Boom time: The rise of unions in the US

The US labour movement is stronger than it’s been in decades. What’s driving this revival and what can Australian unions learn? Lucy Meyer spoke with experts to find out.

On an autumn afternoon in 2023, US President Joe Biden made history by joining striking autoworkers on a picket line. He was the first sitting president to do so.

Speaking through a bullhorn at a General Motors plant outside Detroit, he told a crowd of striking workers that they deserved the raises they were fighting for.

“Wall Street didn’t build the country,” said President Biden to cheers and hollers. “The middle class built the country. And unions built the middle class.”

What might seem like a publicity stunt in the lead-up to an election is a snapshot of a larger phenomenon. The US is experiencing a union revival – a substantial rise in industrial action and high-profile organising campaigns across the country hailed by the media as “the union boom”.

There have also been similar surges in union activity in the UK and Canada in the past few years. While the US has no shortage of political and social challenges, the union boom offers some insights for Australia.

“The middle class built the country. And unions built the middle class.”

US President Joe Biden

From Hollywood to Houston

The Hollywood strikes are the most well-publicised example of US union action. Last year, you may have noticed your streaming choices grew thinner as writers and actors walked off set, and TV and film productions went on indefinite hiatus.

From May to September 2023, the 11,500 members of the Writers Guild of America took part in the second longest labour stoppage in Hollywood history.

The actors’ strike was even bigger, with 160,000 members of the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists striking from July to November. In both cases, workers won huge gains.

From writers and actors, to autoworkers, baristas, teachers and support staff, Amazon warehouse workers, journalists and many more, US workers across industries, states, and even political divides, are organising, and taking industrial action to demand better pay and conditions. According to analysis by CNN, close to 1 million unionised workers secured double-digit wage increases last year.

Union popularity is also growing. The latest survey
results from Gallup show 67 per cent of the US public support unions.

Yet this recent activity does not come close to the level of unrest seen in the 1970s, says union organiser-turned-academic Johnnie Kallas, an assistant professor in Labor and Employment Relations at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Compared with the last few decades, however, “it’s a significant uptick”, he says.

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A still image of the Labor Action Tracker, which maps strikes and labour protests across the USA. Image credit: Labor Action Tracker.

Mapping union activism

While the 2023 figures are not yet finalised, about 500,000 workers took part in more than 400 work stoppages in 2023, Kallas says, up from 224,000 in 2022 and 140,000 in 2021.

Kallas would know – he’s the Project Director of the Labor Action Tracker (LAT), an exhaustive database compiled by researchers at Cornell University and the University of Illinois, who are mapping labour protests across the US. Kallas and colleague Eli Friedman noticed that official data wasn’t capturing the full extent of labour action.

US academic Johnnie Kallas

The aim is to build relationships with activists and practitioners, encourage people to join picket lines and “amplify the voices of striking workers”, Kallas says.

While the LAT officially launched on May Day in 2021, research began in late 2020, at a time of notable “labour unrest and social movement activism more broadly”, Kallas says, when the US was in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement.

What’s driving the action?

Kallas believes the pandemic exacerbated long-standing labour issues including workplace health and safety, with many on the frontline risking their lives.

Add to that high inflation and the kind of sweeping social movement activity not seen in the country for some time, and you get “the right conditions for organising and collective action”, Kallas says.

Kallas charts the start of the union boom to the
American autumn of 2021. It was then that he and his
team began to see a “more persistently high level of labour strikes and militancy”. But Kallas can see the roots of the current trend much earlier, a view shared by Australian academic Amanda Tattersall, who has worked with unions
in the US and Australia, and was an elected official for
Unions NSW.

“The first thing to say about any strike wave is that by the time people are paying attention, there’s been decades of stuff, decades of work and organising,” says Tattersall, who is also a co-founder of GetUp! and an associate professor at the Sydney Policy Lab.

High support, low membership

It may seem reasonable to assume that with this upsurge in union activity, rates of joining unions would have surged in the US, but this has not occurred. Despite increasingly positive attitudes to unions, membership rates remain low.

