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https://www.csmonitor.com/Business/2023/0330/Labor-strikes-are-rising-and-winning-pay-hikes

While much of the union action has taken place in schools and state and local government, the union movement also has notched headline-grabbing wins in the private sector, notably organizing more than 300 Starbucks stores and successfully organizing an Amazon warehouse in the New York borough of Staten Island.

The policy backdrop has also been shifting, with a labor-friendly administration in Washington and state or local laws – supported by organized labor – to boost minimum wages. But the new activity doesn’t represent a rebound for the labor movement, at least not yet.

“It’s easy to exaggerate it,” says Ruth Milkman, chair of the labor studies program at the City University of New York. “So far what has been going on has not been enough to really move the needle on the overall unionization rate in the United States.”

Indeed, the recent gains in organizing mostly have come in the public sector, where unions still represent 33% of the workforce, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In the private sector, they represent only 6%. The overall union share of the workforce continued to decline last year to 10.1%, down from 10.3% in 2021 and far below the one-third representation that unions had in their heyday in the 1950s.

Also, while unions earned substantial raises last year, inflation ate away almost all those gains. So while last year’s average boost of 5.7% for the first year of contracts was the largest since 1990, according to Bloomberg Law, inflation in recent months has hit 40-year highs. In February, the urban consumer price index rose 6% year over year, nullifying many of the raises that union workers earned last year.

The economy has helped labor. “A pretty strong economy with a low unemployment rate with a lot of vacancies – that gives labor more bargaining power,” says Harry Katz, a professor of collective bargaining at Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations in Ithaca, New York. But “that’s not a revolution. That’s a business cycle event.”

What is different this time, these experts say, is that unions have regained community support. That’s what happened in Los Angeles, where not only teachers were supportive of the staff workers’ strike, but also many parents, too. According to a Gallup survey last year, 71% of Americans approve of unions, the highest level since 1965.

“Parents were in the loop from the beginning,” says Conrado Guerrero, president of one of the local unions that led the picketing during the strike in Los Angeles. “And they understood that in order for their children to have a better experience in schools, they need us to be able to live here without having to work multiple jobs, without having to worry about, you know, ‘Where is my next meal going to come from?’”