We exist in a strange interregnum. The Trump era, like the COVID-19 pandemic, isn’t really over despite repeated professions to the contrary. And the Biden years have brought limited political change—but not enough to be felt in the lives of many working people. As the United States lurches toward another election, too many people appear likely to tune out national politics entirely, still convinced that it won’t do much for them either way.
The upside of this state of affairs is that workers are taking matters into their own hands. Strikes continue at a relative high compared to the low tide of the previous couple of decades. As I write this, the United Auto Workers (UAW) are voting on tentative agreements with the Big Three U.S. auto manufacturers, won after six weeks of their new “stand-up” strike strategy. The three deals include raises of about 25 percent, an end to wage tiers, and some other key demands. Most notable is the inclusion of electric vehicle (EV) battery plants in the master agreement between the union and General Motors, bringing those EV workers into the higher wage schedule.
The Screen Actors Guild has a tentative agreement to end its strike, building on the success of the Writers Guild of America, which won groundbreaking contract language protecting workers from the use of artificial intelligence to fragment and de-skill their work.
Beyond these headline-grabbing strikes, a number of small and large actions, including near-strikes, have occurred, and while they don’t add up to the sheer numbers of the heyday of the Congress of Industrial Organizations between the late 1930s and the 1950s, it’s certainly an indicator that the working class is done waiting for the wealth to trickle down.
President Joe Biden even hit a picket line with the UAW, while Donald Trump turned up—unsurprisingly—at a nonunion truck parts plant. Both presidential candidates have trumpeted their support for the working class, pointing fingers at each other as well as at a list of other villains—China, Mexico, inflation, their own parties’ previous leaders, current members of Congress. But the vision of the working class we’ll hear much more of as campaign season drags on is a partial one at best, an often dated image of a hard-hatted white man staving off challenges from global competitors. Biden chose the UAW for a reason, after all, having made electric vehicle manufacturing the centerpiece of his industrial policy. Care workers, meanwhile, got short shrift.
As the U.S. lurches toward another election, too many people appear likely to tune out national politics entirely, still convinced that it won’t do much for them either way.
It might not be fair to blame Biden for the failure of his plans to fund an expansion of care work and the child tax credit—Senator Joe Manchin, Democrat of West Virginia, after all, never met a work requirement he didn’t like—but voters likely will. Child tax credit direct payments were a step toward acknowledging care that is often done in the home, without a wage, by offering material support rather than lip service to the work of parenting. Naturally, it was too good to last.
Representative Gwen Moore, Democrat of Wisconsin, has reintroduced a bill to expand the Earned Income Tax Credit to include caregivers of the ill and older people who require care—the Worker Relief and Credit Reform Act—but it has garnered few headlines and is unlikely to go anywhere in the current Congress.
A delegation of caregivers and advocates headed to Washington, D.C., in late October to support Moore’s bill. Philipa Nwadike-Laster, the mother of a child with a disability and a homecare worker with the delegation, said in a statement, “The Worker Relief and Credit Reform Act is important for families like mine which are easily forgotten, and the work we do for our families, which is easily not considered as important as other forms of work.”
Care workers who do work for a wage have been an important part of the current strike wave. While many hospital strikes in the past few years have flown under the radar—composed of just few enough workers to miss being counted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics—health care workers have borne the brunt of the COVID-19 pandemic and continue to carry the weight of demands to return to normal. For the pandemic to be “out of sight, out of mind,” health care workers have to work double duty, yet are ignored.
But this year also brought the largest documented health care strike in U.S. history, involving 75,000 workers at Kaiser Permanente facilities in several states. And those workers notched big wins, including a 21 percent raise over the life of the contract, higher bonuses for night-shift workers, and more.
The Kaiser strike was the latest action by those we deemed essential workers during the early days of COVID-19, who risked their lives and got little more than applause in return. Those essential workers span industries—from processed-food manufacturers like Kellogg and Nabisco to food-service workers and grocery store clerks—but the thing they have in common is a feeling that their bosses didn’t care if they died, as long as profits kept rolling in.
So workers are coming together in old and new organizations, reshuffling the structure of the old ones (including new leadership at the Teamsters and the UAW) and inventing new strategies for the workforce of today. They are building power across cities and regions, whether or not employers recognize the unions.
The Union of Southern Service Workers, a project that sprang from the Service Employees International Union-backed Fight for $15 in the South, is supporting Waffle House workers and their demand for $25 an hour. Dollar General workers are organizing around the country as well, sometimes into traditional unions, and sometimes, as in my home state of Louisiana, with the support of community groups like Step Up Louisiana.
Los Angeles has been an epicenter of the 2023 strike wave, with Hollywood workers out, but also 15,000 hotel workers with UNITE HERE, as well as public school workers, health care workers, and city employees. As C.M. Lewis noted, Los Angeles’s unions are leaders in what we tend to call social justice unionism, bringing issues of race, gender, and immigration status to the table and winning demands that affect the city around them as well as their specific members.
Workers are building power across cities and regions, whether or not employers recognize the unions.
Bargaining for the common good, a strategy that began with the Chicago Teachers Union in its 2012 strike, and which was on display in the dramatic 2019 strike by United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA), sees unions bringing demands to the table concerning housing and homelessness, police and immigration enforcement, and even environmental health. UTLA members did not technically strike in 2019, but they showed up in force for the support staff who did, joining their lower-paid colleagues on picket lines and winning big raises in the process.
And in Minneapolis and St. Paul, where the 2020 George Floyd rebellions touched off, labor unions are working alongside tenant unions, community groups, and worker centers. Teachers in St. Paul have long been leaders in bargaining for the common good, winning a groundbreaking restorative justice process in schools. They’ve also won commitments from the district to press for tax increases for the wealthy and big businesses to fund schools and other public services.
“We are so excited that tens of thousands of union workers, nonunion workers, and community members in Minnesota have decided to align our fights and set a united deadline of March 1, [2024] for those in power to do what is right,” Greg Nammacher, president of Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 26, tells The Progressive. “Our union is clear that it means we are willing to strike if we don’t see the huge gains our members and community deserve. We have a powerful alignment that is asking the powerful question: ‘What could we win together?’ And we intend to find out.”
The movement’s ecosystem in Minnesota is, as in Los Angeles, diverse and networked. Unions support and collaborate with worker centers like CTUL (Centro de Trabajadores Unidos en la Lucha), which has an office down the block from where George Floyd was killed, and the Awood Center, which brought Amazon to the table, as well as tenant union Inquilinxs Unidxs por Justicia. The coalition represents the working class as it is today: housing-poor and time-stressed, gig-ified and hyper-surveilled. It is made up of men and women, citizens and refugees and migrants, multilingual and queer folk, and as always, those who are sick and tired of being sick and tired.
This may not be the working class we hear much about on the campaign trail, or at least, not favorably. But it is the working class that is slowly but surely gaining ground and that will continue to fight, no matter who occupies the Oval Office.