Written by Taylor Johnston
Unionisation efforts involving some of the most recognisable names in business have dominated headlines across the United States in recent months. Starbucks workers in Buffalo, New York; and Amazon employees in Bessemer, Alabama, and on Staten Island, New York, have recently moved to unionise, as have workers at an REI store in Manhattan last week. Successful strikes at John Deere and Kellogg have drawn new attention to the state of the labour movement as well.
The prominence of these organising efforts, however, obscures the steady downward trend of union membership in the United States for more than four decades. In 1983, about 20% of employees belonged to a union; by 2021, that number had dropped to just over 10%, according to data from the US Bureau of Labour Statistics.
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Nearly all that decline has been in the private sector.
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Union membership among government workers at the federal, state and local levels has stayed fairly consistent — about one-third of workers, give or take a few percentage points — since the 1970s.
Among workers at private companies, on the other hand, union membership has steadily declined for decades, falling to 6% last year from 17% in 1983.
A little more than a third of US workers in the public sector are union members.
Ruth Milkman, a professor at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center and School of Labour and Urban Studies, said the stark difference in the public and private trends over the past four decades could be attributed to private-employer opposition, along with labour laws that are strongly tilted in favour of employers.
The union drives at Amazon in Bessemer and Starbucks in Buffalo were “textbook examples” of how an employer responds when faced with a unionisation effort, she said. Employers “pull out all the stops to try to do everything they can to undermine it, to convince workers not to vote for the union, to intimidate them into being afraid to do so,” she added.
This collection of tactics, carried out steadily over the years, slowly “erodes the unionisation rate,” Milkman said.
After the Starbucks union drive was announced in Buffalo, company officials visited from out of town. Workers who were in favour of unionising said that they found the officials’ presence to be disruptive and intimidating.
A spokesman for Starbucks, Reggie Borges, said that the company’s actions did not constitute union-busting, saying that the officials had held optional meetings for employees to learn about what unionisation might mean for them.
With the Bessemer drive, in which workers voted against unionising by a 2-to-1 margin, the National Labour Relations Board in November ordered a new union election after the union argued that Amazon’s installation of a collection box at the warehouse had given workers the impression the company was monitoring votes.
Amazon’s warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama is the ground zero of a battle over unionizing the American retail giant
Amazon, while not officially declaring opposition to unions, has waged a determined campaign to defeat the initiative https://t.co/Mfke7XDw2p pic.twitter.com/eDI7A9CS4k
— AFP News Agency (@AFP) March 29, 2021
“Our employees have always had the choice of whether or not to join a union, and they overwhelmingly chose not to join the RWDSU last year. We look forward to our team in BHM1 having their voices heard again,” Barbara Agrait, a spokeswoman for Amazon, said, referring to the Retail, Wholesale & Department Store Union at the Bessemer location.
Though union participation has fallen, labour action has not seen the same steady decline. Two recent banner years for work stoppages were 2018 and 2019. The action was driven in part by the “Red for Ed” education strikes, with teachers across the country organising walkouts for raises and school funding. After a lull in the first year and a half of the pandemic, work stoppages appear to have ticked up again in the fall.
“I see what’s happening right now as part of that strike wave,” said Lane Windham, a labour historian at Georgetown University. “Sort of that worker uprising that’s been going for a few years, but that has been definitely deepened by worker dissatisfaction during the pandemic.”
A record 4.5 million workers in the United States left their jobs in November 2021, and more than 4 million workers left their jobs in every month from July through November 2021, according to data from the Bureau of Labour Statistics.
“I think that that’s people voting with their feet. That’s people who don’t have a union saying, ‘I am not doing this anymore,’ ” Windham said. “So they’re either leaving their jobs or refusing to take bad jobs.”
The pandemic, with its many challenges, has contributed to labour shortages, Milkman said. In some cases, school closures and lack of available child care have led parents — most of them women — to stop working for pay. Other workers have chosen to retire early, consider a career change or live for a period on savings.
“It means that employers are having trouble finding workers; it means that any given worker can be picky about what job they take,” Milkman said.
In November 2020, there were about 6.8 million job openings in the United States. A year later, there were almost 10.6 million, according to the same data.
“Everybody’s hiring. That’s not something we’ve seen in this country any time in recent memory,” Milkman said. “It doesn’t necessarily lead to union activity, but it certainly makes workers feel like they can be more demanding, either individually or collectively.”
Even as union membership has continued to fall in recent years, the labour movement’s popularity is the highest it has been in decades — 68% of Americans approve of labour unions, according to a poll from Gallup.
Labour unions’ approval rating in the US is the highest it has been in decades, while overall union membership has steadily declined in the same period.
The high approval rating may be in part because of increased awareness of union activity thanks to media coverage of prominent organising efforts. Much of the media coverage of recent union drives has focused on high-profile companies, Windham said.
(Incidentally, media organisations themselves are among the private companies that have seen a large organising wave in the past decade — by one count, more than 100 outlets have organised since 2015 — though they represent just a very small portion of the private sector.)
“Many reporters tend to highlight organising at companies that their readers are most likely to know — like Starbucks and Amazon — and have given less attention to smaller brands or companies or to organising among blue-collar work that is more behind the scenes, like in manufacturing,” Windham said. “But overall, there does seem to be a general uptick in reporting on labour and workers’ issues, especially in the pandemic, and it hasn’t all been limited to big names.”
Women are taking a bigger role in organising union drives, in organising strikes and in becoming union members more generally. (Representational image via AP)
Across companies of all sizes and profiles, one labour trend has been noticeable in recent years: Women are taking a bigger role in organising union drives, in organising strikes and in becoming union members more generally.
“A lot of people think of labour unions as largely male-dominated industries, but actually, surprisingly, people don’t realise that women are half the labour movement, and the growing sectors of the economy are predominantly female,” said Liz Shuler, president of the AFL-CIO.
While men continue to have higher rates of union membership than women, the gap between those rates has nearly closed in recent years. Women now make up about 47% of all union members.
The decline of unions in the private sector, which were historically male-dominated, and the steady rate of union membership in the public sector also reflect the growing role of women in today’s labour movement, according to Milkman.
Some so-called pink-collar jobs — those historically associated with, and still primarily held by, women — are among the occupations with higher-than-average union membership. For instance, about 17% of employed registered nurses and 46% of preschool through secondary school teachers are union members, according to an analysis of government data.
The labour movement provides an outlet for women to voice some of their long-standing concerns about their work, Shuler said, including equal work for equal pay, better health care benefits and fighting back against harassment on the job.
“It gives me great hope to see women taking their rightful place in leadership in the labour movement, and they’re leading in ways quiet and out in front,” Shuler said. “They’re leading those picket lines. They’re leading those political mobilisations, and they’re leading at the collective bargaining table to show that the labour movement is a movement for women.”
