Will the union ‘renaissance’ last?

This is an audio transcript of the Behind the Money podcast episode: ‘Will the union ‘renaissance’ last?’

Michela Tindera [
When the United Auto Workers union went on strike earlier this year, their president, Shawn Fain, didn’t mince his words.

Shawn Fain voice clip
The billionaires and company executives think us auto workers are just dumb. They think we don’t get it. They think we only understand the power of a supervisor yelling at us or an assembly line coming at us.

Michela Tindera
That’s Fain speaking on Facebook Live a few weeks ago. In the video, he’s wearing a white T-shirt that says in bold letters, “Eat the rich.” And he’s talking to the more than 140,000 auto workers who are a part of his union.

Shawn Fain voice clip
They look at me and they see some redneck from Indiana. They look at you and see somebody they would never have over for dinner or let ride on their yacht or fly on their private jet. They think they know us. But us autoworkers know better.

Michela Tindera
Here’s the FT’s labour and equality correspondent, Taylor Nicole Rogers.

Taylor Nicole Rogers
The autoworkers felt like their jobs used to be really good, solid middle-class jobs where you really felt taken care of. But over the past 20, 30 years, they feel like that has completely changed.

Michela Tindera
Taylor says that the autoworkers’ demands are part of just one of several high-profile strikes and contract negotiations that she’s been reporting on over the last few months.

[AUDIO CLIP OF STRIKE]

Taylor Nicole Rogers
From nurses and doctors to Hollywood actors and writers to autoworkers, and then almost airline pilots and UPS drivers. It got to the point where people started calling last month Striketober.

[AUDIO CLIP OF STRIKE]

Michela Tindera
Last week, it looked like the union was going to get what they had been fighting for. After six weeks of strikes, Fain and the autoworkers agreed to a tentative deal with the three major carmakers here in the US. That’s Ford, General Motors and Stellantis. Now, the workers are on the precipice of signing a historic new contract that will get the union wage increases and better job security as the auto industry transitions to making more electric vehicles.

Taylor Nicole Rogers
The new contract has been a major step forward for auto workers.

Michela Tindera
And to observers like myself hearing about Fain and the rest of the auto workers and other recent labour movements like the ones in Hollywood. It might feel like workers are gaining more ground than they have in years.

Taylor Nicole Rogers
We’re definitely in a union renaissance, as I want to call it. But I think it might be a little too early to say whether this is going to be like a grand renaissance, like, that will look back on in ten years and be, like, this was the beginning or something or is this going to be a blip.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Michela Tindera
I’m Michela Tindera from the Financial Times. Today on Behind the Money, we’re looking at three of the largest labour movements of 2023 to find out whether labour unions in the US are entering a new era of power.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Hi, Taylor. Welcome to the show.

Taylor Nicole Rogers
Hi. Thanks for having me.

Michela Tindera
So labour unions have been having a bit of a moment recently. You reported that so far in 2023, more than 480,000 workers in the US have gone on strike. That’s more than eight times the number of people who went on strike in 2020. So where’s this surge of activity coming from right now?

Taylor Nicole Rogers
We’re in this kind of perfect storm between the fallout of the Covid crisis when a lot of workers were really re-evaluating if their pay was worth what they were being asked to do when it comes to working in person, endangering your health, working harder because there’s a labour shortage, that kind of thing. Also, a lot of labour contracts expired during the pandemic and then the negotiations were delayed by a year or two. So we had this perfect storm of people really re-evaluating their working conditions. And then also three years’ worth of contract negotiations crammed into 12 months. One big theme across several of the strikes is this idea of making up for lost time. There’s this narrative — and I say narrative not because it’s not true; this is just the story that they tell — is that workers have given up a lot of ground to help their company survive in hard times, and now it’s time for you to pay up.

Michela Tindera
So today, I want to focus on arguably the three biggest union movements that have happened in the US this year. Those have been in the auto industry in Hollywood and with the shipping company UPS. So let’s start with the autoworkers. They tentatively agreed to this new contract with Ford, GM and Stellantis last week. But can you tell me more about how they actually got here to this moment with a new contract on the table?

Taylor Nicole Rogers
The auto workers contract expires roughly every four years, and that happened this year on September 15. And this time around, the autoworkers are facing a big existential crisis, which is electric vehicles. EVs take a lot less people to make than combustion engines, and they tend to be made in separate non-union factories. So the union workers really wanted some sort of assurances about what happens to their jobs as EVs become more commonplace in the US. And the other thing is inflation. Workers really felt like their wages had fallen behind, noticed that their companies had made a lot of money during Covid, and they really wanted to make up some ground there. So it made for a very intense negotiation session that ultimately resulted in a strike.

Michela Tindera
Now tell me more about this approach that the auto workers took to going on strike. How would you describe their strategy?

