The life-changing power of the strike: How 500,000 workers refused to work in 2023 — and won big
Timothy A. Clary, Robyn Beck/AFP/Getty; Brittany Murray/MediaNews Group/Long Beach Press-Telegram/Getty; Apu Gomes, Michael Swensen/Getty; Nick Lachance/Toronto Star/Getty; Rebecca Zisser/BI
In January 2023, Adam Conover was preparing to bargain with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers.
Conover, the creator of "Adam Ruins Everything" and "The G Word," had been appointed to serve on the union's negotiating committee for its minimum basic agreement, a three-year contract that covers some 11,500 film and television writers. The union knew it would be what they call a "conflict negotiation." Member surveys painted an alarming picture: Writer pay was way down, and studios were increasingly setting up mini-rooms, with shorter contracts and low pay. Meanwhile, OpenAI launched ChatGPT a few months earlier, and membership discussed generative artificial intelligence in worried tones.
"We knew that the size of what had been taken from writers was so large, and that we'd need to fight very hard to get that back," Conover told Business Insider. "But I was confident because we had been hearing from members who wanted us to fight. We were in a strong position in terms of solidarity. "
Everyone knows what happened next: The studios dug in, and the writers struck. 160,000 members of the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists soon joined — the first time both unions struck together since 1960.
Hollywood To You/Star Max/GC Images/Getty
Conover was a regular face for the strike, and kept afloat by touring as a standup comic. As he went from venue to venue, he encountered something odd: it wasn't just his audience who applauded when he mentioned that he was on strike. Everyone seemed to be on the writers' side.
"When I walk down the street in Tempe, Arizona, or Providence, Rhode Island, sometimes people say, 'Hey, I liked your cable show from seven years ago,' said Conover. "But more often people say, 'Hey, great work on the strike. We're with you.' Or, 'You guys won, congratulations!'"
To Conover, it felt like solidarity. People were outraged over threats by studio executives to wait out the writers for as long as it took, even if it meant driving them into homelessness. They wanted to know not only how to aid the writers, but how to organize their workplaces, or democratize their unions.
Conover isn't alone in that experience. Across the labor movement, there is a sense that things are adding up to more than the sum of their parts. Wins are begetting wins, and the public is behind them. After the depths of fear, uncertainty, and sickness that characterized the pandemic years, workers are starting to go on the offensive — and not only in one industry, but across the economy. Rather than remaining siloed, workers aren't just talking to one another; they're working together.
And if this year is anything to judge by, they have the momentum.
Strikes on strikes on strikes
As the entertainment industry strikes dragged on, the 340,000 Teamsters who work at UPS prepared for what would have been one of the largest strikes in US history. They were led by their newly elected president, Sean O'Brien, who vowed to "put that company on its knees if that's what it takes."
Support lined up from other unions, community organizations, political groups, and elected officials. Just days before the contract expired, the company caved, agreeing to the strongest contract the workers have won in decades.
In September, the United Auto Workers (UAW) struck all of the Big Three Detroit automakers — Ford, General Motors, and Stellantis — at once. Those executives, too, gave in. Through it all, the public backed the workers, so much so that even Joe Biden, with an eye toward his re-election chances, joined a Michigan picket line, becoming the first-ever sitting president to do so.
There were strikes at WabTec's locomotive manufacturing plant in Pennsylvania and the health-care giant Kaiser Permanente, where workers won 21 percent raises over the life of their four-year contract. Business Insider staff themselves struck for thirteen days, and they were far from the only journalists to do so. And strikes spread like wildfire on college campuses, as did new graduate student unions.
There were new organizing efforts at high-profile nonunion employers: Starbucks Workers United ran up against the immovable object that is Howard Schultz, while Amazon workers faced ownership with effectively unlimited resources. Small retail and food service outlets, often staffed by the young and the indebted, launched their own campaigns.
"I've been doing this for twenty-seven years and the biggest struggle is getting people to wake up to their power," Sara Nelson, president of the Association of Flight Attendants-Communications Workers of America, told Business Insider.
"Suddenly, we've broken through, and we've broken through in a way that not only allows people to recognize that they have power, but to gain a fundamental understanding that power is not money, power is not status, power is collective action," she said.
'New constellations of power and income are being worked out'
In sum, more than 500,000 workers went on strike in the United States in 2023, a major increase over recent years. And they won big: In the first quarter of 2023, unionized workers saw an average 7 percent wage hike in the first year of their contracts, according to Bloomberg Law. That's the biggest single quarter raise since 2007.
According to Cornell University's School of Industrial and Labor Relations Labor Action Tracker, this year's strike numbers are more than double those of last year And while there were major strikes in 2018, those were largely confined to the more highly unionized public sector. Many of this year's 393 strikes were in the private sector, and across an enormous range of industries.
