For workers’ movements, this is an understandably confusing time, a period of both peril and hope.
On the one hand, the coronavirus has thrown a spotlight on tens of millions of workers who are usually invisible to the media, upper-middle-class professionals, and political decision-makers. Suddenly, health care aides, farmworkers, food processors, supermarket employees, delivery drivers, transit workers, warehouse workers, hands-on public employees, and many others have been deemed “essential” by both the government and the public. At the same time, millions of “nonessential” blue-collar retail and hospitality workers who can’t work from home have abruptly been laid off. In consequence, there has been a wave of sympathy and support for both groups, a strong sentiment that they deserve safer working conditions, paid sick leave, higher pay, and health insurance.
As for the essential workers themselves, growing numbers have staged job actions to win safer and more appropriately remunerative work. The number of reported walkouts and strikes over the past weeks stands at roughly 150.
All this comes on top of a growing public awareness of our stratospheric levels of economic inequality, and increasing calls for public policy to bring those levels down. Whether this portends a surge in worker organizing such as that seen in the 1930s, however, is not at all clear.
The nation is experiencing the steepest economic downturn in its history, which will likely lead to Great Recession or even Depression-like conditions of underconsumption, underproduction, and underservicing for no one knows how long. Many small businesses will close for good; many others will reopen to a diminished clientele, with fewer employees, more part-timers, and perhaps lower pay.
The New Deal flourished both despite and because of similarly dour economic conditions. But after decades of anti-government rhetoric, attempts to mirror that strategy today with progressive initiatives may founder. The Democratic governor of Virginia, for instance, with the support of the Democratic state legislature, recently delayed a hike in the state’s minimum wage that they had proudly enacted earlier this year, for fear that it would deter some businesses from reopening, and compel others to bring fewer employees back to work.
Moreover, organizing in a time of pandemic or post-pandemic consciousness—when workers either can’t or don’t want to huddle with co-workers, welcome organizers into their homes, or go to mass meetings—is uniquely challenging. Modern unionization rules, and governing bodies like the National Labor Relations Board that are indifferent to collective bargaining when not actively hostile, make matters no easier. None of these conditions contribute to a climate in which labor organizing will thrive, in which workers will be willing to take chances with the assurance that they can always land another job.
With all these conditions in mind, the Prospect asked seven labor historians, journalists, and strategists to give us their thoughts on how workers and their movements will fare in the months and years ahead, and their proposals for what workers’ movements should be doing—not just for their current members but, primarily, for the millions more non-members who’ve won the nation’s admiration and sympathy but still lack the power to significantly improve their lot.
We begin with CUNY sociologist Ruth Milkman, who notes that the labor upsurge that many anticipated in the wake of the 2008 crash and Barack Obama’s presidency never happened. If this time is going to be different, she posits, it will be because millennials will bring a militance and zeal to grassroots organizing that has been largely absent for decades.
Celebrated labor historian Nelson Lichtenstein writes that the current wave of labor militance could be greatly expanded and given legal standing by state statutes establishing worker health and safety councils, which could build worker power. Journalist Mike Elk reports on a recent semi-precedent for such councils—the campaign of 1,700 immigrant workers engaged in cleanup after Houston’s Hurricane Harvey to ensure that sufficient safeguards were provided before they began clearing the wreckage.
Brandeis University’s David Weil, who headed the Wage and Hour Division of President Obama’s Labor Department, outlines the holes in the nation’s safety net through which millions of non-standard-employment workers routinely fall—and the temporary patches to those holes that Congress has enacted in response to the coronavirus. Georgetown University historian Lane Windham documents the plight of millions of women whose domestic or care work has often placed them beyond the bounds of statutory protections, and the problems of women working from home “literally balancing a laptop and a baby.” Unions, she argues, must fight for universal social programs, including Medicare for All.
Labor strategist and organizer Stephen Lerner, who masterminded SEIU’s epochal Justice for Janitors campaign, writes how Bargaining for the Common Good—which demands not just increases in workers’ wages and benefits, but a host of broader improvements for the communities in which they live and work—can prove particularly important in building a more powerful progressive movement and fighting the looming specter of austerity.
