[There is unquestionably a new force undergirding the labor
market: a new class consciousness. But leaving neoliberalism behind
will require sustained collective action among millions of unorganized
workers.]
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A NEW CLASS CONSCIOUSNESS  
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Andrew Elrod
September 21, 2023
Dissent
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_ There is unquestionably a new force undergirding the labor market:
a new class consciousness. But leaving neoliberalism behind will
require sustained collective action among millions of unorganized
workers. _

UPS Teamsters picketing in Milwaukee, Photo: Teamsters

 

The Biden era has, in some respects, been a boon for unions. They have
a friendly voice in the White House. A flurry of rulemaking at the
Department of Labor, the National Labor Relations Board, and the
Environmental Protection Agency promises to raise prevailing-wage
determinations for labor on public works, to restrict employer speech
that threatens or intimidates workers, to seek court orders against
employers for violating the law, and to impose employer neutrality on
beneficiaries of certain federal grants and tax credits. Liberals
preach the case for rebuilding the labor movement, which is the
closest thing to a popular political machine they have ever enjoyed.
Meanwhile, a new group of conservatives—led by politicians such as
Marco Rubio and intellectuals such as Oren Cass—publicly argues,
however improbably, for collective bargaining.

The economic conditions have been ripe as well. A business-cycle
upswing in the late Obama years, delayed politically during the Great
Recession, saw a decade of minimum-wage increases at the state and
local levels. (Only five counties or cities had their own minimum-wage
ordinances in 2012; fifty-five do today.) Employment in state and
local governments—which is near its peak pre-pandemic levels—is
strong. The construction boom, although slowing in the housing sector,
has accelerated in manufacturing, driven by a reorganization of supply
chains for producers of electric vehicles and renewable energy.
Federal spending on infrastructure is scheduled to double in 2024 and
again in 2026, while private investment to install energy generation
and distribution systems is rising and expected to continue; expanded
prevailing-wage and apprenticeship requirements on these projects will
grow the construction trades. Product orders, capacity investment,
construction, and government payrolls all sustain employment, a
prerequisite to union organizing.

But it was the COVID-19 pandemic that did more than anything to
denaturalize the regime of individual bargaining—competitive and
private wage negotiations and company-sponsored career-path
planning—with which employers and politicians have frozen the
aspirations and energies of the nation’s workers. Eighteen months of
enhanced unemployment benefits (beginning under the Trump-signed CARES
Act) for more than 53 million workers provided temporary relief from
the daily grind. And the customarily hidden powers over who organizes
work were exposed, challenging our tolerance for managers’
unilateral control over the terms and conditions of employment. Wage
earners discovered a disorganized power during the pandemic, and in
April 2021 the White House responded by establishing the Task Force on
Worker Organizing and Empowerment, chaired by Labor Secretary Martin
Walsh and Vice President Kamala Harris. In February 2022, the task
force recommended a library of administrative rule changes “to
empower workers and to remove longstanding barriers to organizing.”

Is all this part of a process of workers learning to think and act as
a class? How long can the new mood last?

Employers’ antennae are buzzing. “Today’s workforce is looking
for a cause, and unions are stepping in to try to fill the void,”
the employer-side labor law firm Littler Mendelson warned last
November. A panel at the firm’s Tri-State Regional Employer
Conference, held at the Times Square Marriott in June, prepared
executives and HR professionals for “The Resurgence of the Labor
Movement and What It Means to Your Business.” C-suites, with their
defensive instincts, recognize what can only be described as a new
consciousness about class in American life.

Yet if you ask anyone in organized labor today whether they believe
the United States is moving beyond neoliberalism, they will accuse you
of idealism. The newfound popularity for collective bargaining has
been mostly cultural and rhetorical, and unions have until recently
played a negligible role in the political and economic transformations
of the pandemic era. For all the signs of class consciousness, a new
workers’ movement remains incipient. Roughly a third of
union-membership growth in 2022 (70,000 members out of 200,000) came
as a result of new organizing. Most of the gains were from new hires
in shops that were already unionized. But that part of the labor
market grew more slowly than the rest: the union share of national
employment continued to fall, from 10.3 percent in 2021 to 10.1
percent in 2022. New organizing has been magnified by the contemporary
culture, but by most metrics—number of eligible voters, number of
elections, number of votes and election wins, number of workers taking
strike action—union activity during the past couple years was around
the levels of 2009 and 2010, and lower than it was in the last three
decades of the twentieth century.

