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ACCORDING TO LIZ - First it was the Amazon warehouse workers and the Starbucks’ baristas. Then the Writers and Screen Actors Guilds. In September it was the auto workers and swathes of staff at Kaiser Permanente.
Starbucks closed some of its stores or let strike leaders go. Amazon has tried the same.
California State Universities have perpetual strike threats – settling with one union only to have another step up its demands – impacting both staff and students.
Picketing Writers’ Guild members eventually achieved some major increases both in money and job security. Kaiser Permanente settled with some substantial gains for their workers, and Ford, Stellantis and now General Motors have folded to the “Stand Up” strikes of the UAW – strikes that were costing GM alone around $200 million a week.
Over 3,600 SAG members signed an open letter stating that they would rather stay on strike than accept a bad deal. After recent meetings, entertainment companies are increasingly optimistic but actors and the studios remain far apart on some of the most divisive issues.
“We have not come all this way to cave now. We have not gone without work, without pay and walked picket lines for months just to give up on everything we've been fighting for. We cannot and will not accept a contract that fails to address the vital and existential problems that we all need fixed.”
Pressure is on with savings running low and hopes for new television shows to sell advertising and movies to fill the seats in theaters dimming by the day.
Again in Los Angeles, Unite Here Local 11 and the hotel industry have engaged in an at-times acrimonious labor dispute for months over workloads and working conditions, wages, health insurance and pensions. Housing affordability in our city is a tangential but crucial consideration.
Bottom-line businessmen are arrayed against the forces for social responsibility. Which should be paramount? Profits for owners and investors?
Or, should corporations fully commit to the other three components of a profitable company, and acknowledge that the success their vendors, customers and employees are equally important?
In 1928, just before the Great Depression began, America’s richest 0.1% held almost a quarter of the nation’s wealth. Union organizing forced the adoption of policies by governments that redirected some of that to those who actually extracted and built the goods on which those fortunes were based.
Households below the median level – those that in the 1950s would include the majority of the one-third of American workers belonging to private sector unions – have not shared in the country’s economic growth in the years since, and now our poorest households make less, after inflation, than those of 50 years ago.
The pendulum has swung. People today are looking back with nostalgia to the 1950s when unions flourished and the economy was growing in leaps and bounds.
When the wealthiest Americans paid 90% in taxes on the top portion of their earnings.
When companies acted like families caring for their workers, and people spent their entire working life with one employer.
Yes, it was a society predominantly of white males back then but, with our technical advances, good jobs and a vastly improved quality of life should be available for every American today – for men and women and every variety between, for a rainbow of races, for all those who speak different languages and embrace different religions or lifestyles.
But it was also a society where, within their various circles, people helped each other up instead of going on social media to bully, doxx and destroy the lives of those who disagreed with them.
In the wake of pandemic-related wage suppression and inflation, organized labor is making significant inroads as public approval of unions escalate – now 67% – and unions negotiate contracts with fairer pay and improved conditions.
A month ago, a representative of the Sierra club spoke to a UAW rally in Ontario about how labor issues are interwoven into the rights of the community, and the critical need to work together to solve the “climate catastrophe [and] biodiversity crisis that are going to have a very real impact on our supply chains and our food systems and water quality” and ensure everyone thrives.
In the aftermath of the pandemic and accelerating inequality, workers can only do so if they are treated with respect and are invited to collaborate on solutions.
Kaiser Permanente’ historic strike of nurses, ER technicians and pharmacists in California was driven by workers passionately concerned about their patients.
Their agreement addressed staffing shortages (over 11% of positions had been unfilled, putting often unbearable stress on remaining workers) with raises that will add up to 21% over the four years, and requires Kaiser to invest in job training programs.
These will help attract new employees but, more urgently, in the retention of current workers and their needed institutional knowledge – a critical component too often ignored by management.
Last week, the United Auto Workers announced a tentative contract with Ford that included noteworthy wage increases (although not even close to the salary boosts given the upper echelons of management), cost-of-living adjustments, and removal of the despised two-tier system where newer employees had to perform the same job alongside prior hires for significantly less in pay and benefits.
Ford's original proposal included wage increases of just 9% while the union demanded a 46% boost; the tentative deal calls for a 25% general wage increase over four years, with starting wages jumping to over $28 an hour—a 68% increase. Long-exploited low-paid temp workers will see wage increases of more than 150% over the four-year agreement, with some receiving an immediate 85% raise.
At the time, when almost 30,000 Stellantis and General Motors workers remained on strike, UAW president Shawn Fain who declared at the beginning of the strikes that “We fight for the entire working class and the poor” took the scope of the Ford win big:
“What started at three plants at midnight on September 15, has become a national movement. We won things nobody thought possible... Together, we are turning the tide for the working class in this country.”
Reportedly, the agreement includes the right to strike over plant closures, a game-changer in a climate that has continued to reward corporations for outsourcing the manufacturing and assembly of consumer goods, gutting good jobs from the American heartland.
Long time labor ally, Senator Bernie Sanders congratulated the UAW on the settlement:
“When workers fight back against corporate greed, they win. It's time for Stellantis and GM to get serious and negotiate a fair contract for their workers. The American people are watching.”
Three days later, when Stellantis settled, he added: “The strong pro-worker contracts negotiated with Ford and Stellantis are helping to rebuild the American middle class.”
The latter contract, still subject to both committee and rank-and-file approval, has similar wage increases as well as reassigning work and new jobs to the 1,200 workers laid off when management idled an Illinois plant at the end of February.
Today (Monday) Bernie gave a shout out that, with the GM agreement this “victory that will resonate all across the economy, impact millions of workers from coast to coast, and help create a more just and equitable economy.”
Unions safeguard workers’ rights both to their pay and protection from being physically harmed on the job. Pay theft and work-related injuries have ratcheted up in recent years especially among the burgeoning numbers of gig workers.
Only six percent of private sector workers belong to unions today, although 37% of government employees have such a benefit even though there is a far greater need to protect people from wage theft in service industries and from heavy machinery and fumes in factories and mining operations than from paper cuts.
UAW’s “Stand Up” strike strategy of escalating protests targeting different facilities with little advance notice kept management guessing and curtailed the use of goon tactics of yesteryear when corporations could more easily stifle protests and shape the narrative.
The UAW’s Fein on Facebook Sunday undertook to bring the “Stand Up” model to organize Honda, Tesla and other nonunion American automakers. And, while the terms of the GM deal have not been made public as of this writing, purportedly they too contain the right to strike plant closures and ditch the despised tier system.
“Stand Up” also allowed the UAW to focus on economic justice and inequality, to build wide support opposing the ability of management choosing to not invest in safety and upgrades and move jobs elsewhere, often out of the country.
Using this approach, ‘union-made’ is now a vision that can be more comprehensively applied, providing the country with a new paradigm: the imperative to concentrate on and correct the systemic issues imperiling America’s economy and the health of our planet.
(Liz Amsden is a contributor to CityWatchLA and an activist from Northeast Los Angeles with opinions on much of what goes on in our lives. She has written extensively on the City's budget and services as well as her many other interests and passions. In her real life she works on budgets for film and television where fiction can rarely be as strange as the truth of living in today's world.)