Finally, labor journalist Steven Greenhouse assesses the labor movement’s current responses to the pandemic’s reshaping of work lives and the economy, finding grounds for both hope and concern.
Can Unions Surge in Post-Pandemic America?
BY RUTH MILKMAN
During the 40 years that I’ve been writing about labor issues, obituaries for the American union movement have been a perennial, punctuated by occasional moments of optimism, like the one inspired by the massive teachers strikes two years ago. Ten years earlier, in the wake of the 2008 financial meltdown and Barack Obama’s election victory, many observers (myself included) made fools of ourselves with rosy predictions of imminent union resurgence. Instead, organized labor’s main political goal, the Employee Free Choice Act, went down to ignominious defeat in 2009, and union density soon resumed its relentless downward spiral.
While labor’s high hopes soured into bitter disappointment, a new generation of young activists launched Occupy Wall Street in 2011, firmly planting the issue of growing inequality on the nation’s political agenda. Occupy itself proved short-lived, but it did help to ignite the SEIU-sponsored Fight for $15, a campaign that boosted the pay of low-wage workers more than any effort in recent memory. Millennial-generation Occupy veterans also began to enter the labor movement, infusing it with new ideas and energy. Yet unions remained on the sidelines, battening down the hatches as their membership numbers continued to hemorrhage.
Entering the labor market during the 2008 crash and the ensuing Great Recession, many millennials were radicalized. But the present economic downturn is already far more severe, recalling the 1930s in the massive scale of the unemployment and business closings (and there are more to come). The crisis is compared daily to the Great Depression; the metaphor of war is equally commonplace.
Could it pave the way to a new union upsurge like the one that emerged in the New Deal era? Or will we instead see a reprise of the post-2008 “back to normalcy” Obama-Biden regime, if Trump is defeated in November?
It’s Workers Who Should Determine When Their Workplace Is Safe
BY NELSON LICHTENSTEIN
When it comes to our collective understanding of the American working class, this pandemic marks a decisive inflection point. In our moral and social imagination, we have finally displaced the white male autoworker and construction worker, let alone the vanishingly small remnant of those who mine coal, with a multicultural army of all those who staff the distended supply chains, the vital hospitals, the home care services, the warehouses, the poultry and meat disassembly lines, the sales counters, and the grocery aisles, performing the mundane jobs we once disparaged or ignored. Now denoted as essential workers by no less an entity than the Department of Homeland Security, we recognize them both for their indispensability and for their moral dignity.
Moreover, our new appreciation of these poorly paid and precarious strata of the working class reflects not just the vital role they play in the current crisis, but the centrality of these workers to firms and industries—food processing, fulfillment centers, mass retailing, and health care—that now constitute a new “commanding heights” of Western capitalism. This realization echoes the great social and economic shift that took place 90 years ago when our conception of the American working class was transformed, from that of the tradesman, railroader, or victimized immigrant to a stratum of self-confident mass-production workers organized into a set of powerful trade unions led by “the new men of power,” to use a phrase first coined by C. Wright Mills.
The celebration of these workers opens the door to their empowerment. Corporate advertisers now endorse the vital role played by retail clerks; grateful New Yorkers clap and shout at 7 p.m. each evening to honor those on 12-hour hospital shifts. But as Dahlia Lithwick points out in a recent Slate column, commending these frontline workers as heroic—or even offering them a bit of bonus money—does nothing to enhance their actual power. Indeed, praise for their heroism is actually an accommodation to their victimization, as if nothing can be done to make their jobs more safe and secure. Instead, we need laws, institutions, and unions that can make the work they do and the rewards they receive sustainable and healthy for the long haul, ensuring that careers can be built, homes purchased, and retirement assured.
So how do we get from here to there—from the cultural and moral goodwill now showered on these workers to the unions and laws and even to the transformation in employer expectations and behavior that will elevate and institutionalize their new status? It will not happen in any automatic fashion; a transformation in our cultural and social mores may be necessary to a transformation in the law, but it is hardly sufficient.