Employer anxieties about a “resurgence of the labor movement” thus
resemble the paranoia of the antebellum plantation owner, who warned
of conspiracies, outlawed literacy, and sounded alarms despite an
absence of sustained revolt. For all of corporate America’s apparent
preparations for insurgency in, and invasion of, its labor markets, it
has yet to be met with the kinds of collective action that would
confirm its fears or change the political balance in Congress in favor
of reforming labor law. Leaving neoliberalism behind would entail just
this sort of organization among the millions of unorganized. Until
labor unions and their disruptive power grow, any talk of a
post-neoliberal order will remain theoretical. 

Could two national contract fights help change this picture? The
largest union campaigns currently underway, as measured by the numbers
of represented workers, involve the bargaining of national contracts
for existing unions: one, which expires on September 14, for 150,000
United Auto Workers at the Detroit automakers, and another for 340,000
Teamsters at the United Parcel Service, who spent the summer preparing
to walk on August 1. Both contract campaigns are institutionalized
expressions of a new collective desire: the struggles—both of which
are led by new nationally elected leaders who use militant, at times
vengeful, outsider rhetoric—aim to reverse wage concessions, which
were granted in response to the global restructuring of product
markets (in the case of UAW) or to the legal reclassification of work
relationships (the Teamsters). As contract campaigns, they are
necessarily focused on existing members. The excitement they have
generated outside the unions points to the still-vicarious nature of
the new labor culture.

If workers are to capture and organize the hype into an empowered and
growing labor movement, they will do so only by staking claims to the
vast unorganized territory outside the UAW and Teamster contract
campaigns. 

The U.S. workforce consists of roughly 166 million people across some
131 million households. Just 14 million workers, about one in twelve,
were union members in 2022; about half work in the public sector,
including some 2.6 million public-school teachers and 2.3 million
state employees. The other 7 million work in industries with owners
and managers who have long since learned to recruit, train, and
operate with non-unionized labor. These include 1.2 million healthcare
workers (out of 18.7 million total); 1.1 million manufacturing workers
(out of 14.6 million); a million construction workers (out of 8.6
million); 729,000 transportation workers for air, rail, water, truck,
and bus companies (out of 3.2 million); 650,000 retail workers (out of
15 million); 600,000 private educators (out of 5 million); 190,000
utility workers (out of 968,000); 373,000 clerical workers (out of
16.6 million); 117,000 food-service workers (out of 8.6 million); and
81,000 hotel workers (out of 1.1 million). The organized minorities
mainly exist in regional strongholds: the mid-Atlantic corridor, New
England, the northern auto towns, the Pacific coast, Chicago and
Milwaukee, and (thanks to UNITE HERE) the Western cities of Las Vegas
and Phoenix.

Many unions are economically embattled by non-union competition in
their product and service markets. For every UPS or General Motors
party to a master contract, there is a FedEx or a Nissan that is not;
for every union shop, there’s another dozen non-union competitors.
Labor’s economic environment over the past four decades has been
defined by a pattern of consolidating ownership among the
high-labor-cost, union-contracted firms, which drive hard bargains
against their organized workforce to protect market share in an
ecosystem of non-union competitors; employer bankruptcies are the
trump card. This is the pattern of industrial organization under
neoliberalism, which, as the labor economics professor David Weil has
shown, is characterized by the fissuring of employer responsibilities
toward not only collective bargaining but employment itself, to the
point that companies reclassify labor as independent contracting. 