Taylor Nicole Rogers
A lot of people were expecting them to do the traditional US strike model, which is everyone in the union stops working, the whole plant shuts down, end of story. They took a different approach. The union called it the Stand Up Strike, which is actually a reference to a very famous series of strikes back in the 1930s. So in this case, Shawn Fain would go on Facebook live and he would say, for example, we’re not getting anywhere with Stellantis. So workers at this Stellantis plant, you guys go on strike. And he would not give any warning to Stellantis. So the company would really be left guessing on who was going on strike and when and where. And that was a really novel approach we don’t see a lot. And arguably it had a very big impact because they were able to keep a lot of their members working while also creating the havoc at the automaker plants. And I’ve heard a lot of union leaders say, you know, we might look into this for next year. So we’ll see.

Michela Tindera
Yeah, that’s really interesting. Now let’s go to another big labour movement, the strikes in Hollywood.

[AUDIO CLIP OF STRIKE]

Michela Tindera
Back in May, the union representing television and film writers went on strike. Then the union representing actors joined them in July. This was the first joint strike between those two groups in more than six decades.

[AUDIO CLIP OF STRIKE]

And sort of like the autoworkers, the actors and writers were facing these existential questions around the future of their jobs. While the autoworkers were looking ahead to this growing sector, actors and writers were looking at how things like artificial intelligence would impact their rights as workers.

Hollywood striker voice clip
We deserve to be able to be protected from machines pretending to be us. We deserve to be working artists.

Michela Tindera
So, Taylor, how was their strategy different from the autoworkers?

Taylor Nicole Rogers
If you think about the autoworkers making targeted strikes, in Hollywood they just detonated the nuclear weapon. They completely paused all production when the writers first went on strike in May of this year and the fallout extends far wider. They essentially shut down most of the production in Hollywood. And if you think about all of the other people in different professions and different unions that were out of work from the day one of the writers strike until . . . well, until now. Because the actors are still out on strike. It is substantial. You know, cinematographers, set designers, directors, people who clean on Hollywood sets and cook the food, all of those people are out of work. Whereas in the auto industry, a lot of the businesses that depend on, you know, Ford and GM and Stellantis plants were able to operate at some level, whether that’s parts suppliers and car dealerships. They were obviously affected, but they did not come to a screeching halt the same way that the restaurants that cater food on Hollywood sets did.

Michela Tindera
Mm hmm. So each strike really had a different ripple effect out into the broader workforce. Now, the writers union did eventually reach a deal and end their strike. So how did that turn out? Did they get everything they wanted?

Taylor Nicole Rogers
They got a lot of what they wanted. They got pay rises and they got some guarantees around job security. If you think about how Hollywood works, the writers were being hired for a couple of months at a time to write one season of a TV show, then being unemployed or looking for a new job. And they got some guarantees around how long that will be, how many writers there will be per TV show, which they really wanted. And also some basic guidelines around the use of AI in the writers’ room.

Michela Tindera
OK. And but the actors strike is still ongoing. So what’s happening there?

Taylor Nicole Rogers
They’re coming up against a lot of the same problems that the writers did. But we are anticipating that that strike is coming to an end soon.

Michela Tindera
And there’s another industry that had a notable effort in the labour union movement this year, and that’s around the workers at the shipping company UPS. So those workers are part of a larger union in the US called the Teamsters, which are historically workers that work in warehouses or are like freight drivers. And now, unlike Hollywood or the auto workers, this group actually did not go on strike. They reached a deal with their contract prior to needing to go on strike.

Taylor Nicole Rogers
Hours before. (laughter)

Michela Tindera
OK. Yeah, they rode it right down to the line, but they did not end up going on strike. So what happened there?

Taylor Nicole Rogers
The UPS workers actually took a very similar posture to what the auto workers did. But like you said, they were able to get that deal that they wanted without going on strike, which I think was good because of the role that UPS plays in the economy. There was in many ways a lot more at stake with that strike.

Michela Tindera
What do you mean by that?

Taylor Nicole Rogers
When you think about the role of auto companies in the US economy versus the role of UPS, obviously the auto industry is very crucial, but the world did not implode without six weeks of new pick-up trucks being built. But without six weeks of shipments into grocery stores, without six weeks of, you know, medicines delivered to hospitals, it would have been a very different situation.

Michela Tindera
And I mean, how would you compare what the UPS workers wanted in their contract compared to Hollywood and the auto workers? Was that, again, these similar types of demands or what were they specifically trying to put into their contract?

