Worker struggles busting out all over

In addition to providing a nuanced history of the United Auto Workers union, its revival, current strategy, and the aims in its current strike, University of Chicago historian Gabriel Winant offers this broad view of current labor militancy.

The UAW is not alone. In the past several years labor militancy has been on the rise across sectors, challenging not only particular employers but also, increasingly, the direction of the country. For a decade, beginning in Chicago in 2012 and escalating to the strike wave of 2018–2019 and the struggles over pandemic reopenings, teachers have resisted privatization and fought for smaller classes and safer, better staffed schools.

Similarly radicalized by the pandemic, thousands of Starbucks and Amazon workers have stood up to these giants of the new economy, long thought to be unorganizable. In these and other campaigns, workers have faced relentless, often flagrantly illegal antiunion repression, prompting the Biden administration’s National Labor Relations Board to come to their aid with some of the most favorable interpretations of labor law in decades.

In Hollywood, by striking against the algorithmic production and distribution of television and film, actors and writers are defending the very idea of human culture as something more than pellets of pasteurized and predigested content.

So too are workers in Pittsburgh, where the staff of the Post-Gazette has fought a bitter strike for nearly a year to preserve the basic possibility of local news.

Across Los Angeles, thousands of hotel workers have been on strike for nearly a month, demanding not only better wages and working conditions but also for hotels to help solve the city’s crises of unaffordable housing and homelessness by offering housing support for hotel workers and providing empty rooms to the unhoused.

A rolling wave of organizing at hospitals and nursing homes since the pandemic, including an enormous potential strike recently authorized at Kaiser Permanente, contests the ongoing staffing crisis in the health sector, which is intimately tied to patient access and quality of care.

And campus unions are forming functioning coalitions between unions representing different segments of the workforce. Here full time professors, part-time instructors, admin staff, and the groundskeepers unite to welcome students to the new semester at the private University of San Francisco. (PTFA-CFT photo)

In higher education, resistance to a collapsed academic job market and the depredations of increasingly mercenary administrations has quickly accelerated. Unions have launched major strikes across the industry, most notably in 2022 at the University of California, and won an extraordinary string of near-unanimous union victories across the private sector in the past several years—pro-union vote share is regularly above 90 percent in electorates that often exceed three thousand workers. Eight of the ten largest new union bargaining units since January 2022 have been at universities. ...

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