The transformation of auto manufacturing is a case in point. Unlike in
the steel, coal, textile, and apparel industries—other
early-twentieth-century labor battlegrounds—employment in the auto
and auto-parts sectors did not shrink in the final third of the
twentieth century. The notion that Reagan-era deindustrialization
eliminated auto employment is a myth. It last peaked in the year 2000,
at around 1.3 million workers.

Rather than displacement by competition from assembly plants abroad,
industry employment trends have been driven primarily by import
competition in the parts industry and the growth of non-union assembly
by multinational owners in the United States. By the late 1990s, a
fifth of the industry’s workers were in the South, while Japanese
and German companies opened non-union factories on union turf in
Pennsylvania (Volkswagen), Ohio (Honda), California (Toyota), Michigan
(Mazda), Illinois (Mitsubishi), Indiana (Subaru and Toyota), and
Kentucky (Toyota and Volvo). Whether foreign-owned or
Southern-located, a growing share of the industry’s new factories
were non-union. Companies targeted union markets for downsizing,
beginning with Delphi and Visteon, the in-house parts departments that
Ford and GM sold off in response to NAFTA. Until the dot-com crash,
both Delphi and Visteon continued to employ more than 60,000 U.S.
workers. It was the recession that followed the bust, coupled with new
supply chains created under NAFTA, that shrank the industry’s
domestic labor demand: employment at the UAW “Big Five”—GM,
Chrysler, Ford, Delphi, and Visteon—had fallen by 54,000 by early
2003. Altogether the industry shed 300,000 jobs in the early 2000s,
with total employment dipping below 1 million on the eve of the global
financial crisis. Employers thus had increased leverage in contract
bargaining.

Unions adapted by agreeing to the “tiering” of workers. In 2006,
Caterpillar adopted two-tier contracts, and in 2007 the “Big
Three” automakers (GM, Ford, and Chrysler) did the same. On the eve
of the subprime-mortgage collapse, total UAW membership had fallen to
460,000, with less than 200,000 of those workers employed at the Big
Three. The bankruptcies of Visteon, GM, and Chrysler during the
financial crisis brought this number below 150,000, and under the
terms of the bailout imposed by the Obama administration, the UAW
agreed to surrender the right to strike until 2015. 

Foreign investment, domestic restructuring, and competition from
non-union manufacturers and suppliers have given the industry its
modern form. The brand names continue to employ some 300,000 workers
in the United States, and purchase parts from some 4,000 companies
employing an additional 700,000 workers. Out of that million, the UAW
today represents just 150,000. 

Against these headwinds, labor’s epochal challenge has been to
establish beachheads among the unorganized competition, while at the
same time pursuing collective bargaining that protects the
profitability and employment stability of unionized workplaces.

Autoworkers at non-union plants have routinely lost elections for UAW
representation: in 1989 and 2001, at Nissan’s plant in Smyrna,
Tennessee; in 2017, at Nissan’s plant in Canton, Mississippi; and in
2014 and 2019, at Volkswagen’s plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
These plants, at the time of their elections, employed a total of
about 10,000 workers; in the final count, across the three plants,
there were just 3,569 votes for UAW representation, and 6,180 against.
During the campaigns, the employers had threatened that unionization
would lead to the plants reducing their production, or even closing up
altogether. Joining a union was high risk, for uncertain rewards.

Labor has faced similar problems in the trucking industry, in which
company ownership often quickly changes to offload contractual
obligations to bankruptcy courts. The number of non-union trucking
businesses doubled during the 1970s. Congress opened new markets to
their competition with the Motor Carrier Act of 1980, which
liberalized federal rate regulation. The deep and prolonged recession
induced by the Volcker Shock that same year cleared the field of union
firms: signatories to the Teamsters’ National Master Freight
Agreement fell from 500 in 1979 to fewer than forty in 1985. The
number of long-haul truckers covered by Teamster standards fell from
300,000 in 1979 to 136,000 in 1998. At the same time, the total number
of truckers has gone up. From around a million drivers in the early
1990s, employment has grown to 1.4 million today. An additional
350,000 to 400,000 drivers work as independent contractors, according
to the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association. Today just two
large conglomerates are party to the Teamsters’ non-UPS
master-freight agreements, which cover some 33,000 workers—about a
quarter of all union truckers—out of 1.7 million total
truck-transportation workers.

