Labor strikes are rising – and winning pay hikes

A wave of union activity is rippling across the United States, giving workers historic boosts in pay at a time when the cost of living is soaring. In this month alone:

• Public works employees in St. Paul, Minnesota, ratified a contract with a 9% raise in pay – and, based on seniority, up to 9% more.

• A New York union convinced a system of about 90 hospitals and nursing homes to reopen their contract with nearly 80,000 health care workers, winning annual raises of 7%, 6%, and 5% over the next three years.

• And in Los Angeles, a three-day strike by some 30,000 public school employees led to a proposed 30% wage increase from the school district, retroactive pay of $4,000-$8,000, and seven hours of guaranteed work a day for special education assistants. Workers will vote on the tentative contract next week. 

“It was just so inspiring and so powerful,” says Jannette Verbera, an L.A. special ed assistant and member of the union bargaining team who spoke to 45,000 people at a rally earlier this month. “When I was up onstage, I felt, like, so empowered by looking at everybody.”

The upsurge in union activity has many social and economic roots – from globalization to the pandemic to a generation of millennials and Gen Zers who saw their parents struggle during the Great Recession and for whom the American dream seems to be receding. While it’s not at all certain the current union activism will kick-start a rebound in the labor movement, it is clear that grassroots dissatisfaction is taking hold among a segment of low-paid workers, especially younger ones, and increasing support for collective labor action at levels not seen since the 1960s.

“It’s not just a cost of living crisis; it’s a crisis of living,” says Toby Higbie, professor of history and labor studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. “It’s linked to economics, but it’s a feeling of existential crisis. ... We no longer have that rosy view of America that [President Ronald] Reagan bequeathed on us.”

The dissatisfaction is palpable, especially for educated workers in relatively low-wage white-collar jobs.

“Most of us work two to three jobs,” says Ms. Verbera, who also serves as an office manager for a law firm just to get by. “So, a lot of us share the same sentiment, the same pain, the same frustration when it comes to disrespect and disregard in terms of not just wages, but other issues that we had like the lack of staffing, the lack of hours.”

“I’ve always had a side hustle,” says Francisco Peraza, who started working part time as a teaching assistant for Los Angeles County schools in 1993. He planned to get his teaching degree, but halfway through college, he got married, started a family, and quickly realized that he could not support it with his current wage. He left school to work more hours and to take on another part-time job.

“It was a sacrifice that we felt that we needed to make in order to just be able to survive in Los Angeles at that time,” Mr. Peraza says. “And then we had another child. And unfortunately, because of the stress of finances and the stress of me not being around my children because I had to work ... our marriage failed.” There were many factors, he adds, but financial disagreements was one of them.

After 30 years with the school district, Mr. Peraza’s pay has not quite doubled while inflation nationally has more than doubled. It’s especially not easy making ends meet in Los Angeles, with the seventh-highest cost of living among U.S. metropolitan areas and where, by one estimate, the average one-bedroom apartment rents for $2,400 a month. Another problem: School employees typically work only nine to 10 months a year.

“I don’t pay 9 1/2 months’ rent,” Mr. Peraza says. “I don’t pay 9 1/2 months of groceries.”

Such challenges are not confined to workers at Los Angeles schools. “Not a day goes by when I don’t hear of people who can’t pay the rent,” says Professor Higbie. Most of his interactions are with campus staff and teaching assistants. “A lot of those people [the T.A.s] made $25,000, $30,000 a year,” he adds. “You can’t live on that here.”

Late last year, T.A.s, graduate researchers, and other academic employees at the University of California system, including UCLA, went on a monthslong strike and eventually won contracts that raised salaries up to 66%, secured a minimum salary of some $34,000, and improved child care and health care benefits.    

Now, academic workers at the rival California State University system, as well as the University of Michigan and Rutgers University, appear poised to strike over similar demands. The two unions bargaining at Rutgers include full-time faculty and part-time instructors. If they do walk out, it would be the first faculty strike in the institution’s 257-year history. 

While much of the union action has taken place in schools and state and local government, the union movement also has notched headline-grabbing wins in the private sector, notably organizing more than 300 Starbucks stores and successfully organizing an Amazon warehouse in the New York borough of Staten Island.

The policy backdrop has also been shifting, with a labor-friendly administration in Washington and state or local laws – supported by organized labor – to boost minimum wages. But the new activity doesn’t represent a rebound for the labor movement, at least not yet.

“It’s easy to exaggerate it,” says Ruth Milkman, chair of the labor studies program at the City University of New York. “So far what has been going on has not been enough to really move the needle on the overall unionization rate in the United States.”

Indeed, the recent gains in organizing mostly have come in the public sector, where unions still represent 33% of the workforce, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In the private sector, they represent only 6%. The overall union share of the workforce continued to decline last year to 10.1%, down from 10.3% in 2021 and far below the one-third representation that unions had in their heyday in the 1950s.

Also, while unions earned substantial raises last year, inflation ate away almost all those gains. So while last year’s average boost of 5.7% for the first year of contracts was the largest since 1990, according to Bloomberg Law, inflation in recent months has hit 40-year highs. In February, the urban consumer price index rose 6% year over year, nullifying many of the raises that union workers earned last year.

The economy has helped labor. “A pretty strong economy with a low unemployment rate with a lot of vacancies – that gives labor more bargaining power,” says Harry Katz, a professor of collective bargaining at Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations in Ithaca, New York. But “that’s not a revolution. That’s a business cycle event.”

What is different this time, these experts say, is that unions have regained community support. That’s what happened in Los Angeles, where not only teachers were supportive of the staff workers’ strike, but also many parents, too. According to a Gallup survey last year, 71% of Americans approve of unions, the highest level since 1965.

“Parents were in the loop from the beginning,” says Conrado Guerrero, president of one of the local unions that led the picketing during the strike in Los Angeles. “And they understood that in order for their children to have a better experience in schools, they need us to be able to live here without having to work multiple jobs, without having to worry about, you know, ‘Where is my next meal going to come from?’”