Is that this the worst second for the labor motion in latest reminiscence, or the perfect? That query animated a conversion I just lately had with Mary Kay Henry, who simply stepped down because the president of the 2-million-member Service Staff Worldwide Union, having been an organizer for 43 years and led the SEIU for 14.
Constructive sentiment towards unions has surged over the previous decade. Curiosity in becoming a member of a union has surged. Petitions to kind a union have surged. And a lot of high-profile organizing drives have succeeded: amongst Uber and Lyft drivers, Amazon warehouse employees, Starbucks baristas, and Volkswagen manufacturing workers, within the staunchly anti-union South, no much less. For its half, the SEIU has organized hundreds of hospital workers, house well being aides, and child-care employees in recent times.
And but, simply 11 p.c of American employees have been represented by a union as of 2023—a quantity that has been falling. Lower than 7 p.c of private-sector employees have union illustration, down from 17 p.c in 1983. Throughout Henry’s time main the SEIU, membership was flat at roughly 2 million. Unions are financed by their members, and are at their most influential when negotiating on behalf of these members. Is it potential to have a stronger American labor motion with out having an even bigger one?
Henry thinks it’s, and her innovation was to increase the SEIU’s affect with out increasing its ranks. A longtime strike chief, she took over because the president of the SEIU in 2010, a bleak yr for organized labor and American employees on the whole. The Nice Recession had ravaged the labor market. The union-approval charge had plunged to an all-time low of 48 p.c. Republican politicians had capitalized on the pattern to develop and strengthen right-to-work guidelines that prevented unions from accumulating dues from nonmembers, sapping their capability to prepare.
In 2012, an SEIU native helped manage a strike amongst workers of fast-food eating places in New York Metropolis: Dozens of cashiers, janitors, and cooks for Burger King, KFC, McDonald’s, Taco Bell, and Wendy’s picketed as a substitute of working their shifts, asking for $15 an hour and a union. Quickly, hundreds of employees throughout the nation have been picketing and strolling off the job. The SEIU was instrumental in what turned often called the Combat for $15 and a Union, offering organizing capability, media relations, and tens of millions of {dollars} in help.
The marketing campaign appeared like a protracted shot. The federal minimal wage was simply $7.25 on the time. Then-President Barack Obama and congressional Democrats have been pushing for $9 an hour. Henry recalled Tom Harkin, then a Democratic senator representing Iowa, who had proposed $10.10 an hour, asking her, “What are you doing? That is ridiculous.”
Furthermore, the SEIU was spending cash supporting the protests of employees who weren’t paying SEIU dues and had little prospect of turning into SEIU members. “There have been questions inside our management about whether or not we must always proceed to again it,” Henry instructed me, noting that the majority members of management thought the reply was no. “I simply had an intuition, primarily based on listening to the employees themselves, that we wanted to proceed, as a result of we needed to discover a approach to disrupt the decades-long assault on the labor motion that was unfolding.”
The “tide shifted,” Henry instructed me, when the Combat for $15 started galvanizing employees exterior the fast-food business. Employees at airports, faculties and universities, and hospitals determined to push for union illustration. It actually shifted when the Combat for $15 began notching tangible coverage victories. SeaTac, Washington, voted to bump its minimal wage to $15 an hour in late 2013, adopted by Seattle, dozens of cities and counties, a number of states, and a lot of main employers. The Obama administration set a $10.10 an hour wage ground for federal contractors early in 2014. The Nationwide Employment Legislation Challenge estimates that the Combat for $15 helped generate $150 billion in wage will increase for 26 million employees. “It turned a motion far greater than our establishment,” Henry instructed me.
“Mary Kay Henry helped revitalize the labor motion,” Obama instructed me in an electronic mail. “She matched a fierce intelligence and dedication to social justice with deep empathy and a pointy humorousness, and America is stronger at the moment because of her efforts. I couldn’t have requested for a greater, extra artistic accomplice.”
The Combat for $15 was not the one means the SEIU supported employees exterior its ranks. In 2017, an SEIU native in Seattle—together with the nonprofits Casa Latina, Working Washington, and the Nationwide Home Employees Alliance—started pushing for town to strengthen protections for nannies, housekeepers, and well being aides. Town did so by passing a home employees’ invoice of rights and establishing a requirements board, composed of labor advocates, employers, and employees. Home employees began to get a say in minimal wages, extra time guidelines, and insurance coverage insurance policies. And so they obtained the help of SEIU, although they don’t have the precise to unionize in the US.
