For the last half century unions have been under attack and the numbers of non-government workers in unions has steadily declined, today only 6% of non-government workers belong to unions.
In the 1973 movie Sleeper UFT president Shanker is parodied as being responsible for a nuclear war (Watch video clip here)
Surprisingly public support for unions has increased.
Nick Kristoff in a NY Times editorial praises the roles of unions and the increasing public support,
Labor unions are … a powerful force for equality, elevating underpaid workers who otherwise are often treated as doormats.
The central reality is that as unions declined over the past half-century, workers were stiffed. They were paid poorly, they lost health care and retirement benefits, and they lost control over their schedules. They were robbed of dignity and sometimes of wages as well. Deaths of despair from drugs, alcohol and suicide surged among blue-collar workers.
What happened?
In the 1970s the United Auto Workers (UAW) had over a million members, today, 150,000 members.
Non-unionized facilities in Southern states with anti-union sentiments, competition from foreign car companies, automation and the emergence of electric vehicles (EI) requiring fewer workers, and, the automobile companies being slow to respond to the growth in demand for EVs.
In 2008 the Great Recession exploded
… the combination of an historic recession and financial crisis pushed the American auto industry to the brink of collapse. Access to credit for car loans dried up and auto sales plunged 40 percent. Auto manufacturers and suppliers dramatically curtailed production.
and the automobile industry was a victim, faced with catastrophic economic issues, faced with bankruptcy, the federal government bailed out the companies and the UAW in order to curtail layoffs agreed; new employees would not be eligible for pensions and receive salaries 1/3 lower than pre recession members
The resurgence of the auto industry was swift, the loans from the federal government were repaid and the “Big Three” auto companies returned to profitability.
As the post Recession years passed the number of UAW members in the new tier, no pension and 1/3 lower salaries than in the pre Recession tier continued to increase. Political divisions within the UAW widened and in the 2022 union election the incumbents were defeated, in a very close election, with a platform attractive to the post and pre Recession members. Shawn Fain, the new UAW president immediately set the stage for a strike.
The UAW strike — which includes demands for 40% higher wages and a shift to a 32-hour workweek — is part of a more general labor revival in the U.S. A wave of major strikes is spreading across the country; the strike activity in 2023 has already reached levels that haven’t prevailed since the 1980s:
I think the strike is ultimately going to run up against even more powerful forces that severely limit its effectiveness. The auto industry is in the middle of a wrenching change like nothing it’s ever seen since its creation over a century ago — the switch from internal combustion cars to battery-powered electrics.
That change is necessary and even inevitable, but it’s going to make life a lot more difficult for unionized auto workers in the U.S. Even if the UAW wins on all their demands, the shift to electrics is going to reduce the importance of traditional heavily unionized industry clusters like Detroit, and will transform the nature of auto manufacturing itself. How flexibly U.S. institutions — the car companies, the government, and labor itself — can respond to these changes will determine whether union-friendly states can avoid a new miniature version of the Rust Belt.
Just as the movement to EV impacts the automobile industry the power of Artificial Intelligence (AI) threatens employment among writer and actors,
. the threat of AI vividly cast the writers’ plight as a human-versus-machine clash, with widespread implications for other industries facing a radically new kind of automation.
After a five month strike the writers strike has a tentative settlement, with lessons for all unions.
The tentative deal announced this week by the Writers Guild of America includes many industry-specific aspects, such as the size of writers’ rooms and improved residuals for streaming. But everyone from autoworkers to white-collar middle managers should be paying very close attention to how this deal was achieved — because it sets a monumental precedent for labor relations in a digital future.
In the past, management would often make nearly all technology-related decisions before negotiations even began. Workers and their unions were excluded from early conversations about technology
The W.G.A. contract establishes a precedent that an employer’s use of A.I. can be a central subject of bargaining. It further establishes the precedent that workers can and should have a say in when and how they use artificial intelligence at work.
In the past, when labor has sought to simply resist or impede technological change, it’s been completely run over.
But A.I. is coming for workers in every sector, no matter their academic pedigree or sartorial choices
The W.G.A.’s success will also reverberate in more traditional ways.
Negotiators for the United Auto Workers are currently focused on the transition from gas-powered to electric vehicles, a shift that requires reskilling the work force and potentially shifting production from unionized manufacturers — GM, Ford and Stellantis — to smaller, nonunion suppliers. The union is not looking to curtail a shift to electric vehicles, but it does want to secure a share of the profits generated by the transition, in the form of wage increases, investments in reskilling and worker relocation. The W.G.A. agreement points a way toward that resolution. Union and management negotiators can now look to screenwriters for a little precedent and a lot of inspiration
Teaching is not immune from the generational changes, the impact of technology. Enrollment in teacher preparation programs continue to decline, teacher shortages are endemic: will technology begin to replace teachers? Read my blog: The Teacher Shortages: Can Chatbots Be Unionized? Here
The new UFT contract contains a lengthy section attempting to define virtual teaching with a long list of caveats, what management can and cannot do, with considerable uncertainty. Read here p 14 ff
The importance of the section of the agreement is the use of new technologies is negotiable.
ChatGPT is less than a year old and already is being used in classrooms: how long before a ChatBot for every student, a virtual teacher/personal assistant replacing brick and mortar schools and flesh and blood teachers?
Ed In The Apple 