There’s been a lot of buzz around collective action recently. From threatened strikes at UPS and hospitals across the nation, walkoffs from Los Angeles city workers and United Auto Workers (UAW), and a near-record battle in Hollywood (where the WGA and SAG unions have gone on strike together for the first time in nearly 60 years), it’s been a hot year for workers exercising their bargaining power. Several factors have come together to make this business climate possible:
Tight Labor Market
Despite a rapid increase in interest rates (back up to levels not seen in 20 years), the labor force remains tight. This is especially true for demanding in-person jobs like hospitality & food service, nursing, and blue-collar manufacturing, squeezed by a wave of retirements from older workers and shortages of younger workers interested in the fields. It’s easier to ask for better pay and better treatment when you know there are 5 other places nearby who’d be happy to hire you.
High pro-union sentiment
Pro-union sentiment is at its highest level since the 1960s, according to Gallup’s annual Work and Education survey. A supermajority of American (67%) approve of unions in 2023 , and Americans’ support of specific unions are even higher, with 72% supporting television and film writers in the WGA strike and nearly 75% supporting UAW in its negotiations with auto companies.
Stronger public support for collective action makes it easier for well-established collective action engines, like unions, to garner public support against the corporations at the negotiating table. This includes enforcing union strike lines, as Drew Barrymore just found out — publish backlash to Barrymore taping new episodes of her talkshow forced her to pause it indefinitely until the WGA and SAG strikes end.
Generational Change
Millennials are now the largest generation in the workforce, and Millennials + Gen Z will soon constitute a majority. These younger generations have come of age amidst the Great Recession and the Covid-19 pandemic, events that exposed cracks in society with lopsided recoveries across the socioeconomic spectrum. New technological shifts that threaten industry upheaval, from the hot-again “AI” buzz to improved mechanical automation, make workers feel increasingly worried. With more tools at their disposal to organize disparate workers and a sense of unfairness around rising generational inequality, Millennials and Gen Z are more inclined to wield their market power and seek a better deal.
Strikes (and the threat of strikes) have earned workers some big wins, like United Airlines pilots getting a 40% pay increase over the next 4 years. At the same time, union membership is at historic lows, hovering just above 10% in 2022. It remains to be seen whether union success will prompt more widespread unionization, alternative methods of collective action, or if historically low-union industries will appease workers enough to maintain the implicit social contract within their workplaces.
Andrew Jabara 