The Daily - Are Unions Making a Comeback?

Episode Date: May 2, 2022

The United States is seeing a revival in union membership.In the last six months, the National Labor Relations Board has recorded a 60 percent increase in workers filing for petitions that allow for union elections to take place.The circumstances that have prompted these unionization efforts have some similarities with the period that brought the largest gain in union membership in U.S. history, during the 1930s.What can that era tell us about today, and are current efforts just a blip?Guest: Noam Scheiber, a reporter covering workers and the workplace for The New York Times.Want more from The Daily? For one big idea on the news each week from our team, subscribe to our newsletter. Background reading: Since the Great Recession, the college-educated have taken more frontline jobs at companies like Starbucks and Amazon. Now they’re helping to unionize them.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.

From The New York Times, I'm Sabrina Tavernisi. This is The Daily. History made in Buffalo, New York. Starbucks workers at the Elmwood Avenue location voted to unionize. Final tally, 19 to 8. It's significant because that is the first Starbucks to form a union at a company-operated store ever in America. Unionization efforts have been gaining steam across major companies. Today, Amazon workers at a Staten Island warehouse successfully voted to unionize. Workers at the New York City location of outdoor clothing and equipment seller REI have voted in favor of joining a union.

Now, this is the first major effort at an Apple store. Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. We got to thank Amazon because they made this all possible. We went for the juggler and we went for the top dog because we want every other industry, every other business to know that things have changed. We're going to unionize. We're not going to quit our jobs anymore. My colleague, Noam Scheiber, on the largest gain in union membership in U.S. history,

the 1930s, and what that era tells us about today. It's Monday, May 2nd. So, Noam, you cover labor for The New York Times, and I've been hearing a lot of reports about this flurry of activity with unions. We did an episode last month about this organizing in an Amazon warehouse in New York, and there are other reports, too. So I wanted to ask you, what are you seeing in terms of actual numbers? Well, we are definitely seeing signs of a revival in union membership. You know, before you form a union, at least one that's certified by the federal government, you have to file a petition

for an election with an agency called the National Labor Relations Board. And once you file that petition, then you and your co-workers can vote and vote in a union, potentially, that the government will effectively bless. And what we've seen is that over the past six months, those filings are up 60% over the same period one year earlier. Oh, wow. 60%. So a big surge in intent to form a union. Yes, very much so. In my seven years covering unions for The Times, I've never seen a jump that big. And it really is actually at odds with the trend, both in my lifetime and my career covering this stuff. Right. I mean, my understanding of the story of unions is that it's been one of decline. Correct. Yes. We're down from about a third of American workers in a union at its peak to about

10% today. So it's quite dramatic. And it turns out that unions are a really, really big deal for workers. There's a pretty big body of research showing that workers in unions make significantly more money than workers of the same profile who are not in unions. And over time, what we've seen is that as unions have declined, wages for a lot of workers, even workers not in unions, have tended to stagnate. We've seen a real rise in income inequality, a real concentration of wealth at the top. And all of this has corresponded to this really tough era for unions. And so a lot of people think that if you could trigger some sort of revival of the labor movement, you would start to see a reversal of all these trends that we've sort of bemoaned over the past several

decades. And so it could really, really be a big deal for workers and for the economy and for the entire country. So, Noam, do we know if the rise in filings you're talking about will actually result in reversing that decline, that decline in union membership? We don't know. But what we do know is that historically, a lot of things have to align at the same time for union membership to really take off. It's not just that the working conditions are bad. It's not just that workers are feeling emboldened or that inequality is really high. It's that all these things kind of happen at the same time. But the good news for unions is that if these things do align, the growth in union membership can be really, really quick.

And we actually saw this play out in the 1930s when we saw a huge expansion of union membership in a very short period of time. What exactly was happening in that period to prompt that huge expansion of unions? In the 1920s, the great American word was prosperity. Now the 30s have begun and there is a new word, depression. The country was in the throes of the Great Depression, which had obviously been an incredibly traumatic event.

Little man, what now? Well, you can always sell surplus apples, five cents apiece, on the street corner. And if you're bewildered, panicky at what's happening to you and your country, you aren't alone. But then things started to shift. Our responsibility is to all of the people in this country. This is a great national crusade. A crusade to destroy enforced idleness,

which is an enemy of the human spirit generated by this depression. At the same time, you started to have Congress pass and President Franklin Roosevelt sign laws that actually made it easier for workers to organize a union. To enforce minimum wages, to prevent excessive hours, to safeguard, define, and enforce collective bargaining. For the first time, it created a federally protected right to unionize. You couldn't be fired for trying to unionize. There was a process for voting in a union. These things hadn't existed before,

but FDR creates that essentially in the mid-1930s. And then the economy is actually starting to improve a bit. Unemployment is still very high, but it appears to be moving in the mid-1930s. And then the economy is actually starting to improve a bit. Unemployment is still very high, but it appears to be moving in the right direction. Never since my inauguration in March 1933 have I felt so unmistakably the atmosphere of American recovery. Workers are feeling a little bit better about their prospects.