The Power to Slow Down Reopening
BY MIKE ELK
“People have anxiety and always rush to return to normalcy as soon as possible after a crisis,” says Marianela Acuña Arreaza, who led the immigrant rights movement’s response to Hurricane Harvey as the former head of the Fe y Justicia Worker Center.
In the wake of hurricanes, there is always a rush by homeowners to get back into their property. However, such storms often cause hazardous materials and chemicals like asbestos to come loose, exposing workers repairing the damage to health hazards in the process. Experts say that more workers often wind up dying from exposure to hazardous conditions in hurricane recovery work than from the storm itself.
“Workers often get pushed to go into hazardous conditions,” says Acuña Arreaza. “We were definitely pushing for people not to be back in their houses right away.”
By slowing it down, they not only saved lives but dramatically expanded the capacity of workers to organize in Houston.
Fe y Justicia Worker Center, working closely with the National Council of Occupational Safety and Heath (NCOSH), brought in 40 different trainers to educate workers on the risks they’d encounter, eventually training more than 1,700 immigrants in their rights as workers during the cleanup. They put pressure on Houston to enact laws to protect immigrant workers from fly-by-night contractors.
For the first time, a municipality in Texas prosecuted and jailed developers for putting workers in unsafe conditions and withholding their wages when they complained.
Now, Acuña Arreaza, who is helping to lead the nonprofit NCOSH’s response to COVID-19, is calling on the government to slow down the process of reopening businesses closed for the pandemic, so that organizers have time to build the power required to protect workers.
“There are a lot of parallels with how we need to respond to COVID-19,” says Acuña Arreaza. “People have a lot of anxiety and want things to return to normal, but by slowing things down, we can build real power for workers.”
New Laws for the Fissured Workplace
BY DAVID WEIL
Late last month, Instacart workers went on strike to protest the company’s refusal to provide them with rudimentary personal protective equipment, such as hand sanitizer and disinfectant wipes. The CDC has made it clear that these basic items are necessary protections for frontline workers and their customers. Instacart workers—along with thousands of other so-called independent contractors who work for platform companies like Uber Eats, DoorDash, and Amazon Flex—are not protected by federal workplace health and safety laws or many other foundational labor standards.
Around the same time, Dr. Ming Lin, an emergency room physician in the coronavirus hot spot of Bellingham, Washington, was fired after advocating for more medical supplies for his fellow health care workers at the facility where he had worked for 17 years. That removal order came not from PeaceHealth St. Joseph Medical Center, the hospital where he worked, but from a staffing agency called TEAMHealth, which was actually his direct employer. PeaceHealth refused comment on his dismissal because he was not their direct employee.
From gig workers to medical doctors, a minimum of 25 million workers in the U.S. face barriers to standard workplace protections like unemployment insurance, workers’ compensation, and such basic protections as minimum wage and overtime. That’s because they either are classified—sometimes falsely—as independent contractors or, like Dr. Lin, work at arm’s length from the organization where they do their job, as they are formally employed by staffing agencies, third-party managers, or subcontractors.
These arrangements, which I have called “fissured workplaces,” release the parties that most directly benefit from the work these people do from many of the legal obligations to follow standard employment and labor laws. As responsibility becomes murky, accountability fades for providing safe workplaces, payment of minimum wages and overtime rates, or protections for the right to speak out in the face of dangerous conditions.
Labor Will Win by Championing Everyone
BY LANE WINDHAM
It’s in times of great crisis that the world has broken open, and today’s pandemic has created just such a moment for American workers. Their future depends on whether the workers’ movement—both existing and emerging—can compel the forging of a new social compact, building on the public’s new appreciation of its working class and on the surge in worker protests. Through two decades of creative experimentation, elements of the movement have already developed many of the answers it needs to build worker power in the post-pandemic era. But will labor act quickly and boldly enough to build on and implement these solutions?
The pandemic will likely hasten some trends already under way in the workers’ movement—the range of unions, worker centers, and new class-based coalitions and campaigns that are fighting for labor rights. The organizations that will thrive are those that are nimble and resilient, and that have been building new models and strategies to meet a shifting capitalism. The pandemic will likely hasten the demise of those organizations that go into a defensive crouch to protect only their members.
