sees only increased momentum ahead for the union effort at Starbucks.
"What is keeping the momentum going is a solidarity that is across the working class," Eisen said. "It doesn't necessarily have to be segregated to certain industries."
The Pandemic Effect
The initial push to unionize, however, largely stemmed from the pandemic. As COVID-19 raged, many members of the working class were on the front lines as essential workers, putting their health at risk.
"We cannot downplay how significant that was in the lives of the working class," Eisen said. "We were hearing all of these CEOs saying how much profit they were making during this very awful time in the world and in our lives, and we weren't seeing our fair share of what was being brought in."
The first Starbucks vote to unionize happened in December 2020, months into the pandemic. In just 18 months, 340 Starbucks locations have voted to unionize, representing about 8,500 baristas, according to Eisen.
"These are the ripple effects of what these corporations put their workers through in the early days of the pandemic," she said.
Starbucks did not immediately respond to a request for comment by The Messenger.
Last year, 2,510 union representation petitions were filed with the National Labor Relations Board — a 53% increase from the 1,638 petitions in 2021 and the highest level in 6 years. Petitions filed at the NLRB rose 2%, to 1,200, between October 2022 and May. As of December, 14.3 million U.S. workers were union members, according to the BLS. That's down from union membership of 16.6 million 30 years ago.
The AI Threat
Artificial intelligence has also become a flashpoint in negotiations, taking the spotlight in the first double strike of SAG-AFTRA and the Writers Guild of America in 63 years.
Ahead of the Hollywood strike, the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) presented what it referred to as a "groundbreaking AI proposal" that would require a performer's consent for the creation and use of digital replicas used in films and TV shows, according to a statement obtained by The Messenger.
SAG-AFTRA COO and General Counsel Duncan Crabtree-Ireland said at a press conference that AI studios suggested scanning and using background actors' likeness in perpetuity for one day's pay. An AMPTP spokesperson said this claim is false and that its current proposal only permits a company to use the digital replica of a background actor in the motion picture for which the background actor is employed.
“I’d say we’re pretty far apart on AI, mainly because the companies refuse to recognize that you can’t expect people to sign over their name, image, likeness and voice — their persona — to some corporate conglomerate with no right to ever say what they’re going to do with it in the future,” Crabtree-Ireland said at a picket line outside of the Walt Disney Studios lot in Burbank, California. “We will never agree to terms like that."
Kochan said that worker concerns about AI are spreading to other industries outside of Hollywood and will be front and center in many negotiations this year.
"Unions are seeking not only job security protections and/or adjustment assistance for those who might be displaced by AI or other technologies but also are seeking a greater voice in how the technologies are used, including what problems are they being designed to address and how might they be used to augment worker skills, not just designed to replace workers," he said.
The contentious negotiations between the United Auto Workers (UAW) and General Motors, Ford Motor and Stellantis are also centered on technological change as the shift toward battery-powered vehicles puts manufacturing jobs at risk.
“The militancy we're seeing in, for example, the UAW rhetoric about the auto industry is something that's different than it was several years ago,” Patrick Anderson, founder and chief executive officer of Anderson Economic Group, told The Messenger. “One of the causes with the auto industry is that the union and its workers are now contending with the potential displacement of many of their jobs by taxpayer-subsidized batteries.”
Potentially Billions in Losses
The potential walkout of 340,000 United Parcel Service workers, however, could be one of the most consequential labor events in recent memory. Teamsters and UPS returned to the table on Wednesday after two weeks of silence following a breakdown of negotiations. The union has said it will go on strike August 1 if an agreement is not reached by July 31, when its existing contract expires.
This would not only be the largest strike against a single employer in U.S. history, but “one of the costliest in at least a century,” according to a report from Anderson Economic Group released last week. The group estimates that even a 10-day work stoppage could result in $7 billion in total losses.
“Package delivery is now critical to the United States economy,” Patrick Anderson said. “We've never had a situation where this kind of modern economy has had a third of its small package delivery interrupted for any time period."
Big economic threats will likely lead to big payouts, according to MIT's Kochan. And this could lead to snowballing momentum across industries.
"I think we're entering an era of sustained wage increases," Kochan said. "And especially in collective bargaining settings, like the UPS negotiations that are coming to a head, and at the end of this month, the auto industry."
"These are going to be expensive settlements," Kochan said. "And that's going to set some patterns for other unions to also negotiate big settlements."
Correction: A previous version of this story implied that The New York Times Guild contract had not yet been ratified. The New York Times Guild ratified its new contract on June 6.