Companies are starting to do better, sales are increasing, profits are coming back, and especially at some very large manufacturing companies like General Motors, you really start to see a rebound. In a few days, the Chevrolet Motor Company will announce a great new car. If you think back to the 1930s, GM was really at the forefront of the U.S. economy. The auto industry in those days was almost like the tech industry today. It was seen as this rising power.

You will get the thrill of a smooth 60-horsepower six-cylinder engine with a speed of 65 to 70 miles per hour. Cars had been around for a little while, but they were still relatively new technologies and they were seen as this thing that was going to kind of drive growth and take us into the future. You will get the thrill of ultra modern styling in smart new bodies by Fisher. We believe it is unquestionably the finest motor car this company has ever designed or built. So it was this central piece of the American economy that was also new. And it was really starting to see sales increase at that point. No question. Yeah. GM and the other automakers were really starting to bounce back. At the time, in the mid-1930s, GM employed about 250,000 workers

and they were producing about half the vehicles in the country. But there were some issues for workers that made it complicated at the very least. The first one is GM would typically shut its factories down once or twice a year and workers could be out of work for a month or two months while this retooling happened. And that was leading to some real anxiety and frustration. There's just a sense of, at any moment, you could be unemployed and no one wanted to be unemployed after the trauma of the Great Depression. The second thing that really was starting to build frustration in these factories was something that workers referred to with this kind of catch-all term called the speed-up. And the speed-up was this general idea that GM and the factories were going to continue to push you faster and faster and faster until your body was basically used up. Workers talked about having foremen just

kind of looming over them with stopwatches. And workers would talk about having to make like 100, 110, 120 hand motions per minute. So this was just an incredibly grueling job. And as time went on, people found that their bodies were really just breaking down. Okay, so it sounds like these jobs were hard physically, but they were also hard psychologically because they were unpredictable. That's right. And on top of that, there was a final factor, which is workers knew that the company was starting to do well again. And in fact, some of the most visible figures running the company, not least Alfred Sloan, who was the longtime president and chief executive of GM, were incredibly wealthy,

powerful figures. Alfred Sloan at the time was almost like a Jeff Bezos or an Elon Musk character today. He boasted about being worth $70 million, which in today's dollars would be well over a billion dollars. And workers just couldn't sort of fathom why, if the company was doing so well and producing such wealthy executives, why their lives couldn't be made a little bit easier. So in terms of the conditions you were talking about that have to line up, it sounds like what we're seeing here is, you know, this federal support for unions, workers experiencing pretty terrible working conditions. And at the same time, GM is actually doing incredibly well. The economy is on the rebound.

It's selling tons of cars. And workers are seeing that. And they're saying, hey, why don't we get more out of this? Yes. And I think there was one additional factor that may be underappreciated, but was actually really important, which is that even though these workers were toiling away in pretty lousy conditions, they were not the lowest rung workers in the workforce. A lot of them had some skills.

Some of them were even quite educated. A lot of them had some skills. Some of them were even quite educated. They saw themselves as being powerful, not powerless. And, you know, they actually made typically more than the average worker. All of this kind of gave them a sense that when things were not great at work, they might be able to change it. They might be able to take matters into their own hands. So what do these workers do? So they actually start a union. The United Automobile Workers Union is founded in 1935. And at first, it's a pretty weak union. But by 1936, something starts to happen. In July of that year, there's a terrible heat wave in the Midwest. It's over 100 degrees for about a week.

And workers in these factories are really feeling it. They're getting heat stroke. They're going to the hospital. Some are dying. And so the union starts to gain momentum. And it's signing more and more people up. But they're not really successful at getting the company to recognize them. And the leaders of the UAW decide that they have to do something really dramatic in order to get GM's attention.

These were days when history changed its course. The sit-down strikes began on December 30th. And so on December 30th of 1936, at 7 in the morning at a plant in Flint, 50 workers sit down at their workstations. And the decision to sit down is actually a strategic one. Because if you sit down at your workstation and the company wants to disrupt the strike, they have to come in and physically remove you. Which is much harder than if you're outside striking and they just send in other workers. And so this sit down starts at that plant in Flint. By the end of that day, it spreads to a much bigger plant in Flint.

