Michael Dwyer/AP Photo
Union protesters march at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, May 1, 2019.
This article appears in the October 2022 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here.
According to the 2022 edition of its annual Labor Day poll, Gallup reports that a bare 3 percent of Americans between the ages of 18 and 34 belong to unions. The poll also shows that the percentage of Americans between the ages of 18 and 34 who approve of unions is about 24 times higher than that: 72 percent.
That 3 percent figure reflects the long-standing and myriad obstacles that workers seeking union membership must somehow overcome: chiefly, the adamant opposition of American employers to having their workers unionize, and the decades-long enfeeblement of the National Labor Relations Act, which once actually protected workers’ rights to form and join unions.
But what does that 72 percent figure reflect? Certainly not a childhood spent in the company of unionized elders or an environment celebrating organized labor. “A lot of us grew up hearing anti-union messages,” says Jaz Brisack, who, at age 25, straddles the line between Gen Zers and millennials. In her mid-teens, Brisack encountered the play Inherit The Wind, about the Scopes Trial, which piqued her interest in Scopes’s attorney Clarence Darrow, which piqued her interest in an earlier Darrow client, socialist Eugene V. Debs, who in 1894 led a nearly nationwide strike of railroad workers.
Brisack has been militantly pro-union ever since. She’s the Buffalo barista who led the first successful unionization effort at a Starbucks and who since has counseled union-seeking baristas across the country on their fights.
Today, the unionization efforts that may seem to have sprung out of nowhere are dominated by young workers. While the majority of members in long-established, shrinking industrial and crafts unions are mostly in their forties, it’s 20- and 30-somethings who are organizing at warehouses (Amazon Labor Union leader Chris Smalls is 34), and at retail and food outlets ranging from REI and Starbucks to Chipotle and Trader Joe’s. It’s younger professionals who are organizing at nonprofits, museums, think tanks, and state legislatures, and young aspiring professionals who constitute the grad student unions steadily growing at universities.
For companies like Starbucks that are working mightily to keep employees from having a say in their work conditions, the new unionists pose a particularly knotty challenge. The company can, of course, fire workers and close facilities to keep workers in line. It can offer higher wages or better benefits only to those workers who aren’t going union. Starbucks has done all of that, and more. But there’s an ideological and generational gap between these uppity baristas and the preceding couple of generations of workers whom firms managed more successfully to intimidate. This new generation seems more determined to try to unionize than any since the 1930s.
Part of the reason is ideology. For most of the past decade, young Americans have provided some startling (if sensible) answers when polled about our political economy. Since the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations of 2011 called attention to the stratospheric economic inequality that has overtaken the nation, large percentages and sometimes slim majorities of young Americans have a positive view of socialism. The outpouring of young people’s support to Bernie Sanders, the only socialist presidential candidate in American history who got more voters than Debs, when he began his first run in 2015 surprised everyone—including Sanders himself. But a look at the preceding half-decade of polling on ideology made clear that Sanders didn’t so much create a new American left as he revealed it and gave it expression.
For most of the past decade, young Americans have provided some startling (if sensible) answers when polled about our political economy.
The ideological shift of the young tracks an economy that’s been particularly dysfunctional for them. The Great Recession of 2008 and the grindingly slow recovery took a very long time to reach young people, and did so in such a haphazard and incomplete way that their net worth still trails that of their predecessor generations at comparable ages. Since World War II, only the recession of 1981-1982 was as deep, but that was a shorter, if severe, downturn, and those it permanently damaged were disproportionately the nation’s industrial workers, who saw the states where their jobs were clustered turn into the Rust Belt. As the political evolution of Ohio makes clear, that generation of workers has tended to move right rather than left, and the steady diminution since then of decent-paying blue-collar jobs has rolled that rightward movement on.
The political effect of 2008 and its aftermath was quite different. The damage wasn’t centered in one region or sector. It caused millions of Americans—disproportionately Black Americans—to lose their homes, though as this coincided with Barack Obama’s presidency, it didn’t lead to a Black exodus from Democratic ranks. Job and pay cuts particularly hit the nation’s public sector, another area that is disproportionately Black. Teacher ranks and wages were reduced; universities substituted non–tenure track and adjunct professors and graduate students for more costly tenured faculty; student debt rose as job opportunities fell.
Economist Noah Smith has argued that the post-2008 generation has suffered from what he terms “elite overproduction.” College students flocked to humanities and social science majors in the first decade of the century, only to see job markets in law, journalism, publishing, teaching, and academia shrivel after 2008. None of them have come close to regaining their pre-2008 levels since. Millions of college graduates were compelled to take jobs for which they were overqualified, while paying off student debt and navigating an increasingly tight and pricy housing market they could not afford to enter.