Taylor Nicole Rogers
It’s a bit different because the UPS workers do not have this existential new technology threat coming at them. A lot of their demands were around pay and working conditions. So some of the things that the UPS drivers were talking about was the need for air conditioning in the brown trucks, because if you think about it, they’re driving around for 10 hours a day in the sun with no air conditioning. Pay was a really big one because they saw the company making record profits during the pandemic as everyone was ordering stuff to home. So in general, the UPS workers’ demands were more straightforward in many ways. And also they were just negotiating with one company instead of three automakers and a handful of movie studios.

Michela Tindera
So all three of these tactics, you know, each group really took a different tack here. The Hollywood workers took this approach of a general strike. Auto workers took a more targeted approach. And UPS was able to reach a deal before needing to go on strike. So I’m curious, thinking back on the last several months, what do you think worked here? What didn’t?

Taylor Nicole Rogers
I think all of the strategies were successful in their own right. Workers came out with a lot of what they asked for. But if you’re going to ask me, you know, which strike experience I would personally want to have, I would like to be a UPS driver. Going on strike is a lot of work. And even though you do get some money back from your union’s strike fund, it’s a lot on your family financially. And the Teamsters at UPS showed that you can get these big pay raises without striking.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Michela Tindera
So I’m curious now, seeing these bigger strikes in Hollywood with the autoworkers, do you think that the tide is turning more in favour of workers getting what they want in a contract?

Taylor Nicole Rogers
I will say the tide is definitely turning when it comes to public opinion. If you look at the polling, the majority of Americans are on the side of striking workers. They approve of the unions. If you even just think back to the auto workers strike, you had both President Biden and President Trump supporting the auto workers. Have you ever seen those two men agree on anything? (laughter)

Michela Tindera
Yeah, that’s a great point. I didn’t know that, actually.

Taylor Nicole Rogers
Yeah. In the same week, they both went and met with striking auto workers in Michigan. I definitely think that’s a notable shift.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Michela Tindera
We’ve been talking a lot about the strategies of the unions. I’m curious if you’ve observed anything new or different with how companies have been responding to unions.

Taylor Nicole Rogers
You know, there is a very standard playbook that’s been largely the same for a long time about how a company should respond to a union. You call workers into meetings on the clock and tell them, we want to talk to you directly. We don’t want a middleman. These are outsiders. We’ll just go ahead and give you a raise. Don’t worry about it. What I would say is changing is that we now have an administration in Washington that is really working to enforce a lot of the laws that we have around what companies can and cannot do when unions are organising their workers. So I wouldn’t say that the playbook has changed, but now that these laws are being enforced more starkly than they have in the past, the effectiveness is going down. So I’ve actually seen quite a bit of scrambling in the union avoidance industry, is what they call it, about what are we going to do, this is a new environment, the things that we’ve done have backfired in many ways, especially now that you have workers filming managers on TikTok breaking the law.

Michela Tindera
So when you were on Behind the Money last, which was a little over a year ago, we had you on to talk about some of these new unions that were forming at companies like Apple, like Amazon, like Starbucks. And these are companies that hadn’t had unions in the past. So what’s happened with these groups since we last spoke?

Taylor Nicole Rogers
Not a lot, actually. So statistically, it’s very difficult once you form that union to get that first contract. And that is what those unions are experiencing, although perhaps on the extreme end, I know a lot of experts I’ve spoken to were expecting us to see those first couple of Starbucks maybe having a contract by now, but that hasn’t happened.

Michela Tindera
Right. Yeah, I mean, yeah, basically, none of these newer unions have been able to secure a contract. Why is that?

Taylor Nicole Rogers
When I asked labour experts, they have said that the real problem is that US labour law only has this very loose standard of you have to bargain in good faith. But it doesn’t say what that means. There’s no timeline. So Starbucks and the union are having regular bargaining meetings, but they have not come to an agreement. So when you ask me if those unions are succeeding, it’s hard to say because the workers have some legal protections because they’re a member of a union. But has their day-to-day changed in terms of scheduling, in terms of how many people are on a shift, in terms of pay? No.

Michela Tindera
So where do you see all this going next?

Taylor Nicole Rogers
My plan so far for next year is to really loop back to some of these younger unions that we were just talking about: Amazon, Starbucks, Apple. And to learn more about what’s going on. Because as time passes, what you tend to see is either you get a contract or momentum wanes and the union fizzles out. And I think that we’re really reaching that crunch time for those unions. So I’ll be paying a lot of attention to those next year.

[AUDIO CLIP OF STRIKE]

Michela Tindera
Well Taylor, thank you so much.

Taylor Nicole Rogers
Thanks for having me.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Michela Tindera
Behind the Money is hosted by me, Michela Tindera. Saffeya Ahmed is our producer. Topher Forhecz is our executive producer. Sound design and mixing by Sam Giovinco. Special thanks to Jessica Dye. Cheryl Brumley is the global head of Audio. Thanks for listening. See you next week.