And over the next few days, it's spreading all across the Midwest. Workers also establish picket lines in Cleveland, Ohio, Norwood, Ohio, Toledo, Ohio, Janesville, Wisconsin, St. Louis, Missouri. This thing has really become a bona fide strike. Roughly half of GM's workforce of 250,000 people are pretty quickly striking at their plants. The few hundred workers who had the leading roles in the strike stayed in the plant.

Thousands on the outside carried on their important parts, while the sit-in strikers maintained a disciplined existence inside the plants and sang, when they tie a can to a union man, sit down, sit down. When they give him the sack, they'll take him back, sit down, sit down. When the speed up comes, just twiddle your thumbs, sit down, sit down. When the boss won't talk, don't take a walk. Sit down. Sit down. They sang, and they dug in for the duration. GM is really starting to feel this. They're losing millions of dollars each week.

And so on January 11th, about two weeks in, they decide to respond. And what they do is two things. They cut off the heat at this big plant in Flint, and it's only 16 degrees outside, so pretty quickly it's very chilly inside the plant. And two, when supporters of the strikers come in to bring food

that evening, a company police officer, a company security person, blocks the shipment of food, and suddenly all hell breaks loose. What observers describe as the most crucial battle in American labor history, involving nearly 100,000 men, has practically shut down the entire American motor industry.

From Michigan, where the strike started, we bring you these actual pictures of a riot in progress. There's a complete melee that goes on. What happens when a crowd of strikers goes crazy? When destruction becomes the order of the day? Flint police arrive. Meanwhile, workers are defending their positions.

They're throwing bottles and rocks and equipment. Local police use tear gas in a last effort to disperse the crowd. And at a certain point, the police use tear gas to try to subdue the workers. But luckily for the workers, the wind blows the tear gas back at the policemen. This is not vandalism, you see there.

They are breaking these windows to let the air in and to let the tear gas out. And eventually this is known as the Battle of the Running Bulls, bulls being slain for police because they were actually forced to retreat by the use of their own tear gas, which got in their eyes and caused them to disperse. And a lot of these details come from a University of Michigan historian named Sidney Fine, who wrote a definitive account of this strike. And what Fine describes is that next, the governor of Michigan, who is an ally of President Roosevelt, a progressive governor, sends in the National Guard.

But critically, he tells them, you're just there to keep the peace. You're not supposed to crush the strike. So another month goes by. GM continues to feel the pressure until finally, on February 11th, GM essentially gives in. until finally, on February 11th, GM essentially gives in. They agree to recognize the union. They effectively make them the sole representative of the workers. And they announce a 10% wage increase.

General Motors workers in Flint get the news of the settlement and the celebration is spontaneous. After the long, patient struggle in the factory, the men go home. There was a great sense of release, like the end of a war or the overthrow of a despot. Okay, so the workers win and manage to inflict quite a bit of pain on the company. No question. When all is said and done, they've lost several billion dollars in today's dollars during this strike. It's just an enormous cost to the company. And what happens is other employers are watching this very carefully, and they are becoming freaked out about what might happen to them. So in March, U.S. Steel decides that it's going to recognize a union in its industry

rather than risk a strike of the kind that we saw at GM. And pretty soon, union membership is really exploding. of the kind that we saw at GM. And pretty soon, union membership is really exploding. We see oil field workers, textile workers, furniture manufacturing workers, food, tobacco, streetcar operators, even newspaper reporters start to unionize. And we go from about 12% of American workers

who are unionized in 1935 to about 34% in the early 1950s. So it really takes off. And all throughout this time, workers who are unionizing are starting to see real gains. Their work days are capped at eight hours and their work weeks get capped at 40 hours. They get time and half pay for overtime

if they have to work longer than that. Eventually they start getting healthcare benefits too. So this is a huge win for these workers. And they really quickly start to see the gains that the companies are reaping being pretty widely distributed. So that strike effectively kicked off the modern labor movement. And in a lot of ways, it gives us a few really important clues about what might be happening this time. We'll be right back. So, Noam, what about the 1930s helps us understand what might happen today?

Well, there are definitely a number of similarities between today and the 1930s. Obviously, you have the trauma that workers felt during the pandemic, which is not so different than the trauma that workers felt during the Depression. You know, suddenly you feel vulnerable. You feel betrayed. You feel like these things that you knew to be solid have disappeared. And you want an institution, maybe something like a union, to give you more security going forward. The second thing is you have an environment, a political environment, a regulatory environment, that's pretty friendly to unions.

