The 40 years starting with Ronald Reagan’s election were awful ones for labor unions. Union activity had already peaked when Reagan fired striking air-traffic controllers and signaled to business that the era of labor peace on the employer side was over.
I worked in a factory in Trenton that summer. There were whispers that union organizing was taking place, but it wasn’t gaining much traction. Factory jobs were leaving the state and the Northeast and there was fear that management would close shop and move to Georgia, Alabama, or another anti-union state. Reagan’s action was the final straw, dooming the efforts, and setting in motion a frenzy of union busting we are still struggling to understand. (I’m working on a play about this moment.)
The 40 years that followed were mostly dark for the union movement, with some victories. Some of this darkness was brought on by the unions themselves, many of which had calcified and were either corrupt or overly cozy with management and politicians. Grassroots energy was dismissed and reform efforts short-lived.
The COVID pandemic shifted the terrain. Donna Murch, a union colleague and associate professor of history at Rutgers, has been making the case that COVID laid bare the vulnerabilities of all faculty members and all workers at Rutgers. COVID forced classes online with little assistance and no compensation for the work needed to make that happen. It put clinicians and lab workers in peril, requiring them to work through the pandemic often without proper PPE. It disrupted grad students’ research, even as their funding clock continued to tick.
This precarity was evident throughout society, an insecurity that led to union drives at Amazon, Starbucks, and other companies that relied on short-term and/or low-paid workers. Warehouse workers — many immigrants, some undocumented— often faced the worst conditions.
Those of us with a level of economic privilege were able to pay folks in the gig economy to do our grocery shopping and provide needed services, allowing Im us to stay home.
Unemployment shot up, wages stagnated with the economy, and the fascistic wing of the Republican Party — those most aligned with then-President Trump and opposed to vaccines, masks, and those who violently responded to the Black Lives Matter protests that spread after the state murder of George Floyd — cracked down and continue to crackdown on efforts to expand opportunity and inclusion.
This is the backdrop against which we have to judge the current wave of organizing and strikes — a movement that is gaining traction in ways we have not seen in a long time.
Gallup reports: “Seventy-one percent of Americans now approve of labor unions. Although statistically similar to last year’s 68%, it is up from 64% before the pandemic and is the highest Gallup has recorded on this measure since 1965.”
Union density remains an issue, though this is likely because of the legal impediments erected over 40-plus years of aggressive anti-union activity from both parties, abetted by a media infrastructure that has lost its connections to workers.
News coverage of labor is lagging badly behind this surge of organizing. The loss of labor as a beat has created a structural coverage deficit that, in practical terms, means reporters are reporting and writing stories with at best a limited background on labor issues and dynamics, including how labor law works and just how much power the bosses have accumulated over the years. The upshot is a series of stories throughout the press that boils nearly every labor dispute down to money, or that filters these disputes through an earlier lens in which each dispute is a singular event unrelated to the larger American economy.
The reality, as we discussed in my class, is that the current wave of organizing is about more than money. It is about life conditions, workplace conditions, about safety and scheduling, and long-term job security. Starbucks workers want more control of their schedules, more regularity, so they can plan their lives. Amazon workers and others working in the new mostly unregulated warehouse industry want safety rules, regular breaks, sick time. The rail workers, who were thrown onto the tracks by President Joe Biden, want an end to the kind of scheduling that results in exhaustion and dangerous conditions — one of the many factors that resulted in the deadly East Palestine crash.
Adjuncts and grads at Rutgers and other institutions of higher education want raises. But we also want respect. We want job security — big raises mean little if we can be fired or laid off easily. We want a shift in values in higher ed away from the current model, which is more focused on creating a profit (big reserve accounts and endowments that can be invested to generate bigger reserves and endowments), on building sports empires, on turning faculty into grant chasers or replaceable cogs.
The framework in place at Rutgers is a start, but this contract fight is far from over. And even when this one ends, we know there will be more work to be done. This is the beginning of the transformation of higher ed, of society and work, not the conclusion.
Hank Kalet is a poet and journalist in New Jersey, lecturer of journalism at Rutgers University and a member of the union executive board who participated in the Rutgers strike in April. Email: hankkalet@gmail.com; Twitter, @newspoet41; Instagram, @kaletwrites; Substack, hankkalet.substack.com.
From The Progressive Populist, May 15, 2023
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