About 7,000 nurses in New York City walked off their job for several days in January, the latest in a string of job actions by workers seeking to take control of their working lives.
The four-day strike resulted in significant wins for the nurses, who sought what they called “safe staffing” levels that would require the hiring of new nurses and an increase in wages and benefits to keep current nurses on staff. The new contract, as the New York Times reported, will result in pay hikes and hundreds of new nurses being added to the major hospitals in New York City.
The nursing strike is part of a national wave of strikes, strike threats, and smaller job actions one of dozens of strikes and strike threats that are part of a revived level of labor militancy not seen in years. “Workers are hoping to take advantage of a tight labor market to reverse years of concessions and win big raises to help cope with inflation,” reports Labor Notes.
Workers are demanding more and deserve more, especially at a time of “Rising wage inequality and slow and uneven growth in real (inflation-adjusted) hourly wages for the vast majority of workers” that the Economic Policy Institute describes as “defining features of the U.S. labor market for most of the last 40 or so years.”
The corporate sector, with help from government and academic apologists, are pushing back, hoping to tighten the labor market and increase unemployment rates. The “owning class,” Sarah Lazare writes in Jacobin, believe that higher unemployment will be good for the economy as a whole, blaming rising prices on workers so they can tamp down demands for higher wages. But this ignores the real drivers of inflation — supply chain issues, the war in Ukraine, and excessive profit taking by elites.
“US wages,” Lazare writes, “lag behind inflation, companies’ price hikes are well above the rate of inflation for wholesale products, and many corporations are profiting handsomely from the current economic environment.”
The “owning class,” she says, sees labor militancy as a threat to profit-taking, and its economic proposals are structured to tamp down union organizing by re-introducing uncertainty into the job market in the form of higher unemployment. “(W)hen workers are less worried about losing their jobs,” Lazare writes, “they can be more emboldened to exercise their power on the job, including by unionizing their workplaces — something the owning class is firmly against.”
Elites — politicians, business leaders, economists, opinion leaders — are adept at keeping all eyes on the damage wrought by inflation, humanizing its impact, while explaining it using tired tropes designed to refocus anger away from business and onto workers. Rising unemployment rates are framed in theoretical terms, primarily as numbers, usually without the human face we see in stories about inflation — even as unemployment can be far more damaging to average workers’ health and well-being.
What we are witnessing is a deliberate effort to protect a failed status quo. Profit- and rent-taking have become our primary economic goals, driven by legislation that has hampered union organizing and funneled the gains from economic growth into fewer and richer hands. We have privatized the benefits while socializing the costs — in a ravaged planet, in homelessness, war, disease, mass migration, and so on. As EPI reports, “four decades … of policies have reduced the leverage of most workers to achieve faster wage growth,” with inadequate protections for labor and workers’ rights to form unions being among the most critical.
We are witnessing a surge in unionization and not just among the usual industries. Higher ed unions2 are making major gains, using the threat of strikes to push back against the gigification and adjunctification of academia. The rail unions are not taking their Congressional defeat lying down, with members engaging in a campaign to oust current leadership. And we are seeing service sector and high-turnover jobs (Starbucks, Target, Amazon) and the tech sector organizing. as well.
Corporate capitalism as a way of organizing work and the economy has left much ruin in its wake. The ownership class knows this, but will do everything it can because it has benefited greatly. Unions are our best tools to fight back. If we don’t organize, we will die.
Hank Kalet is a poet and journalist in New Jersey. Email, hankkalet@gmail.com; Substack, hankkalet.Substack.com; Twitter, @newspoet41; Facebook, facebook.com/hank.kalet; Instagram, @kaletwrites.