Unlike freight trucking, in which thousands of firms compete for small
slivers of the national market, parcel delivery comprises just four
companies competing in many local markets. The largest of these by
revenue, UPS, remains a union stronghold, employing 340,000 Teamster
members across its facilities. By volume, UPS commands about a quarter
of the private parcel-service market in the United States, just above
the non-unionized FedEx—a company that saw significant growth and a
doubling of earnings during the last UPS national strike, in 1997.
FedEx exhibits the aggressive anti-union animus typical of corporate
America. The Teamsters won an NLRB election in a twenty-person FedEx
shop in Hartford, Connecticut, in 2007, but the company fought a
successful ten-year battle to vacate the results. Some 400 workers
across four FedEx Freight facilities have voted for union
representation since 2014, but at three of those facilities the
company successfully decertified the unions after refusing to bargain
with them. 

At the beginning of the pandemic, most unions continued to emphasize
protection rather than gamble on growth. In 2020, the UAW devoted just
6 percent of its budget to organizing; the United Steelworkers
allocated only 3 percent. The United Food and Commercial Workers
reduced its organizing spending from 9 percent of its budget in 2013
to less than 4 percent in 2021. James P. Hoffa, president of the
International Brotherhood of Teamsters from 1998 to 2022, sought to
protect existing markets by conceding to companies’ demands to limit
labor costs, through wage and benefit cuts in existing contracts, and
phasing in lower standards for newer workers. In 2018, Hoffa’s
Teamsters introduced a second tier of workers into UPS’s master
agreement when it approved a contract voted down by UPS’s
membership. At its worst, this loss of higher purpose bred corruption.
In 2019, the Department of Justice indicted leaders of UAW’s
Chrysler and GM divisions, along with two executive board members, for
embezzling funds from joint labor-management training centers and
accepting bribes.

It has been left to newer leaders to take the initiative. Local
affiliates of the American Federation of Teachers and the National
Education Association organized the statewide teacher mobilizations of
2018. The Amazon Labor Union—which, despite its inability to enforce
its right to collective bargaining, represents the largest new
certified bargaining unit since the NLRB began publishing digital
records—is a start-up created by coworkers in New York City. 

Two unions have publicly adopted the new attitude: the Teamsters and
the UAW. In November 2021, the Teamsters, the country’s largest
private-sector union, elected Sean O’Brien, of Boston Local 25, as
president. He defeated the Hoffa-endorsed Steve Vairma by a margin of
two to one, with over 173,000 members voting. O’Brien campaigned
against the Teamsters’ declining market share, as well as Hoffa’s
pattern of wage and pension give-backs and his unwillingness to call a
strike at UPS in 2018. His coalition included the forty-seven-year-old
left-wing caucus Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU). The caucus
collects its own dues and employs its own staff, and three of its
leaders are now on the Teamsters’ twenty-seven-member executive
board. There they are joined by non-TDU militants such as Lindsay
Dougherty, the leader of Hollywood’s Local 399, which has been
instrumental in shutting down production during the ongoing Writers
Guild of America strike.

This March, the UAW completed its own leadership referendum. In 2019,
the union’s fourteen-member executive board appointed a new
president in response to the federal bribery investigation. The
following year, members gathered enough signatures for a referendum to
change the way leaders are elected. Historically, the UAW has selected
its executive board members through 900 delegates who attend the
union’s constitutional convention. Last July, for the first time in
its history, the union instead sent ballots to every one of its
members in an election supervised by a court-appointed monitor. A
reform slate led by Shawn Fain—a former electrician at Local 1166 in
Kokomo, Indiana, who worked for ten years at the Chrysler training
facility—campaigned for new leadership. The slate included several
other staff from the Chrysler division. Proximity to malfeasance
appears to have stimulated enough indignation to challenge the
remaining leadership.