That isn't to say that this year's strike activity is unprecedented, however. Far from it. In the wake of World War II, more than 1.5 million workers struck simultaneously. About 10 percent of the US workforce withheld their labor in 1946, in strikes encompassing some 4.6 million workers. Even in 1970, a moment far removed from unions' heyday, 3 million workers struck.
Bettmann/Getty
The unionization rate is as low as it has been in decades, sitting at 10.1 percent last year. Despite pro-union sentiment among the public, lasting union organization is difficult to maintain, and the nation's labor laws are partly to blame. Under the Biden Administration, the National Labor Relations Board has issued more worker-friendly rulings, but its monetary penalties remain pennies to major corporations.
Yet workers' determination to change the distribution of power is indisputable, strengthened in part by years of a pandemic that hit workers particularly hard.
Labor historian Nelson Lichtenstein pointed to the post-World War II period as an analogous moment. Workers underwent a collective experience extreme enough to rewire their view of the world. They expected more in the months after the war, and they were willing to fight for it.
"You're coming off a period of economic disruption," Lichtenstein told Business Insider. "We have a pandemic, they had World War II. New constellations of power and income are being worked out."
During the pandemic, low-wage workers in particular bore the brunt of the health risks, dying at higher rates than their better-off peers. As COVID-19 spread through meat-packing plants, restaurants, and healthcare facilities, employers couldn't protect the health or income of their workforces.
"People saw that the boss didn't care if they died," Gabriel Winant, a labor historian at the University of Chicago and a former colleague, told Business Insider.
'It's gonna get bloody, it's gonna get painful'
Workers' desire to go on the offensive isn't the only distinctive feature of this moment. Some of their leaders are also taking a more confrontational approach toward the titans of industry.
"It's gonna get bloody, it's gonna get painful," O'Brien, the Teamsters president, warned employers last year. "So ice up, because when you take one of us on, you take all of us on." During the UAW strike, newly elected president Shawn Fain threw a management proposal in a garbage can on Facebook Live. And rather than take part in a ceremonial handshake with executives at the start of negotiations, he traveled to Detroit-area plants to shake hands with members instead.
Shawn Fain, president of @UAW, just went live to read the contract proposals from Stellantis, which owns Chrysler and Fiat.
— More Perfect Union (@MorePerfectUS) August 8, 2023
Fain is pushing for big gains in this contract, and says that Stellantis is only looking for concessions.
So he throws the document in the trash. pic.twitter.com/arE3guzeSH
When he took over as president, "people said that we were aiming too high, and, do you really want to piss off the CEO?" Fain told Business Insider.
"That's laughable to me. They've been pissing our members off for my entire career."
After enjoying decades of chumminess with union leaders, the antagonism is a gearshift for the Big Executives, one they were not particularly happy about. General Motors CEO Mary Barra accused Fain of "theatrics," writing that the union leader "wants to make history for himself." A Stellantis executive was " disappointed" in his Facebook Live display.
Their response is not surprising. The Big Three strike cost Ford $1.3 billion and GM $800 million through October 24. Both companies pulled their full-year guidance, admitting that the strike made the future too difficult to predict. Ford CEO Jim Farley told analysts that the company was "negatively impacted by the strike, and our cost and quality remain a drag on our business." Stellantis estimated the strike cost $800 million.
Yet some analysts saw little reason to panic. "We believe that GM should be able to offset most of the UAW-driven increased wage headwind," Chris McNally, an analyst with Evercore ISI, wrote in a note to investors following the conclusion of the work stoppage.
Elsewhere on Wall Street, strikes are on the tips of tongues. A Bloomberg News analysis found that S&P 500 executives and analysts talked about unions on earnings calls more this year than any other on record, according to data going back two decades. They, too, have been quick to assure investors that the labor uptick is no big deal. Caesars Entertainment Inc. CEO Thomas Reeg told analysts that a recently settled contract with Necada's Culinary Union is "going to be the largest increase that our employees have seen" in four decades.
"That's well deserved. It's anticipated in our business model," he said.
Such comments, arguably made to calm antsy investors, are partly bluster. But they also reflect the changed balance of forces in the United States. Were the public not so pro-labor, and were the labor market not so tight, one might hear management rail against greedy unions and entitled workers. But those workers were, in the not so distant past, lauded as frontline heroes, and fewer unemployed people are lining up to replace them. Compromise in the face of a well-organized strike may be the safest line for the boardroom.
That isn't to say it will remain that way indefinitely. Management's wisest option may simply be waiting out the current moment, hoping for a loosening of labor markets, a rallying of anti-labor elected officials, a change in public opinion. But for now, momentum favors the workers. The most discernible example is in the auto industry, where employer fear of unionization remains. On the heels of its victory at the Big Three, the UAW has its sights set on the nonunion auto plants that now employ the majority of US auto workers. Some of those automakers have responded to the threat by raising their workers' wages, a reversal of the dynamic of recent decades, where the Big Three would point to nonunion competitors' low labor costs as the reason they couldn't agree to union proposals.
