Posts tagged labor organizing
The share of Californians in unions holds steady as nationwide numbers continue decline
August 28, 2025 // The report, which analyzed data collected by the U.S. Census Bureau and the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, found that the percentage of Californians covered by a union has hovered between 16% and 18% in the last two decades. In 2024, the most recent year analyzed by researchers, the Golden State’s 2.67 million union-represented workers amounted to 16.3% of its labor force. Unions have only been able to sustain those numbers through consistent new organizing, said Enrique Lopezlira, director of the Low-Wage Work Program at the UC Berkeley Labor Center and a co-author of the report.
A History of Everything Leftist Unionism: The Old Left and the Reds
March 10, 2025 // American labor radicalism has come a long way from Soviet agents in the Congress of Industrial Organizations through the UAW-funded Students for a Democratic Society to today’s SEIU purple-shirted demonstrators and red-shirted UAW anti-anti-Hamasniks. As Big Labor has declined, what independence the labor movement had from the progressive Left has diminished to the point where, with rare divergences, it effectively has ceased to exist. The causes of the Long Decline are many, and the causes of Big Labor’s leftism are also many, ranging from financial incentive structures of union officials to the structure of collective bargaining. Today, organized labor is a full member of the Everything Leftist coalition, not just in economic issues and labor organizing but also in social and foreign policy.
Commentary: Labor unions are mobilizing in new and old industries alike
October 6, 2024 // How job security issues are addressed following this wave of strikes could set the tone for what other hospitality, manufacturing and transportation unions seek when their contracts are up for negotiation again.The Conversation
Are Unions Experiencing a Renaissance? Not Quite
January 24, 2024 // The reality is that, although the absolute number of union members has risen, nonunion jobs have increased faster.2 Gallup data support the apparent lack of worker demand for joining a union. Although 17% of workers are highly interested in joining a labor union, six in 10 U.S. employees say they are “not interested at all,” unchanged from 2022.
Op-ed: Workers Rights Won by Unions, From the 8-Hour Workday to Overtime Pay
September 11, 2023 // The overall proportion of unionized workers in the United States remains relatively low, with only one in every 10 workers in the country belonging to a union. But whether you're a union worker or not, you may benefit from policies for which unions have fought long and hard — and they continue to fight. Labor organizing has helped secure everyday benefits that many of us now take for granted. And these efforts have shown people what kind of protections they can hope to secure in the workplace.
OREGON: Oaks Park workers launch push to unionize amid heat wave
August 23, 2023 //
‘It feels like it’s strike summer’: US unions flex muscles across industries
July 31, 2023 // “In the wake of the Patco strike, companies saw strikes as opportunities to weaken unions or even break them. That’s not the case today. Today there’s no fear that calling a strike will result in disaster,” said Lichtenstein. “Today there’s a sense that unions are on the offensive,” Lichtenstein continued. “Take the actors. They say they don’t want just a good contract. They want a transformative contract.”
You may have heard of the ‘union boom.’ The numbers tell a different story
March 2, 2023 // Headline writers began declaring things like, "Employees everywhere are organizing" and that the United States was seeing a "union boom." In September, the White House asserted "Organized labor appears to be having a moment." However, the Bureau of Labor Statistics recently released its union data for 2022. And their data shows that — far from a resurgence — the share of American workers in a union has continued to decline. Last year, the union membership rate fell by 0.2 percentage points to 10.1% — the lowest on record. This was the second year in a row that the union rate fell. Only one in ten American workers is now in a union, down from nearly one in three workers during the heyday of unions back in the 1950s.
The year labor organizing came to tech
December 13, 2022 // Tech's labor organizing is still in its infancy. Only a few unions have successfully formed, and most of those still face the often-arduous process of negotiating contracts with employers. Pandemic-driven labor shortages gave workers an unusual boost in leverage for a time, but that dynamic could change again as the economy slows down. The tech industry laid off over 120,000 employees in 2022.
Workers Start Union Push at Trader Joe’s in Massachusetts
May 18, 2022 // Even though unionization by Trader Joe’s workers at the start of the pandemic failed, labor conditions have changed under the Biden administration and National Labor Relations Board General Counsel Jennifer Abbruzzo, said O’Brien, the Boston College professor. “She's much more pro-union and that's going to work in favor of the Trader Joe's workers," she said.