The ballot count resulted in a runoff election for three offices
within the executive board, including the presidency. As O’Brien’s
alliance did with TDU, the Fain slate had campaigned with a left-wing
caucus, Unite All Workers for Democracy, which organized around the
journal _Labor Notes_ and its readership in higher-education locals.
The Chrysler locals, the higher-education and white-collar locals, and
the economically embattled Midwestern locals delivered majorities for
Fain’s slate. But the election wasn’t a sweep. UAW’s Region 8,
in the South—home to Curry, the incumbent president—and the
militant Local 600, in Detroit—a stronghold of Chuck Browning, the
union’s vice president—delivered large majorities for the existing
leaders. In the 142,000-vote runoff, completed in March, Browning won
a two-to-one majority and kept his office; Curry lost by a margin of
less than 500 votes.

The new leaderships of these two major unions—which together command
$525 million in annual revenue and more than $1 billion in strike
funds—both represent, albeit in different ways, a novel and
uncertain partnership between radicals and business-minded career
officers. Fain has hired two left-wing journalists to lead his new
team. Chris Brooks, a former staff writer for _Labor Notes _and an
organizer with the NewsGuild, is his chief of staff, and the freelance
journalist Jonah Furman is his communications director. Fain and
O’Brien built their campaigns on eliminating two-tier contracts and
raising newer workers’ wages to older standards. Senator Bernie
Sanders has appeared with both leaders. 

Because the Teamsters’ contract with UPS was set to expire on August
1, the union had given the company a deadline of July 1 to finalize
the agreement, so that the membership could have four weeks to ratify
the new contract and avoid a strike. The union later extended this
deadline to July 5, and in a thirteenth-hour concession the company
agreed to eliminate the lower wage tier, yet the parties failed to
reach a wage settlement. As a result, the union mobilized practice
pickets and announced a series of rallies in major cities, all in
preparation for midnight on August 1. The need for members to ratify
any agreement made a strike look inevitable throughout July—until
seven days before the contract expired, when O’Brien’s team
announced a tentative agreement. The bargaining team’s performance
has been a master class, and TDU has joined the union to support the
agreement. The UAW, for its part, took defensive job actions in 2007
and 2019; the overtly offensive rhetoric in the current round appears
to all but promise work stoppages. “Whether or not there is a strike
[is] up to Ford, General Motors, and Stellantis,” Fain said in
mid-July, days before bargaining began. (Stellantis is the
multinational corporation to which Chrysler now belongs.) “They know
what our priorities are.”

Could the Teamster and UAW contract campaigns be a bellwether in this
new environment, in which excitement for organized labor is appearing
to grow? Securing a large wage increase, some argue, would demonstrate
the utility of collective bargaining and increase the appeal of unions
to the unorganized. But the defining characteristic of our era has
been organized labor’s continued decline, which current business
trends and union campaigns indicate will only continue. 

It is important for those looking for a revival of organized labor to
understand how the task of collective bargaining necessarily limits
the ambitious aspirations that have colored the internal revolutions
at the Teamsters and UAW. So far, new organizing efforts have come
second to the contract campaigns targeting the companies that employ
more than a third of each union’s membership. This means that the
power of even militant leaders rests on the claims they make to
existing membership—rather than to those currently unorganized,
whose future participation remains an uncertainty.

“We have to organize Amazon,” O’Brien said shortly after his
inauguration. The Teamsters even launched an Amazon Division, led by
Randy Korgan of Local 1932, in Southern California’s Inland Empire
region. Yet for all of O’Brien’s forceful, and welcome, challenges
to Jeff Bezos, Amazon has won only 12 percent of the parcel-delivery
market. FedEx, by contrast, has grown nearly to the size of UPS. The
UAW faces similar problems. The portions of the auto industry that
have grown the most long ago devised ways to operate without
collective bargaining.

