The new wave of unionism in USA is committed to a new vision of the public good, centered on the politics of anti-monopoly legislation and enforcement. Whereas pro-neoliberal ideologists insisted for decades that every worker was ultimately a consumer, the new unionism insists that every consumer is ultimately a worker, writes Dennis Redmond.

The summer of 2023 witnessed three events which marked the historic rebirth of the American labor movement. The first major event was a wave of successful labor mobilizations ranging from the Teamsters’ victory at the bargaining table in June 2023 to innovative campaigns to organize high-technology and service workers such as Microsoft videogame studios, Amazon staffers, Starbucks baristas and Apple retail workers.

These victories also include the five-month strike by the Writers Guild of America against the digital streaming platforms and studios which monopolize the world’s media, which won significant staffing and revenue gains for its members. Just as importantly, the new contract will protect cultural workers from being unfairly exploited by digital tools such as artificial intelligence (AI).

These protections are especially important for workers in the single largest culture-industry of them all, namely videogames, which recorded $182.9 billion in 2022 revenues (this is roughly five times the total ticket sales and rental receipts of the world film industry). One of the chronic scandals of the videogame industry has been the horrendous exploitation of voice actors, motion capture actors and quality assurance testers by profit-hungry studios. The new contract enables everyone who participates in the creation of a work of interactive digital media, from the lowest-paid tester to the highest-paid programmer, to benefit from the success of the work.

Most recently, the United Auto Workers has employed the innovative tactic of conducting strikes at key nodes of the auto industry’s supply chain, rather than shutting down the entire industry. This is a strategy the UAW leadership has called “stand-up strikes”, an allusion to the famous sit-down strikes which unionized the American auto industry during the 1930s.

This tactic has been especially effective because the auto companies are furiously investing in electric vehicle (EV) technology, knowing full well that the majority of vehicles sold by 2025 and the years thereafter will be powered by batteries and not by gasoline.^[1] Over the next two years, workers will be employing stand-up strikes in a wide range of service and high technology industries which depend on time-dependent production networks and logistics chains.

The second major event was the decision by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) that once a majority of employees sign a union card, the company can no longer simply fire anyone it suspects of being a union member, and must recognize the union. For decades, tens of thousands of US companies have routinely blocked organizing drives by identifying key organizers or discontented workers, firing them, and then waging delaying tactics at the NLRB. The right to join a union was achieved by workers in all other fully-industrialized polities decades ago, but has only now finally been achieved in the United States.^[1]

The third event has been the surging popularity of labor unions among America’s youngest cohort of workers, i.e. Americans born in 1900 or later. In a 2023 survey commissioned by the AFL-CIO, the leading US labor federation, a total of 88% of workers under the age of 30 approved of unions, as compared to 69% for workers aged 30-49 years old and 67% for those aged 50 and older.^[2] This younger cohort is the leading edge of a sea change in popular attitudes towards unions, exemplified by a 2022 Gallup poll which showed that US citizens approved of unions by a margin of 71% to 29% – the highest level of pro-union sentiment recorded since 1965.

While each of these three events is significant in their own right, their simultaneous appearance signals the historic rebirth of progressive unionism in the United States after a lapse of almost eighty years. Although this progressive unionism is still in its formative stages, it is marked by three strategies worth exploring further.

First, the new unionism celebrates and embodies a culture of workplace solidarity which includes all ethnicities, races, genders, sexualities, ages and skill levels. Rather than upholding the privileges of a small group of skilled workers, it practices the democracy it preaches.

Second, the new unionism wields the tools of the digital commons in order to mobilize digitally-connected communities. These tools were especially powerful in the case of the WGA strike, and are proving to be equally effective in coordinating and amplifying the UAW’s stand-up strikes.

Third, the new unionism is committed to a new vision of the public good, centered on the politics of anti-monopoly legislation and enforcement. Whereas pro-neoliberal ideologists insisted for decades that every worker was ultimately a consumer, the new unionism insists that every consumer is ultimately a worker.

In fact, American consumers have been looted for decades by plutocratic monopolies such as Big Data (Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google), Big Agriculture, Big Hospital, Big Pharma, Big Grocery and Big Airline. It is no accident that Biden is not just the most pro-union US president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt, he has also unleashed the most serious anti-monopoly enforcement drive in the United States since the 1930s.

One of the best examples of the potential power of these three new strategies is a video entitled Why Does Flying Suck so Much?, narrated by former Department of Labor Secretary Robert Reich. The video shows how four companies have created Big Airline – a monopoly which controls 80% of all US domestic air travel. This monopoly treats its workers like dirt, overcharges its customers, and delivers a miserable passenger experience. However, the video also shows there is nothing natural or inevitable about Big Airline. It is a socially constructed institution which can be changed by a coalition of progressive consumers, reformers and unions.

While the strategies of this new unionism will spread from the United States to other fully industrialized polities over the next few years, their role is likely to be especially prominent in the partly industrialized polities of the world. Organizing unions in these latter has always been extremely difficult due to despotic governments (as with China and Egypt), abyssal levels of social inequality (as with Brazil and Nigeria), and the extreme heterogeneity of ethnic, linguistic, confessional, regional and occupational identities (as with India and Indonesia). However, the revitalization of workplace democracy at the heart of the new unionism, the plebian accessibility of its digital tools, and its reinvention of the very notion of the public good are important contributions to the creation of the truly transnational labor movement of the future.

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^[1] The reason for this transformation is that the cost of batteries per kilowatt hour stored drops at an exponential rate of about 15% annually, whereas the cost of hydrocarbons per horsepower produced is broadly stable over time.

^[2] For further details on the NLRB decision, see: Harold Myerson. “Biden’s NLRB Brings Workers’ Rights Back From the Dead.” The Prospect. August 28, 2023.

https://prospect.org/labor/2023-08-28-bidens-nlrb-brings-workers-rights-back/.

^[3] It is also noteworthy that when asked whether they agreed or disagreed with the general statement that “society would be better with more people in unions”, 70% of workers under 30 agreed, 50% of those aged 30-49 agreed, whereas only 45% of those aged 50 and older agreed.