The summer of 2023 is over, but it was a big one for organized labor. Social media users dubbed it another “hot labor summer,” as picket lines sprang up across the country. As of this writing, the strikes are still on.
The biggest story has been the Hollywood unions’ battle against the studios. The Writers Guild of America (WGA) has been on strike since May 2, and the Screen Actors Guild and American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) has been out since July 14, with stars walking out of the premieres of the summer’s twin blockbusters, Barbie and Oppenheimer, to join the picket lines.
There have been big almost-strikes, too, with the Teamsters using militant pre-strike action, practice pickets, and rank-and-file mobilization to bring UPS to the table to win a landmark contract without walking off the job.
The biggest story has been the Hollywood unions’ battle against the studios.
And in mid-September, some 13,000 members of the United Auto Workers (UAW) went on strike to demand higher wages and other benefits at a time of near-record earnings by automakers and multimillion-dollar CEO pay packages. For the first time in UAW’s history, the strike simultaneously targeted all of the Big Three automakers, with workers walking off the job at three plants in Michigan, Missouri, and Ohio, owned by Ford, General Motors, and Stellantis (owner of Chrysler), respectively. Other locations may follow. This simultaneous strike is a new tactic by Shawn Fain, the first UAW president to be elected directly by members.
It’s a shift in tone—particularly among some of these big private-sector unions—from what we grew used to in the era of neoliberalism, but it has been building for years. Teachers and other public-sector workers, along with nurses and service workers, have been rebuilding their unions and winning gains with big, militant, festive strikes in cities like Chicago and Los Angeles since the early 2010s. The Wisconsin uprising of 2011 against Republican then Governor Scott Walker’s anti-union Wisconsin Budget Repair Bill (known as Act 10) kicked off a return to labor among progressive activists that has borne fruit, even if it didn’t win the day against Walker.
The Chicago Teachers Union strike of 2012, on a platform informed by the community, brought “bargaining for the common good” to the nation, and the United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) strike of 2019 inspired many of today’s strikers, a large proportion of whom are in Los Angeles. The 2018-2019 wave of teacher strikes in “red” states remains the busiest year for strike activity in more than two decades. The Starbucks workers and the Amazon Labor Union, in what now feels like old news but was the thrill of summer 2022, won shocking victories at the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) when many old hands thought that board elections were all but dead.
All of this is genuinely exciting. The working class is flexing its muscles in a variety of industries, from auto manufacturing to food service, and from hospitals to hotels. Logistics workers march alongside actors. There is a real sense of awakening that provides a much-needed counterpoint to the depressing news that is seemingly everywhere else you look.
We have a way to go, though, before we reach the kind of class power that’s necessary for real transformation. We have work to do before we finish building the kind of solidarity that lasts. When I sat down to write this column, I had planned to write “in praise of the almost strike,” noting that the viable strike threat that the Teamsters built served to overturn years of concessions, and that Monday-morning quarterbacks on Twitter are perhaps not the best judge of what should be in a contract—the UPS workers are.
As organizer and author Jane McAlevey noted, there are plenty of what-ifs to wonder about already: What if they did strike; what if they had lined up the strike date with the UAW; what if the bargaining committee had been bigger and more representative so that decisions were made “by a huge and representative committee elected directly by their peers, whose collective intelligence about their workplace is greater than the best-informed executive board or team of lawyers could ever be”?
But we can also forget that strikes are hard, and it is usually true when workers say they would rather be on the job, in the classroom, or in the hospital than living without pay and walking the line, rain or shine. Strikes require sacrifice that goes beyond the spectacle.
Spectacle seems to be the thing that everyone wants these days, and that, too, can be hard to argue with. I remember how thrilling it was to march with the UTLA through downtown Los Angeles, drumbeats and chants echoing off the buildings.
The spectacle is part of the power of the strike and the union, a demonstration of strength and solidarity that makes the sacrifices easier to bear. The videos from the WGA and SAG-AFTRA picket lines, with celebrities bearing signs that reference their iconic roles, have been great fun. (My favorite was Mandy Patinkin, bearing a hand-scrawled sign reading, “You killed residuals. Prepare to pay!”—a reference, of course, to his famous Princess Bride line, “You killed my father! Prepare to die!” Patinkin, it’s worth noting, held that sign in solidarity on a WGA picket before SAG-AFTRA declared its own strike.)
Being an observer of the spectacle is not enough.
But being an observer of the spectacle is not enough. Another strike this summer has reminded us of that. Fifteen thousand hotel workers, members of UNITE HERE Local 11, have been holding rolling strikes since July at a variety of Los Angeles-area hotels, where about sixty union contracts remain unsettled and the region’s impossibly high housing costs make survival a struggle for the workers who provide comfort and cleanliness at luxury properties.