Joe Biden, like Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930s, has been incredibly outspoken in support of unions. And some of the federal agencies that work in this area, especially the National Labor Relations Board, have also been incredibly supportive of workers seeking to form unions. The general counsel of that agency, which enforces workers' labor rights, has been very aggressive in prosecuting things like retaliation against workers who are trying to form unions. So that also is pretty similar to the 1930s. And then you have to think about where we are in the economy today. Just like in the 1930s, we had this traumatic event, but since then things have started to get better. We now have these labor shortages. Employers are constantly talking about

how they can't get enough workers in the door. But at the same time, the workers feel like they're not sharing in all the gains that the companies are making as the economy bounces back. So they feel a kind of disconnect in the way that they did in the 1930s. And the last thing is, you have to look at the type of worker who's kind of at the center of this unionization trend. If you think back to the 1930s, the people at GM were not the most marginal worker at the lowest rung of the workforce. And I think we're seeing something similar today, where the people who are often leading this unionization campaign, many of them are college-educated people, have graduated from college. That's not to say that people who haven't been to college aren't forming unions too, but if you look at where these union campaigns appear to be getting

traction, it's Starbucks, it's not McDonald's, it's REI, not Walmart. And that's not for lack of effort on the part of unions. Over the past decade or two, we've had some very high-profile unions spend tens of millions of dollars trying to unionize fast food workers, workers at the likes of McDonald's and Burger King. We had a very high-profile campaign that tried to unionize Walmart workers and spent tens of millions of dollars doing that. And those campaigns just never really gained a ton of traction, certainly not the kind of traction that we've seen at Starbucks and REI over the past several months. But, Noam, why college grads? I mean, why are they the special sauce here? Well, it really goes back to the Great Recession of 2008.

That was an incredibly deep and painful recession. What was especially tough about that recession is that people who had recently graduated from college had an incredibly difficult time finding jobs, at least jobs that were on a par with their skill set. Right. I remember interviewing a bunch of college grads in Washington, D.C. around 2010. So, of course, two years later, and they were still scooping ice cream and they were pretty unhappy. Yeah. And in a typical recession, that might happen for a year or two after the recession. But the economics research that we've seen come out in recent years shows that these effects actually continued on until about a decade or so after the Great Recession, really right up until the eve of the pandemic. And there are some very prominent examples that I think all of us have

come to recognize since then. You have Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who herself graduated from Boston University. She comes out of college. She majors in economics and international relations and spends much of her post-college years working as a waitress and a bartender before she eventually runs for Congress. Right. I remember when she came onto the scene, one of the reasons she was so popular is because she really spoke to a generation. That's right. And there are a number of people that I've interviewed who are involved in union campaigns now who fit this profile. I spoke with a man who graduated from Siena College in 2017 with a degree in political science. He did a number of sort of

social service jobs for several years after he graduated, but he never made more than $15 an hour at any of those jobs and finally quit the last one in late 2020. It took him a while to find another job. That job was at Starbucks, where he started at $15.50 an hour as a barista, and that was more than he'd ever made since he graduated from college. Wow. I talked to another woman who's a shift supervisor at a Starbucks in Mesa, Arizona. She graduated from Arizona State University with a bachelor's degree in music education. Then she got a master's degree in opera performance.

She started working at Starbucks not too long after the Great Recession in the early 2010s. And she just ended up staying there after having kids and getting married because she just needed the health care. And that was a place where she could get reliable health care benefits. So you see a lot of these college-educated folks who, for one reason or another, often having to do with the economy and not having other opportunities, ending up at companies like Starbucks. And when they get there, they don't always love it. They envision themselves maybe doing other things, maybe making more money, maybe having other options. And over the course of 10 or 15 years, this frustration really builds across a whole demographic of workers. And then, of course, there's the pandemic, right, which probably makes life a lot harder for the workers you were interviewing.

That's right. In a way, I think of what happened after the Great Recession and up until the pandemic as kind of the kindling. You know, this frustration is building and building. And then you have this pandemic, which really is kind of the spark. People are working in conditions that they think of as unsafe. Meanwhile, their companies are doing very well and oftentimes making record profits. And the workers feel like, well, these companies, not only are they not taking care of me and protecting me, but they're not even sharing in all of the profits that they're making during this period. Okay, so Noam, based on what you just said, we have a political environment that's friendly towards unions. We have pent-up frustration among workers.

And we have this type of worker that fuels some agency. And companies are doing really well. This is sounding a lot like what we saw in the 1930s. So does it mean that unions are about to take off? Well, we don't know, but it's not necessarily a slam dunk. And there are two big reasons to keep in mind here. Number one, workers just have less power today than they did in the 1930s. And that's largely because of the trends in globalization and automation since then.

