For the Labor Movement, There Is No Substitute for Activism

Workers Can Expect Little Help from a Divided Government, So We Must Organize

Hank Kalet Feb 15 ∙ Preview

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Todd E. Vachon, a labor professor at Rutgers, speaks during a December rally. Organizer Sherry Wolfe stands to his right.
This is a much longer version of my next column for the Progressive Populist, which should run next month. Read my current column here.

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Temple University has retaliated against its striking graduate workers, cutting off “free tuition” and demanding these students pay up or, in the words of the Associated Press, “face sanctions.”

As the AP reported,

A notice from the bursar’s office posted online by a striker said students involved must pay their spring tuition bill in full by March 9 or face a $100 late fee and a financial hold on their account, which would bar them from registering for more classes, The Philadelphia Inquirer reported.

Striking workers at Temple. (From the Temple University Graduate Student Association website.)
The strike by Temple graduate student assistants — which is ongoing as I write this —  is part of a broader wave of labor activism that I wrote about last month, and that cuts across job titles and class distinctions. Academic workers, Starbucks baristas, and warehouse workers at Amazon all have used or are using their labor as leverage to win better wages and working conditions. As the activist Medea Benjamin writes in The Progressive, “The U.S. labor movement caught fire.”

In 2022, we witnessed the brilliant organizing of Chris Smalls and the Amazon workers, Starbucks Workers United reached nearly 7,000  members and unionized close to 300 stores. Requests to the National Labor Relations Board to hold union elections were up 58 percent in the first eight months of 2022. Labor is back and fighting the good fight. 

Yes, we have been witnessing a strike wave: Municipal workers in Portland are on strike. Alaska bus drivers have walked. HarperCollins, hospitals in New York, academic workers around the country — strikes and strike threats have forced management to negotiate truly revolutionary contracts.

This militancy coincides with an increase in union members: Union membership was up in 2022, ending a four-year slide that cost the labor movement about 600,000 members. It’s a datapoint that should generate some good feelings — even if it is nothing more than an uptick, an increase of 200,000 union jobs or 1.2%. Unfortunately, it failed to erase the losses of the last four years and accompanied a big increase in employed workers, the majority of who are not union members. (Data compiled from the Department of Labor). Overall, 16 million workers in the United States were represented by a union last year, while the union share of the workforce fell from 11.6% to 11.3%. As the Economic Policy Institute writes, “More jobs were unionized, but nonunion jobs were added at a faster rate.”

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