Opinion: This Labor Day is a promise to our future
Labor is on the march.
On Friday, Aug. 25, 150,000 members of the United Auto Workers employed at General Motors, Ford and Stellantis voted to authorize a strike if a new contract isn’t in place when the current agreement expires on Sept. 14 at 11:59 PM, with 97% voting in favor.
This isn’t abstract to me, and it isn’t abstract to many Americans. I have family that have relied on the UAW’s retiree benefits, family that took wage cuts while executives flew on private jets to ask for bailouts, and family that will be on picket lines if the “Big Three” refuse to reach a fair deal with their workers.
To hear talking heads tell it, workers demanding their fair share of the profits they produce is unthinkable. Watch Jim Cramer, and you’ll hear denunciations of “class warfare” and how democratically elected UAW President Shawn Fain is “frightening.” You won’t hear much about workers struggling to get by while corporate profits soar, and workers who want to spend more time with their families instead of working 60 to 70 hour weeks.
Auto workers aren’t alone. Across the country, writers, actors, delivery drivers, health care workers, hotel workers, and more are taking action to fix what so many Americans feel: that their wages aren’t keeping up, that their hours are getting longer, that housing is becoming less and less affordable, and that just making ends meet is more and more of a struggle.
Profits are soaring for corporations, but isn’t benefiting the workers that create it. According to Realtime Inequality, a project run by the Department of Economics at University of California at Berkeley, growth in real income in the first quarter of 2023 was under 2% for the bottom 90% of Americans, while the top 0.01% saw more than twice that.
The federal Treasury Department named the problem in a landmark report published Aug. 28: that declining union membership, brought on by years of corporate attacks, has contributed to slower wage growth and rising inequality. Even while working families struggle to pay the bills and Americans stare down the resumption of student loan payments, the rich get richer, accumulating more money than they can spend in a lifetime.
Workers know that it doesn’t need to be this way. That’s why they’re striking in greater and greater numbers, and why more and more are turning to unions to fix a system that’s only working for the wealthy.
Unions are the solution. According to the Treasury Department’s report, union workers make between ten to fifteen percent more than non-union workers. That’s in addition to improved benefits, better job security, and more predictable scheduling. Union jobs are some of the last sources of true, robust pensions, ensuring that retirement benefits aren’t based on the luck of the draw and where the stock market happens to be. Unions are the only way for American workers to have a real voice in the workplace, and in the decisions that affect their employment and their futures.
Workers get that. That’s why union approval is at its highest point since the 1960s, and why younger generations left behind by economic catastrophe and spiraling inequality overwhelmingly support unions.
Labor Day this year should be more than a day off or a celebration of organized labor’s past. It should be a promise to our future: that we’ll build a movement for workers that ensures that working people have safe, good jobs, that working people have secure retirements, that working people have strong communities to live in, and that every worker that wants a union can join one, free of intimidation.
We can do better for workers. The best way to accomplish that is to work together, strengthen unions, and ensure that working Americans have respect, dignity, and fair wages at work.