"That shows two things," Arin Dube, a professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst whose research focuses on the labor market and wage inequality, told Business Insider. "It's a tight labor market so the employers may just have less leverage, and they're worried about losing workers to competitors. But they're also worried about a union campaign, and that union-deterrence aspect is central."
It's hard to imagine a bigger showdown than Tesla's factory in Fremont, California, which employs 20,000 workers. There, the union will face down Elon Musk, an opponent of unions who brings to mind Henry Ford, the UAW's foundational foe.
Josh Edelson/AFP/Getty
Fain appears confident. "We can beat anybody," he told Bloomberg in November. "It's gonna come down to the people that work for him deciding if they want their fair share... or if they want him to fly himself to outer space at their expense."
A future beyond enterprise bargaining
One factor in the union's favor at Tesla is the plant's location: the Bay Area, where a constituency of radicals will be sure to rally to their cause. Such advantages are not held in the largely union-free South, where many of the UAW's other targets are located.
Sara Nelson pointed to one recent example where workers did not achieve what they'd set out to do: hundreds of United Mine Workers of America members who struck Warrior Met in Brookwood, Alabama. They returned to work nearly two years later without a contract.
"The Alabama governor used the state troopers to escort scabs from other cities into the mines to break the strike, and the local judges ruled against the union and said that they couldn't be within 900 feet of the mine entrances," Nelson told Business Insider. By contrast, Biden stayed out of the way when the Teamsters requested he do so during negotiations with UPS, and sent Acting Labor Secretary Julie Su and Trade Ambassador Katherine Tai when the UAW sought help folding EV plants into the Big Three contracts.
"It has to start with workers," Nelson said. "But having a government that is willing to support you is a big deal."
Nelson has some ideas for how to harness today's pro-union enthusiasm given the constraints of labor law. She described her vision for a new type of organization, one that can support workers from the earliest days or an organizing campaign through getting a first contract. In early planning stages, she thought of it as 1-800-UNION.
Kevin Dietsch/Getty
"This is an organization that would not exist to gain members and to sustain itself," she explained. "It would only exist to help workers join unions and build their own power bases. Ideally, if the organization does what it needs to do, it would work itself out of existence."
A successful shoestring version already exists: The Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee (EWOC), which was formed to aid frontline workers during the pandemic. It connects experienced organizers with not-yet-organized workers seeking to remedy problems in the workplace. A joint effort between the Democratic Socialists of America and the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America, it's representative of the growth of ties between segments of the US working class. Gabriel Winant, who helps organize with EWOC, said its ranks are filled with young people in the margins of the labor market where there's "high turnover and little organizing presence but a ton of militancy."
Yet organizing at the scale required to increase union density nationwide and win contracts with employers remains a dilemma. While unions as of yet have been unable to surmount Congressional opposition to labor law reform, Dube, the economist, sees another path forward.
"Enterprise bargaining is a very difficult terrain on which to rebuild wage standards and labor standards," he explained. By contrast, a more informal system that pushes up wages and benefits across an entire sector could lock in gains for workers at the legislative level. Such a method, common practice in much of the world, may gain momentum at a moment when workers are seeking ways to overcome the obstacles posed by both a recalcitrant Congress and defiant corporations like Starbucks and Amazon.
California is the furthest along in developing such an approach. The state passed the "FAST Recovery Act" in 2021, establishing a statewide "Fast Food Council" which, while barred from bargaining over benefits, negotiates statewide standards for fast-food workers' wages and working conditions. This year, the state passed a similar bill for the health-care sector, which helped Kaiser Permanente workers successfully negotiate higher minimum wages in the state.
"That gives a different place for the labor movement to engage," said Dube. "Not just at the shop floor, but also at the legislative level; not pushing for abstract laws, but for actual standards for wages and health benefits and working conditions."
'People just want to do it'
I met up with Adam Conover shortly after he was reelected to the WGA-West's Board of Directors in September. He was on vacation in New York, happily playing hooky from a union meeting for the first time in months. When I asked about his plans for the new two-year term in WGA leadership, he was focused on growth.
"The most important thing is that we expand our coverage of work areas where our organizing isn't as strong as it should be," he said.
There are also looming negotiations for the industry's other unions: the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, Moving Picture Technicians, Artists and Allied Crafts and the Teamsters' Motion Picture Division. Both unions' contracts with the AMPTP expire next July, and the members who respected the WGA's picket lines will expect writers to return the favor if necessary.
As for himself, he called his experience of the WGA strike "life-changing."
"We turned that democracy into power and we were able to force the companies to do what we wanted," he said.
"I hope that everybody in the labor movement is paying attention to the enormous hunger for this kind of organizing," he added. "People just want to do it, and if you bring them the tools, they're going to pick them up and start building shit."
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