Local 11 called for a boycott of three hotels after picketing workers were assaulted. The union also filed a complaint with the NLRB, saying that hotels were “committing and/or condoning violence.” But the American Political Science Association (APSA), scheduled to hold its annual conference in Los Angeles over Labor Day weekend, refused to honor the picket line, causing much debate and dispute within the organization.
Many members did cancel their panels or move them online, expressing solidarity with workers, but the organization argued that its decision to hold the conference anyway was made in “the interests of our membership—especially underrepresented scholars, scholars from the Global South, and non-tenured scholars.” Essentially, APSA pitted its own less-privileged members against the hotel workers and shrugged.
Alyssa Battistoni, who has written eloquently about her own struggle as part of UNITE HERE while at Yale, noted to Jacobin’s Alex Press that hotel workers’ dues funded the organizing of APSA members like her. Their solidarity was not academic, but material. So was that of Thomas Bradley, a gig worker who had signed up via an app for a shift at one of the hotels where workers were striking. When he arrived and realized he’d be strikebreaking, Bradley joined the picket line instead. “I did what I felt was right,” Bradley told Press. “These are people’s jobs and I didn’t want to take somebody’s job away.” He was homeless at the time.
So when APSA members argued that it took “privilege” to stand in complete solidarity with the workers, many of us scoffed. “It does not,” Press wrote. “What it does take is sacrifice. It is true that action comes at a higher cost for those with less job security and less money. It is incumbent upon those with more security to lead the way, assuming greater risk so those with less don’t have to. This is precisely what APSA’s leadership has failed to do.”
Strikes are not intellectual exercises or TV shows to watch. Unions are not hypothetical. They are material, and solidarity is an action you take, not a nice word to tweet when it costs nothing. Yet today’s interest in labor often feels like fandom rather than a movement: workers over there, performing class power, and the others over here, cheering from the sidelines. Unions aren’t a sports team. They are groups of people in motion trying to better their lives—and while they’re at it, all of ours, too.
The APSA debate, in other words, seems to encapsulate a problem of the social media age: a disconnect between the politics people espouse and their willingness to take a risk to make it happen. Some of this is class difference, but not the one the “privilege” commenter meant; Thomas Bradley was more willing to make a sacrifice because he understood it for what it was. To him, the UNITE HERE workers on the line were just like him. To others, working class people are NPCs (non-player characters) in the video games of their lives. They’re subjects for research and tweets to reshare, not people who could well be us.
When organizing at Yale, Battistoni wrote that it was hard to get academics to think of themselves as real workers. And even if they did, asking them to do the work of being the union seemed a bridge too far.
“We asked people to help build the union, and to help lead it,” Battistoni wrote. “We asked them to sign a card, then to ask a friend to sign one, too; to commit to meeting regularly with an organizer; to join the organizing committee and bring the people they knew to meetings and to rallies. We asked a lot — too much, some thought . . . . They supported the union, they said, but they wanted it to leave them alone.”
Union fandom culture is an extension of this problem. It still encourages thinking of workers as “those people over there.” It is less about solidarity than it is the flip side of pity. But pity gets us nowhere. Solidarity is strength.
There is a real sense of awakening that provides a much-needed counterpoint to the depressing news that is seemingly everywhere else you look.
So I find myself hesitating at the hype for a “hot labor summer,” even as I share picket line videos, speak on panels supporting strikes, and find other ways to support actions happening far from where I am. There is a rush to always declare the current thing “The Biggest Thing Since,” an urge that I understand but would caution us against. It encourages a kind of forgetting, a glossing over of the important points of resistance that not only deserve attention on their own merits but also helped us get here in the first place. It encourages a system of ranking that can pass over important but less numerically large events; when the Bureau of Labor Statistics doesn’t even count strikes smaller than 1,000 workers, events like the hospital strike wave of 2021—which included a 301-day strike at St. Vincent Hospital in Massachusetts—get missed.
This is not the fault of justifiably excited people who’ve just come to the labor movement, of course. We have been intentionally cut off from our own history. Neoliberalism’s culture of forgetting was designed to sever working people from their past; to break the chain of knowledge that any sort of historical materialist politics requires; to leave us reinventing the wheel, yes, but also to leave us unable to see the previous struggles on which our own are built. But we can resist it by letting go of the need for things to be “the first” or “the best” or “the most”; by releasing a bit of our desire for heroes and investing a bit more in the day-to-day actions of solidarity.
There is no form of magic, no superhero, as Battistoni wrote, “that will bring the revolution. There are still people, in their stubborn, contradictory particularities, as they exist in concrete space and time. It is up to you to figure out how to act together, or not; how to find common ground, or not.”
Bring some doughnuts and coffee to a nearby picket line and stop to make friends. Ask what people really need, pause to closely read demands, and apply them to your life. Cancel that hotel room if the hotel is struck, even if you lose your deposit. And most importantly, organize your own workplace.