Today, the typical worker is competing against workers on the other side of the world. They're competing against machines. They're not just competing against the worker down the street. And if you put that together, what that means for employers is that if workers get too expensive, or if employers start to think their workers are getting too pushy, then you can maybe make do with less of them. You can replace them with machines, you can send their jobs overseas, and that just makes workers a lot less powerful. And the second reason is that companies may be more motivated today to crush unions than they were even back in the 1930s. Why is that? Well, if you think about one other

big trend since the 1930s, it's that we've had a shift from a manufacturing-based economy to a much more service-based economy. And one big consequence of that shift from manufacturing to services is that labor costs typically have a much bigger impact on a company's bottom line. If you think about what service is, it's people. For a company like Starbucks, their labor costs are a big part of their business. Because if you think about all their other inputs, it's milk, it's beans, it's cups, these things are cheap. That's really different than a car plant where labor costs are relatively small because the other inputs are so expensive. It's glass different than a car plant where labor costs are relatively small because the other inputs are so expensive. It's glass, it's rubber, steel, big machines. So when you

think about it that way, the person in a service-based company is relatively expensive. And what companies like Starbucks have gotten really good at over the past several decades is figuring out how to minimize the cost of that person behind the counter serving you that coffee. They use really sophisticated algorithms and software that tells them at any point in the week or any point in the day how many people they're likely to need, and then they schedule around that. And if it turns out they need even fewer, then they'll send those people home. So you get weird things like shifts that lasted for like three hours and 15 minutes or four hours and 45 minutes. This is all because they are trying to minimize their labor costs at any point in time.

I've heard about this. This is called just-in-time scheduling, and it can be particularly brutal for workers and very profitable for companies. But Noam, what does that have to do with unions and why employers would want to crush them? Well, if you think about what a union does, from a company's perspective, it busts all that apart. Unions want predictable hours. They want more staffing, not less. They reduce flexibility. They increase wages, and because service companies believe that a big part of their game is keeping labor costs low, they may be even more motivated to make sure that unions don't exist. Right. So before, when manufacturing was king, labor costs were just one small part of what factories were dealing with. Today, we have the service sector, and labor costs are a much bigger part of their business.

So if labor costs rise, that goes to the very heart of their business model. That's exactly right. So, Noam, you've told us about this period when unions really took off and how that relates to today. But you've also told us that there are some really big obstacles when

it comes to unionization right now. And I guess I'm left wondering, which force is more powerful in our economy right now? I mean, which one is going to win out? Well, one thing that we know historically is that growth in union membership tends to come in spurts. We get these big waves of growth in union membership that happens in a pretty short amount of time. And I think what that tells you is that once one of these spurts gets going, it can be very hard to stop. The momentum just kind of builds on itself. Workers at one company see workers at another unionize, and they decide

they want a union too, and now they have evidence that it's possible. And that just kind of keeps going across companies, across industries. So I guess the question is, are we at a moment where that has really taken hold? Are we in a moment where the momentum has built to one of these bona fide spurts? Or are we still early enough in this process where it hasn't gotten enough momentum and employers who don't want this to happen can keep it in check? I don't really know the answer to that question. If you pressed me, I'd say we're not going to see a repeat of what we saw in the 1930s. But the thing to keep in mind is that even if we got just a few percentage points increase

in the rate of union membership, if we reverse that decades-long decline, that would affect millions of workers directly and probably millions of more workers who work in similar industries and whose employers would probably raise their wages and benefits because they don't want them to unionize. So even if we just see a modest upturn, which is entirely possible, the effects on the economy and on American workers could be enormous. Noam, thank you. Thank you, Sabrina. We'll be right back.

Here's what else you need to know today. Over the weekend, Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, made a wartime trip to Kyiv on Saturday and met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. We believe that we are visiting you to say thank you for your fight for freedom. Ms. Pelosi was the most senior elected American official to visit Kyiv. Her rare frontline trip signals a deepening U.S. commitment to Ukraine and comes as some civilians were being evacuated from a steel plant in the embattled Ukrainian port city of Mediupol. And the European Union will begin an embargo on Russian oil imports at the end of this year, a move that is expected

to increase economic pressure on Russia, where oil exports are a major part of the economy. The EU gets on average a quarter of its oil every year from Russia, amounting to half of Russia's oil exports. Germany was getting more than a third of its oil from Russia at the start of the war, but has in the past few weeks cut that to 12 percent. the war, but has, in the past few weeks, cut that to 12 percent. with help from John Ketchum. Contains original music by Alicia B. Etube, Dan Powell,

Marion Lozano, and Rowan Nemesto. It was engineered by Alicia B. Etube. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly. That's it for The Daily.'m sabrina tavernisi see you tomorrow