Successful worker organizations will build on the now deepened public demand for a more universal social safety net. The pandemic has made it dramatically clear why we need a better one. After the last enormous crisis in capitalism, the New Deal created the nation’s first national social safety net, but it didn’t just arrive out of the blue. It was based on decades of experimentation and worker protest, often at the state and local level. Massachusetts enacted the nation’s first minimum wage after the Lawrence textile strike in 1912, for example, and workers won a short-term right to collective bargaining through the War Labor Board during World War I because they showed they were willing to strike to win that right. Worker action was also key during the Great Depression: Massive strikes in 1934 pushed Congress to enact and Franklin D. Roosevelt to sign the 1935 Wagner Act, which guaranteed workers’ right to join and form unions.
We’ve been in a similar period of innovation and ferment in recent years, beginning with the great teacher uprisings of 2018. That militance has been on display during the current crisis, in the more than 100 pandemic-related strikes since March.
What Is Not to Be Done
BY STEPHEN LERNER
There are moments in history when the world teeters on a razor’s edge—where we can plausibly imagine a country and a world remade on the values of equality, justice, and collective liberation, or one that goes in a very different direction. The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the savage inequality, injustice, and failures of our economic and political system. The combination of COVID-19 and growing economic collapse has created extraordinary, and urgent, opportunities to organize and fight for that better world.
We face horrifying consequences if we fail. It’s alarmingly easy to glimpse a future dystopian world devastated by climate change, disaster capitalism, hyper-inequality, exploding racism and patriarchy, and political repression.
What we do in the weeks, months, and years ahead matters as never before. We need to both offer a vision of the world we want to create and lay out concrete steps to address the immediate and long-term impact of the pandemic, economic collapse, and impending implementation of crushing austerity.
It is hard to imagine a movement rising to this moment without workers and worker organizations playing a central role. An upsurge for labor is both possible and essential to all of our futures.
Ironic though it may be, history shows us that economic collapses, wars, pandemics, and other national and global crises, with all their horrors, can nonetheless create conditions for transformational positive change. In the United States, a labor movement born from the solidarity forged in organizing, strikes, sit-ins, and battles of the Depression surged in members and power before, during, and after World War II.
More recently, South Africa, South Korea, and Brazil all saw explosive growth of unions after their dictatorships were defeated. In these countries, unions were aligned with and integral parts of the democracy and liberation movements. When apartheid was defeated in South Africa and democracy was won in South Korea and Brazil, workers felt a sense of exhilaration and power born from the part they’d played in defeating repressive regimes. Unions had a moral legitimacy based on their role in these struggles that fueled their organizing, membership growth, and political and workplace power.
What does this mean, what can it prefigure, for the potential for a labor upsurge in the United States in the middle of a pandemic, in the midst of soaring unemployment, soon-to-be-implemented austerity, and, possibly, a major depression?
Turning Worker Anger Into Worker Power
BY STEVEN GREENHOUSE
Millions of workers—grocery clerks, bus drivers, fast-food cooks, delivery workers, and many others—felt newly appreciated when society suddenly deemed them essential. But for many of these essential workers, COVID-19 soon trained a spotlight on the many ways they were being shafted.
The coronavirus crisis made them see many things all too clearly. They lacked paid sick days. Their employers often paid little heed to whether they were adequately protected from the pandemic. OSHA was doing next to nothing to assure their safety. Their employers showed little interest in what they thought or felt.
These “essential workers” grew angrier and angrier, and feeling newly important and newly empowered, they soon erupted. They have engaged in more than 100 walkouts, sickouts, and callouts at some of the nation’s best-known companies, including Amazon, McDonald’s, Instacart, and Domino’s. Their message: “You’re not doing enough to protect us, and we’re not going to take it anymore.”
It’s been one of the biggest explosions of worker militancy in decades, and what has made it all the more extraordinary is that it’s been fueled by low-wage, non-union workers.
These workers are crying out for massive changes—in worker power, in various laws, and in how their companies treat them.
This surge of anger and activism has also spurred a great deal of discussion and debate about the future of workers. One possible scenario might be called the status quo scenario, the other the resurgence scenario.
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