Rafael Jaime is a teaching assistant at UCLA pursuing a Ph.D. in a field that has unemployability written all over it: medieval and early modern English. He notes that a recent study found that only 50 percent of Ph.D. candidates in English from the ten top-rated universities in the field were able to find jobs at colleges or universities. “And that was before the pandemic,” he adds.
Jaime is now the president of United Auto Workers Local 2865, the 19,000-member union of the University of California system’s graduate student teaching assistants and tutors. They’ve recently been joined by a new sister local, this one of UC’s 17,000 grad student research assistants, who voted to go union in January. Add the two locals to the postdocs and others and you get roughly 48,000 UC employees who belong to the UAW. That’s more UAW members than currently work at Fiat Chrysler. Jaime put the grad students’ average age in the mid-twenties.
The growth of unions at UC and other colleges and universities is no mystery. “Though most of us came to UC not really knowing what a union was,” Jaime says, “just seeing the university deteriorate year after year, with tightened budgets, profit-driven priorities, and workers increasingly treated as expendable, made many of us realize that the only way to reorient the university’s priorities was to come together and use our power to shift those priorities.”
For years, the UAW has been unable to unionize the auto factories that European and Japanese automakers have opened in the South. At the same time, it has succeeded in organizing a number of college and university campuses. Today, roughly 100,000 of the union’s approximately 400,000 members are university employees. At its convention this summer, the union voted to re-establish its Western States Region 6. In the postwar decades, that region had been home to over 100,000 auto and aerospace workers, but as the West Coast auto plants closed down and the aircraft factories radically downsized once the Cold War ended, regional membership grew so small that the union abolished the region and consolidated it with a Midwestern region headquartered in St. Louis. The newly re-established Region 6 will have precious few manufacturing workers, however; the vast majority of its members will be grad students.
The union’s previous president, Gary Jones (who’s since been convicted of misappropriating union funds for personal purposes) was cool to grad student organizing. The UAW’s new president, Ray Curry, appears to understand that it’s a source of renewal and possible militance that the union sorely needs. But granting those students what in effect will be their own region signals not only the union’s growth among young academics but also what I suspect is its uncertainty about how they mesh with actual autoworkers.
The rebirth of Region 6 is a distinctly positive development, but it also points to the gap that exists between older, established unions and a new, much younger generation of unionists, many college-educated, many clearly on the left. For years, the share of union members who are college graduates has been steadily rising; according to a 2021 study by the Economic Policy Institute, 46.5 percent of workers covered by union contracts have a bachelor’s degree or more. In recent years, those workers have been disproportionately joining unions.
If these new unionists speak a language that today’s CEOs don’t really understand, it’s not clear that all that many established unions understand it, either. To be sure, Workers United has been discreetly guiding the unionization efforts at Starbucks, while other unions—chiefly the American Federation of Teachers—have provided needed funding and facilities to the Amazon Labor Union. But, as former New York Times labor reporter Steve Greenhouse and I have written, the kind of huge commitment of resources that Mine Workers president John L. Lewis and Clothing Workers president Sidney Hillman made to industrial workers of the 1930s to build unions like the UAW and the Steelworkers is nowhere in evidence today.
Lewis was nobody’s radical; until the coming of the New Deal, he’d tended to back Republicans. But in enabling the generation of 1930s leftists to form unions, he understood that if unions were to grow more powerful, they’d have to incorporate groups and beliefs that had been outside of their comfort zones. A similar challenge faces today’s union leaders. Today’s young union activists gravitated to Bernie Sanders even as established union leaders were more at home with Joe Biden. They are more inclined to rank-and-file power, to racial and gender justice, to addressing the climate crisis than many (though definitely not all) union leaders. The young will push labor leftward—and if their organizing efforts don’t succeed, the movement’s direction will be neither leftward nor rightward, but downward.
Perhaps union leaders are waiting for the current iteration of labor law reform to be enacted, as they have for decades. But moments such as this are all too infrequent, and the current opportunities all too fleeting. Now, as in the ’30s, a new generation of militants have made organizing inroads no one really expected. Now, as then, the federal government, at the NLRB, at the Department of Labor (which recently posted a how-to guide for workers seeking to form a union), and even at the White House, is clearly promoting unionization.
Millennials and Gen Zers can change the trajectory of worker power in America and revitalize our democracy in the process. But they can’t do it alone. Realizing Generation Union’s potential requires support and solidarity from the rest of us to create the kind of transformation our nation clearly needs.