According to the latest figures from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, only 10 per cent of the national workforce is unionised. This paradox, Kallas says, can be attributed to a combination of weak labour laws and “a deep history of employer opposition to unions”.

Tattersall notes that in the US “you can’t join a union unless your workplace votes for it”.

This leads to what Kallas calls the “representation gap”, making the high degree of unrest among workers in the US in the last few years even more notable.

Actors’ strike, Rock the City rally, Times Square, 25 July 2023

Australian academic Amanda Tattersall

Striking in Australia

Despite NSW teachers and nurses taking industrial action in recent years, it’s difficult to know exactly why Australia has not experienced quite the same widespread union activism.

In a 2023 article for The New Daily, journalist and economist Alan Kohler declared “it’s virtually impossible” to strike in Australia “and has been for more than a decade”.

Since the Howard years, conservative governments at a state and federal level have passed laws that have inhibited union action. However, the current federal Labor Government has passed three tranches of industrial relations reforms over the past 18 months aiming to redress the balance (read more on p25).

But it’s important to remember, Tattersall says, that strikes do still happen in Australia.

The IEU’s highly successful “Hear Our Voice” campaign of 2022-23 saw teachers and support staff at Catholic systemic schools in NSW and the ACT take two full days of strike action, including a joint rally with the NSW Teachers Federation, winning historic pay rises in the process.

The IEU had to jump through many hoops to strike, including applying to the Fair Work Commission for protected action ballot orders and engaging a third-party balloting agent to conduct voting.

While the industrial landscape varies in the US and Australia, in both countries, workers do take illegal strike action on occasion, sometimes as a form of civil disobedience, IEUA NSW/ACT Branch Industrial Officer Michael Aird says. The NSW Teachers Federation was fined $60,000 for striking during their 2022 “More Than Thanks” campaign.

Despite the restrictions on strikes in Australia, Tattersall argues that striking is only one weapon in the Australian labour movement’s arsenal. Unions can still achieve transformative change, she says, with limitations presenting an invitation to think creatively, experiment, and reimagine how they can exercise power.

What can be learned

“Borrowing successful techniques and strategies from campaigns in one country and translating them to another is nothing new,” says Tattersall, who has devoted a lot of time to adapting labour movement work across borders.

To her, one of the biggest lessons of the US union boom is the power of localised union activity. She argues that the decentralised nature of the fight has propelled the union revival in the US.

For Kallas, the union boom demonstrates the power of strong leaders who can see “when the conditions are ripe” for action and can capitalise on that opportunity.

Perhaps the biggest takeaway from the union boom is what Kallas calls “the contagion effect”. He points to a series of earlier teacher strikes in the US. The Red for Ed movement kicked off in West Virginia in 2018 when teachers and support staff walked out.

They soon inspired staff in other schools in state after state. “It was like a wildfire,” Tattersall says.

Kallas has seen this contagion effect across industries all over the country through the union boom and he believes it can continue across borders. He hopes the Labour Action Tracker might play a small role in that.

A global strike map

Scholars and activists from several countries are trying to “create at least the beginnings of sort of a global strike map report”, Kallas says.

Inspired by the work of Kallas and his team, researchers in countries including Brazil, Türkiye, and the UK are working on their own labour action trackers, with an effort underway to start a global database. “That would be exciting,” Kallas says.

The ultimate goal is to create a tool that would not only provide accessible data for policymakers and academics, but also help unite workers internationally.

Back in Australia, there is great potential for such a tool. Aird believes there’s power in hearing about what’s happening in other countries because we live in a globalised economy. “When workers are brave enough to stand up, it encourages other workers to do the same thing,” he says.

Looking ahead

With the US now in a pivotal election year, the impact on the union boom remains to be seen, but Kallas expects the revival to continue through 2024.

Tattersall is confident about the outlook for Australian unions. “We’re in a position to turn a fairly good context and a lot of interesting insights into action,” she says. “The hope is that this can be mixed together into something really exciting.”