A New Year’s Thank You to Organized Labor

For my end of 2022 post I want to reflect on a social institution for which I’m personally grateful, and that is foundational to shared urban prosperity. That institution, as you have no doubt already gleaned from the heading above, is organized labor.

One immediate reason I’m grateful for labor unions is that mine just negotiated a ten percent raise for me and all the other hardworking teachers in my District. This will take effect when our tentative contract agreement gets ratified, likely a foregone conclusion though it’s impossible to know for sure until the vote takes place. In an exciting twist, our raise will be effective all the way back to last July, meaning we will receive back pay in a chunk that’s going to feel like a big bonus check, something unheard of for teachers.

Would District management have simply handed all this to us without union representation?  Nothing against the people in management, but I very seriously doubt it. At the national scale, teachers are even more underpaid than in the past relative to other professions (see this excellent December 27 piece by Washington Post editorial writer Heather Long for the data). Low pay, in turn, is one obvious cause of growing teacher shortages. From my perspective within the system, the much too casually maligned teachers unions, including my own, are the only institution that can be trusted to make the teacher pay problem a priority and deliver the goods on salary increases.

Labor-Related News and Musings for December

Early December is a busy time in the teaching schedule, and I’ve devoted winter break primarily to much needed rest, family time, and fiction writing. But knowing that I wanted to talk about labor unions this month, I have also endeavored along the way to pay attention to labor-related news coverage and research publications. Even this basic level of news and research mindfulness has yielded exciting ideas and facts.

UC Strike Generates Big Pay Increase

Most exciting to me has been coverage of the successful strike by some 48,000 University of California teaching assistants, researchers and post docs. According to coverage in the UCLA Daily Bruin, wages will increase across the board, and by as much as 80 percent for the lowest paid academic workers. Coverage in the UC Santa Barbara Daily Nexus indicates that, under the new agreement with the United Auto Workers, graduate student researchers would see minimum pay set at $34,564, and academic student employees would see minimum annual compensation of $34,000. I also learned in the Daily Nexus article that Sacramento Mayor Darrel Steinberg mediated the labor agreement, which also includes critically important child care subsidies. As a Sacramentan, I was proud to hear of Mayor Steinberg engaging in this important statewide work. Additional information on the strike resolution can be found through the non-profit news organization Berkeleyside, which provided extensive strike coverage.

Unions Create Democratic Community

I’ve been aware of the Roosevelt Institute since the early 2000s, when I was working for another New York research organization, the Fiscal Policy Institute (FPI). In recent years, as I’ve slowly been able to peek out of the all-encompassing caregiving cocoon of being a parent and full-time school teacher, I’ve again started to pay attention to the Roosevelt Institute’s work. 

To the focus of this post, I recommend checking out this episode on the Roosevelt Institute’s excellent “How to Save a Country” podcast, particularly at just after 20 minutes where guest Dorian Warren makes an extended case around the importance of organized labor to community-building and democratic participation. “No strong labor movement, no strong democracy,” Warren states provocatively at roughly 22:55. Toward the end of the episode Warren also talks about how key staffing changes at the National Labor Relations Board made by the Biden Administration may have facilitated the successful recent union organizing campaign at Amazon’s Staten Island warehouse.

Speaking of the Roosevelt Institute, also check out this brief by Dr. Ali R. Bustamante, which among other things brings data to bear showing that union affiliated workers in the US were able to recover pandemic related employment losses in four months, as opposed to two years for workers in the broader economy. Here is yet another powerful finding that in an inherently unequal relationship between workers and management, workers will get more (and get it way more quickly) when they organize.

Finally, before I shift focus away from New York-based research organizations, I want to give a shout out to my former boss at the Fiscal Policy Institute, economist James Parrott, who continues his brave research work as Director of Economic and Fiscal Policies at the Center for New York City Affairs at the New School. Here is a link to James’ website, and here is another to an important study he recently authored with colleagues at UC Berkeley and the University of Chicago. The study deals with app-based trips and drivers in New York City (think for instance Lyft and Uber drivers), and the effects of a New York law setting a floor on per trip pay. Parrott and his co-authors crunch a very large data set from the New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission to conclude that app-based driver pay increased by about nine percent due to the minimum driver pay standard.

Sector Bargaining: Strong Unions Required

I was powerfully reminded while perusing the Fiscal Policy Institute site of the years I spent in New York City in the late 1990s and early 2000s. At the time, I was working on what, in my own mind, I labeled “sector-based urban economic development strategies.” With such a long, vaguely technocratic sounding moniker, no wonder few people outside the small community of researchers and activists focused on creating a more just NYC economy had much idea what I was talking about. 

This month, however, on reading this revelatory 2021 paper through the Washington DC-based Economic Policy Institute, I had a realization. Instead of six words (“sector-based urban economic development strategies”) I should have used just two (“sector bargaining”). According to the author of the piece, MIT political science professor Kathleen Thelen, sector bargaining has operated as a key institutional structure underneath the development of the high-wage, “coordinated,” export-led economies of Northern Europe. Thelan states that, “durable progress seems to be possible only where unions are able to strike deals with strong employer associations that are organized on a broad industry-wide basis.” Somehow I found this quote heartening. My former obsession with sector research was not misplaced!

Much of Thelan’s paper focuses on the legal regimes connected to antitrust and union organizing that facilitate this kind of approach in Germany but frustrate it here in the US. Certainly the legal barriers to sector bargaining here in the US are huge. But still, here’s what I continue to wonder from my years working on this issue in New York: could sector bargaining approaches conceivably emerge in the US at the urban and metropolitan level?

To me the teacher contract I mentioned in the opening to this post is one indicator that the answer is yes. My union in Elk Grove was not alone in negotiating a big raise. In our gains we follow the often maligned union at Sacramento City Unified (where teachers actually went on strike last year), and unions in most of the other big regional districts, notably San Juan Unified.  

Getting to metropolitan level sector bargaining in export-oriented areas of the economy with lots of private firms and low union density would be very difficult. We need more labor organizing (you can’t bargain without labor representation), more coordination between regional firms, and leadership from strong and visionary elected officials. But difficult does not mean impossible. All it might take for a sector bargaining approach to spread in North America might be real success in a single metropolitan area, perhaps even in a single industry. Maybe, in other words, all we need at first is to build out one robust model.