Sectoral bargaining—wherein unions negotiate with many employers and even a whole business at a time, as is frequent in Europe—can be barred in the US. However requirements boards just like the one in Seattle, additionally known as employees’ boards or business councils, are authorized. And extra have cropped up: for farm laborers in New York, home employees in Philadelphia, nursing-home employees in Michigan, agricultural employees in Colorado, home-care employees in Nevada, enviornment employees in Detroit, and fast-food employees in California.
The SEIU is concerned with many, permitting the union to “collectivize energy” throughout unions and characterize employees exterior its ranks, Henry defined. For a union chief, she added, it’s “form of scary.” Unions would possibly find yourself accepting concessions collectively that they by no means would have agreed to individually. They may need to reorganize internally. They may have to determine how and what to barter with coverage makers, not simply employers. However it is usually thrilling, she argued, as a result of the organizations are able to aiding tons of of hundreds extra employees than they’d usually be capable to. (The California fast-food council alone is writing guidelines for greater than 550,000 employees, solely a tiny sliver of whom are union members.)
She hopes that pattern continues past her tenure. “How can we transfer from an incremental-growth technique to the form of industrial-growth technique that the CIO had within the Nineteen Thirties?” she requested me, referring to the Congress of Industrial Organizations, a New Deal–period union federation. “We have to think about employees that aren’t presently lined by labor legislation—home-care employees, child-care employees, farmworkers, all people that was written out, and all these new jobs which have been created that no person even imagined current.” She added: “Certainly one of my desires has been to have 4 or 5 unions pool assets and take into consideration the 5 million employees within the gig sector. As an alternative of making an attempt to carve them up, how can we again all of them in making calls for of Uber, Lyft, and Doordash?”
After all, that form of artistic bargaining is critical solely as a result of conventional organizing stays so tough in the US. The nation’s geography poses a problem, since many employees are “dispersed” and there aren’t “pure congregation factors,” Suresh Naidu of Columbia College instructed me. Extra importantly, greater than two dozen states have right-to-work legal guidelines. Corporations generally have interaction in unlawful anti-union ways with impunity: closing shops wherein workers are organizing, firing organizers, interfering with workers who’re organizing off-hours, and delaying negotiations with pro-union employees. “Labor legislation within the U.S. is damaged,” Henry instructed me. “That’s why we’ve been so devoted to looking for options the place employees can manage throughout sectors and geographies.”
But doing that form of work is perhaps tough if unions can not develop their conventional ranks. Unions gather dues to pay for organizing: A union that’s not rising, or wherein extra members are opting out of paying dues, is a union shedding its conventional type of firepower. (Federal reporting types present that the SEIU headquarters’ finances swelled after which declined throughout Henry’s tenure, with the Washington workplace accumulating about $250 million a yr from native unions, down from $270 million when she began.) With funds tight, members would possibly need their union to concentrate on organizing and bargaining and cease advocating on behalf of unrepresented employees or spending tens of millions on elections, because the SEIU now does. (When unions are required by legislation to ask members if they need their dues spent on campaigns, their political spending drops.)
Plus, when employees see wages rising all over the place, they could not really feel compelled to surrender a part of their paycheck to a labor group. Michael Pressure, the director of economic-policy research on the American Enterprise Institute, a right-of-center assume tank, carried out analysis displaying that minimum-wage will increase result in decreased union membership. Unions, he instructed me, are in a “precarious” place if “public coverage is substituting for what a union can ship.” That mentioned, he added, “there’s an actual profit to unions in participating in these kinds of campaigns, as a result of they’re—I might say appropriately—being perceived by a broader swath of the workforce as combating for them.”
Different nations have proven that small unions can nonetheless have a huge impact. In France, a slim share of private-sector workers are union members, however practically all employees are lined by a collective-bargaining settlement, Naidu famous. “It means one thing completely different to be a union member in France,” he instructed me. “You’re more likely to be a union activist or nearer to a steward,” advocating for a broad team of workers.
Henry instructed me she believed that union density would possibly start to tick up in the US. She pointed to the Volkswagen employees in Tennessee, who voted to kind a union on their third strive. She pointed to the Nationwide Labor Relations Board, whose common counsel is “for the primary time in my 40 years really making an attempt to implement the Nationwide Labor Relations Act on behalf of employees.” She pointed to the extraordinary enthusiasm younger folks have for organized labor.
But when the state of affairs doesn’t change, the unions must.
