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The labor movement today

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  • The labor movement today

    This article claims the labor movement will see it's biggest changes in decades.
    Sadly it's due to the virus. Over the past decades we have watched the labor movement fall behind. In terms of pay and benefits.
    Now is the time to strike while the working people hold the advantage.

    America Is About to Witness the Biggest Labor Movement It’s Seen in Decades
    The era of raucous labor is long past, and worker chutzpah along with it. That is, it was — until now. Desperately needed to staff the basic economy while the rest of us remain secluded from Covid-19, ordinarily little-noticed workers are wielding unusual leverage. Across the country, cashiers, truckers, nurses, burger flippers, stock replenishers, meat plant workers, and warehouse hands are suddenly seen as heroic, and they are successfully protesting. For the previous generation of labor, the goal post was the 40-hour week. New labor’s immediate aims are much more prosaic: a sensible face mask, a bottle of sanitizer, and some sick days.
    The question is what happens next. Are we watching a startling but fleeting moment for newly muscular labor? Or, once the coronavirus is beaten, do companies face a future of vocal workers aiming to rebuild lost decades of wage increases and regained influence in boardrooms and the halls of power?
    Until the 1980s, layoffs were barely a thing, writes Louis Uchitelle in The Disposable American: Layoffs and Their Consequences. Companies tended to avoid large-scale dismissals, because they violated a red line of publicly accepted practice and also could finger the company for blame. The United States was still in the age of company as community and societal patron, and even when workers went on strike, they were generally not replaced, because the optics would be bad.
    But in 1981, President Ronald Reagan changed all that. Some 12,000 air traffic controllers went on strike, demanding higher pay and a shorter workweek. In a breathtaking decision, Reagan fired all but a few hundred of them. The Federal Labor Relations Authority decertified the controllers’ union entirely. The era of strong labor was over.
    The past four decades have been perhaps labor’s weakest since the Industrial Age. For a half century, those working for hourly wages have won almost no real gains. The real average hourly wage in 2018 dollars adjusted for inflation was $22.65 in 2018, compared with $20.27 in 1964 — just an 11.7% gain, according to Pew Research. Real median hourly wages rose by only another 0.6% last year despite the sharp tightening of the job market and an increase in the minimum wage across the country, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
    https://marker.medium.com/america-is...s-3aa47f0edf52

  • #2
    Re: The labor movement today

    I will drop this article in here to pair up with fxstc07's post....

    We Had a Better Social Safety Net. Then We Busted Unions.

    COVID-19 has taught us all just how frayed our social safety net has become, and how its holes make us all more vulnerable. Up to 35 million may lose access to employer-provided health care before this crisis is over. Our retirement security depends on markets that twist like roller coasters. We are all at risk when some of us don't have paid sick days and must work with scratchy throats because rent is due. We've learned that people of color are far more likely to die from COVID-19 because racial inequities are baked into the system.



    We used to have a better social safety net. Many people in the U.S. long had government-supported health care, guaranteed pensions, sick days, and even supplemental unemployment insurance. The federal government undergirded these benefits by ensuring people's right to form a labor union. Those wage earners who joined a union—or who got a job with a company that matched the higher pay and benefits offered by its unionized competitors—effectively won a more robust social safety net through government-sanctioned collective bargaining. In fact, the U.S. has long relied on unions to do the kind of economic redistribution work that is shouldered by governments in other nations.



    The collectively bargained social safety net didn't benefit everyone equally. Too often, its protections were limited to the white men most likely to hold unionized, industrial jobs. Women and people of color were often left out, because they were far more likely to hold the types of jobs—like in domestic work or agriculture—that were not covered by labor law and collective bargaining. Nevertheless, for a time, union contracts were the closest thing the U.S. had to the kinds of robust social safety nets found in European countries.
    https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/175093

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