Organized labor hasn’t had this much public support in 50 years, and yet the percentage of Americans in a union is near a record low. A.F.L-C.I.O. president Liz Shuler tries to explain this gap — and persuade Stephen Dubner that “the folks who brought you the weekend” still have the leverage to fix a broken economy.
You've probably been hearing about the many places where american workers are trying to unionize justice now it's been happening at an Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama, at Starbucks stores across the country, workers of the world unite.
One struggle, one fight.
It's been happening among rideshare drivers, among graduate students in the Ivy League and the University of California system.
It's been happening at the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan and at the New York Times, where most of the journalists were already in a labor union but the tech workers weren't.
And you might remember what happened in October.
Thousands of american workers are on strike, and thousands more are preparing to walk out in what some have dubbed Striketober.
Hollywood, John Deere, Kellogg's, even nurses are among the thousands on strike.
According to a strike tracker developed by researchers at Cornell, last year was unusually busy with 370 strikes and nearly 700 labor protests.
Perhaps we shouldn't be surprised for all the recent talk about labor shortages and desperate firms offering employee bonuses, the bigger trend for the past few decades has been wage stagnation.
When you account for inflation.
Even before the recent spike, the purchasing power of an average wage is lower now than it was in the 1970s.
So, yeah, given these circumstances and all the news about unionizing at Starbucks and Amazon and the New York Times, you might think we are living in a new golden age of organized labor.
But youd be wrong.
Last year, just over 10% of the us workforce belonged to a union thats nearly as low as its ever been in modern history.
If you go back to the early 1980s, union membership was around 20%.
The peak was 1954 at 35%.
So why does it seem as if everyone is unionizing these days?
Ill propose two answers.
The first one is cynical.
Some of the unionizing employees work in journalism, and we journalists like nothing more than covering ourselves.