Owing to the difficulty of winning over large shops under the existing
patterns of intimidation and coercion, labor leaders’ collective
imaginations during the Biden era have been monopolized by the idea of
growth through neutrality agreements, in which employers refrain from
running anti-union campaigns among their workers. This perspective
took hold of organized labor’s Washington lobbyists and Democratic
Party allies, who sought neutrality language for the recipients of
federal funding and tax credits—language that Congress failed to
include in either the Inflation Reduction Act or the CHIPS and Science
Act. Nevertheless, Fain has sensibly advocated that workers in the
emerging electric-vehicle industry be included in UAW’s current
round of contract bargaining. This strategic move extends no further
than the existing signatories—it does not include the foreign-owned
or new EV makers—and hinges on a partnership with Washington. It is
not a claim to represent the 850,000 non-unionized autoworkers.

Despite all this, there remains an unquestionable new force
undergirding transactions in the labor market: a new class
consciousness in America. It has emerged irrespective of the continued
decline of unions’ market share, the repeated failures of labor’s
key legislative priorities, and the growing feeling that it is only
workers who can achieve for themselves the security and dignity that
their employers and the larger political system fecklessly promise. It
is reflected in pop culture, where a cynicism long marginalized to the
edges of popular consciousness has become commonplace: a belief that
the United States is a corrupt society, ruled by an entitled,
incompetent, and even sociopathic elite. It reverberates through the
stories that journalists tell about the elections of 2016 and 2020,
and those they are beginning to tell about 2024. The most profound
evidence is in liberal rhetoric itself, in which the goals of strong
employment growth and of strengthening labor’s bargaining power have
become standard economic talking points. Pundits no longer blanch at
the idea of the working class as a category of analysis, or scoff at
the idea that it might exercise collective agency.

Any discussion of labor’s plight today must begin with a hardheaded
realism about the necessity of self-help. For all the signs of
opportunity recognized by labor leaders, there is not yet a consensus
on how to build the organization necessary for greater power.
Unions’ staff may feel as if the gargantuan task of organizing the
unorganized is something beyond their control. It will require
self-organization by workers, who undertake the exhaustive task of
organizing strikes for themselves, likely in defense of their own
leaders and in defiance of court orders; only then can any union
integrate them into a larger structure. Yet it is also true that the
goal is impossible without unions using their existing resources to
sustain campaigns. The return of the union idea is unlikely to go any
farther than the distance unions reach to meet it.

The new class consciousness undoubtedly strengthens the positions of
the Teamsters and the UAW at the bargaining table. But it cannot alter
the balance of forces governing the country unless it is channeled
into campaigns of a scale capable of confronting the existing centers
of economic and political authority. The course of the Biden
administration has illustrated this fact. According to the new liberal
rhetoric, fiscal expansion in 2020 and 2021 was a resounding success:
the annual rate of growth of average hourly wages, which was 2.7
percent in the eight years before the pandemic, has more than doubled
in the past three years, to 6.6 percent, and above 7 percent for those
who earn less than the median. But despite the change of heart among
our business writers and opinihttps://www.dissentmagazine.org/on
columnists, the sharp debate over a sixteen-month inflation that began
in early 2021 and peaked last summer signaled that some thought enough
power had been conceded to workers. Congress limited spending to tax
collections, and opposed raising taxes on either corporate treasuries
or the higher brackets. National health insurance or a federal housing
program—much less any kind of freeze on rents or prices for
essential goods—remain the stuff of intellectual polemics rather
than legislative debate.

The insurgent leaders of two of the largest international unions are
working under conditions of unchallenged corporate domination. When
unions have grown, non-union markets have outpaced them. When wages
have risen, so too have prices. No group of workers or labor leaders
will be able to challenge this status quo absent new organization that
reaches out far beyond existing strongholds. Who can credibly claim
today a program to bring organization to the millions of unorganized
workers in this country? That is still beyond our imagination. And it
is this foreclosure, more than anything else, that signals we are not
yet through the depths of our current struggles.

_ANDREW ELROD is a writer and historian who lives in Los Angeles._

_Dissent publishes the very best in political argument, and takes
pride in cultivating the next generation of labor journalists,
cultural critics, and political polemicists. Subscribe.
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* UAW
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