{"id":9821,"date":"2023-03-30T23:46:18","date_gmt":"2023-03-31T03:46:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.tempestmag.org\/v01_2020\/staging\/?p=9821"},"modified":"2023-04-18T00:27:09","modified_gmt":"2023-04-18T04:27:09","slug":"a-rocky-road-on-the-upward-path-of-labor-action","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/2023\/03\/a-rocky-road-on-the-upward-path-of-labor-action\/","title":{"rendered":"A rocky road on the upward path of labor action"},"content":{"rendered":"

T<\/span>he number of strikes and organizing efforts rose again in 2022. According to the Cornell ILR Labor Action Tracker Report of 2022, strikes were up by 52 percent from the previous year, while the number of strikers increased by 60 percent, as the figures in Table I show. 1

There is momentum in workers\u2019 action<\/a>, and the 2023 bargaining calendar is loaded with labor movement heavyweights looking for relief from years of retreat. At the top of this list are the 350 thousand Teamsters at UPS, followed by more than 150 thousand members of the United Auto Workers (UAW) at the Detroit (formerly \u201cBig\u201d) Three automakers, a similar number of TV and film producers, 75 thousand workers at healthcare giant Kaiser Permanente, 25 thousand Safeway grocery workers, six thousand pilots at FedEx, and thousands of airline workers with unresolved contracts at United, American, and Southwest Airlines. Together, as Bloomberg\u2019s Daily Labor Report \u00a0put it, these unsettled contracts \u201cThreaten Unrest in 2023.\u201d In fact, a scroll down the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service\u2019s January 2023 list<\/a> of bargaining notifications reveals more than 1,700 contract expirations<\/a> in 2023. Most are small local bargaining units, but some will be influenced by the outcomes at the larger companies and their workers that dominate this year\u2019s bargaining.3Cornell ILR \u201cLabor Action Tracker,\u201d Annual Report 2021<\/a>; Cornell ILR Labor Action Tracker, Annual Report 2022; BLS, \u201cMajor Work Stoppage\u201d Annual<\/a>; Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, \u201cOngoing and Ending Work Stoppages,\u201d Monthly, 2017-2019; Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service Annual Report 2009-2017; Jonah Furman, \u201cWho Gets the Bird<\/a>\u201d, Weekly, 2021, 2022; National Mediation Board (airlines and railroads), \u201cStrikes<\/a>.\u201d<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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Yet, as encouraging as the numbers may be, these strike figures are still far below the levels of strike activity from the mid-1930s through the 1970s, while even the jump in the number of strikers from 140 thousand in 2021 to 224 thousand in 2022 is lower than those of the big teachers\u2019 rebellion of 2018\u20132019. And for all those NLRB wins<\/a>, the entire number of those eligible to vote in the 2022 elections<\/a> was just 62,492, and almost none of those who won their election have pried a first contract out of their employer. The defeat of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union\u2019s two NLRB elections at Amazon\u2019s warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama, and the Amazon Labor Union\u2019s lost election in Albany, New York, strongly suggest that the NLRB election route to union recognition and a contract cannot replace internal grassroots organization and direct action. In addition, organizers need to take stock of the major defeat at Warrior mines, also in Alabama, and the even greater setback on the nation\u2019s freight railroads. Clearly, to paraphrase Frederick Douglass, capital is not conceding anything without a fight. To get a better idea of the possibilities for 2023, this essay will look at the changing economic, internal union, and political contexts and the major groups of workers whose contracts expire in 2023.<\/p>\n

Economic context: capital looks for solutions<\/h4>\n

The gains in strikes of 2022, like those in the previous year, were made in the context of unusually tight labor markets. \u201cQuit levels\u201d and unfilled job openings were so high that commentators started speaking of the \u201cGreat Resignation.\u201d As Table II shows, 2023 opened with only a slight softening of these best-of-all circumstances for striking and organizing. There are, however, dark clouds on the economic horizon. For one, GDP growth had declined to 2.1 percent in 2022. The International Monetary Fund, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the World Trade Organization, and the United Nations all predict <\/a>slow growth between 2.2 and 2.7 percent for 2023.<\/p>\n

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While a full-fledged recession or financial crisis signaled by the collapse of the Silicon Valley Bank or the Fed\u2019s high interest rates are not out of the question, the World Economic Forum (WEF), the voice of international capital, found in its Global Risks Report 2023<\/em> that \u201cCost of living dominates global risk in the next two years.\u201d Furthermore, a majority of executives from most developed economies surveyed put \u201ccost-of-living crisis\u201d or \u201crapid and\/or sustained inflation\u201d as the number one risk for the next couple of years. Overall, the WEF also sees slower growth, while \u201ccontinued supply-driven inflation could lead to stagflation, the socioeconomic consequences of which could be severe.\u201d4

While the context of the recent rise in strikes and organizing in the United States has been a tight labor market, it is precisely this supply-driven inflation and the cost-of-living crisis, along with the immense pressures from capital on work itself, that has moved workers to organize and strike. Ironically, the falling real wages and rotten working conditions that have been taking shape for years are also the root of the labor shortages that impact transportation, warehousing, and much of the economy that, in turn, accelerated \u201csupply-driven\u201d inflation. On the one hand, this promises to stiffen capital\u2019s resistance to worker demands. One the other, even under slower growth or worse, it is these strongly felt conditions\u2014the lost income and basics of social reproduction that cannot be even partially recovered without confronting the bosses\u2014that will remain the lived experiences of the vast majority of U.S. workers for 2023, more than the softening of the labor market per se.<\/p>\n

There is one more consequence of U.S. capitalism\u2019s low growth and the recent supply chain crisis that may affect some workers whose contracts expire this year. The collapse of key aspects of the world\u2019s and the nation\u2019s supply chains in the last two years revealed the extreme vulnerability of just-in-time (JIT) delivery and lean production methods. As a consequence, more and more U.S. businesses are contemplating or actually moving away from JIT and reliance on single suppliers to increased inventories and alternative sources of key inputs in order to achieve greater resilience in the face of further disruptions from rising costs, climate change, data outages, or worker militancy. While this doesn\u2019t necessarily mean abandoning all aspects of lean production\u2019s \u201cmanagement-by-stress,\u201d Citi GPS, the research arm of Citibank, observed in its January 2023 report, \u201cOne common change is an increase in inventory as corporates switch from a just-in-time to a just-in-case approach.\u201d5