Unions These Days – Recent Events, and What Their Presence Indicates

Trade unions have a long world history, mostly but hardly exclusively beneficial.  Now it is 2025, and few alive can even remember the pre-union times when, for example, if American workers died on the job they would not even get that day’s pay.  Labor laws, assuring physical and legal employee protections are extensive, widespread, noncontroversial and effective, and few companies run afoul of them.  So where do unions come in now?

First, a few of the large, related stories from the past nine months.

In “The Delivery Business Shows Why Unions Are Struggling to Expand” (The New York Times, May 27^th), Peter Eavis contrasted worker-organization victories, as those “representing workers at three large automakers and UPS negotiated new labor contracts that included big raises and other gains,” with “labor experts” saying “structural forces would make it hard for labor groups to increase their membership.”  One of those is the large share of workers not being employees of the companies at whose locations they report.  Others are increasing part-time work, high turnover in fields otherwise ripe for organizing, and frequent requirements that unions start simultaneously at all of an employer’s often-far-flung locations.  Still, unions have done some amazing things, exemplified by the statistic that the “average annual compensation, including benefits” of UPS drivers is now $170,000. 

Moving to efforts at another huge, well-known company, Matt Bruenig wrote in the August 21^st New York Times that he saw “In a Union Triumph, the Seeds of Future Failure.”  Starbucks employees, he noted, “have unionized 481 stores with more than 11,000 employees in less than three years,” which has, though, also revealed that “American labor laws, and the bureaucracy they require, make mass unionization impossible unless rules for certifying unions and negotiating contracts are simplified and streamlined.”  The National Labor Relations Board, responsible for holding many union elections as well as dealing with worker complaints, has been overtaxed.  “Anti-union activity by employers” is still a problem, and it is not even the law that union authorization requires only most workers signing certification cards.  While bills with legislation ending these concerns have been written and presented, they not been successfully voted in – and seem unlikely to be over the next several years.

The situation at the coffee seller reached a head four months later, as “Starbucks Baristas Walk Out in 3 Cities” (Heather Haddon, The Wall Street Journal, December 21^st -22^nd, 2024).  They were Chicago, Los Angeles, and Seattle, and the picketing, “walkouts,” and “protests” were over five days later, without agreement on a contract.  Later, we saw “Starbucks and Union Agree to Mediation in Quest for Contract” (Danielle Kaye and Rebecca Davis O’Brien, The New York Times, January 30^th), as the company, which “called the union’s wage proposals “not sustainable,”” “did not offer a substantial wage increase during the latest bargaining session in December.” Starbucks’ management has choices to make, on which they will be forced if they do not resolve them freely.

Also last month, and with a group of employees rather better compensated than baristas, there was a “Port Strike Averted With Labor Deal Days Before Deadline” (Peter Eavis, The New York Times, January 8^th).  The dockworkers’ union, the International Longshoremen’s Association, and the United States Maritime Alliance representing employers, “overcame their differences over a big sticking point in their talks:  the introduction of automated cargo-moving machinery at the ports.”  The resolution cemented an agreement on wages to go up over 60% during the time between now and 2031, and calls for positions to “be added when automated equipment was added at a port,” which will give hirers “a more straightforward path for introducing automated machinery.”  By the end of the six years, dockworkers will be getting $63 per hour, and “with shift work and overtime, the pay of many longshoremen at some East Coast ports could rise to well over $200,000 a year.” 

With container ship commerce vital nationally, the International Longshoremen’s Association is in an exceptionally strong bargaining position.  But that is not the case for unions at Starbucks or Amazon.  They are new, and the reason for their ascent is clear: their constituents have legitimate gripes.  That’s what emerging unions need now.  With truly inhumane treatment of employees almost completely a thing of the past, it is time for companies to take fresh union activity as a wake-up call.  What are they doing wrong?  It’s something.  They need to be aware of that before the organizing starts.  If they do, it won’t happen.  If they don’t, and end up in Starbucks’ position of needing to pay more than they think their businesses can take, they have only themselves to blame.

Artificial Intelligence Progress, Problems, and Perceptions: Two Months’ Worth

Recently, the DeepSeek kerfuffle has dominated the AI news.  But since late December, other things beyond future-success assertions have hit the news.  What are they?

First, “OpenAI Unveils New A.I. That Can ‘Reason’ Through Math and Science Problems” (Cade Metz, The New York Times, December 20^th).  Its new product, o3, now in the hands of “safety and security testers, outperformed the industry’s leading A.I. technologies on standardized benchmark tests that rate skills in math, science, coding and logic,” being over 20% more accurate than its predecessor “in a series of common programming tasks.”  That area has received less publicity, but AI has been serving more and more in human programmers’ core roles.  Yet, per OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, “at least one OpenAI programmer could still beat the system on this test,” meaning AI has not taken over superiority yet, and it “can still get things wrong or hallucinate.”  But we’ve seen a big improvement here.

The upcoming main OpenAI system, though, does not look as good, as “The Next Great Leap in AI Is Behind Schedule and Crazy Expensive” (The Wall Street Journal, December 21^st).  Author Deepa Seetharaman said about GPT-5, code named Orion, that “it isn’t clear when – or if – it’ll work,” as “there may not be enough data in the world to make it smart enough.”  This product, intended to succeed GPT-4 and its variants, is being developed with what could soon be regarded as the old way of building AI, with ever-more-gigantic datasets and similarly huge amounts of electricity and processing power, in this case costing “around half a billion dollars in computing costs alone.”  It’s now almost two years in the making, and still does not have even a traditionally overoptimistic release date.

Moving to an application, we saw “Platonic Romances and A.I. Clones: 2025 Dating Predictions” (Gina Cherelus, The New York Times, January 3^rd).  The author predicted less conventional dating and less use of conventional dating applications.  AI may become “your ultimate wingman” as it may be more frequently used to “write… profiles, edit photos and write entire dialogues… on dating apps,” and “some will even use A.I. clones to do the whole thing for them” as people have done with structurally-similar job applications.  As well, people may “use A.I. dating coaches to practice chats before a date, help them come up with conversation topics and suggest preplanned date ideas in their cities.”  At that point, AI had better be able to produce unique output streams, since it wouldn’t be much fun to be able to anticipate what a prospective romantic partner is next going to say, word-for-word.

Among our president’s immediate proclamations was “Trump announces largest AI infrastructure project ‘in history’ involving Softbank, OpenAI and Oracle” (Brock Dumas, Fox Business, January 21^st).  Despite those company’s CEOs joining “Trump from the Roosevelt Room at the White House for the announcement,” there is doubt whether they will meet the cost of “$100 billion, with plans to expand to $500 billion over the next four years” – and if they do, the project may serve only as a framework for capital expenditures they were planning to make anyway.

Another jump in actually-available AI capability occurred with “OpenAI launches Operator – an agent that can use a computer for you” (Will Douglas, MIT Technology Review, January 23^rd).  The software “can carry out simple online tasks in a browser, such as booking concert tickets or filling an online grocery order.”  There are already similar tools at Anthropic (Claude 3.5 Sonnet) and Google DeepMind (Mariner).  This one may be a cause for security worry, as there are plenty of ways of initiating physical action from a keyboard, so these apps will need to be constrained somehow.

“When A.I. Passes This Test, Look Out” (Kevin Roose, The New York Times, January 23^rd).  It has been produced by the Center for AI Safety and Scale AI, and it is called “”Humanity’s Last Exam.””  It has “roughly 3,000 multiple-choice and short answer questions designed to test A.I. systems’ abilities in areas ranging from analytic philosophy to rocket engineering,” which are “”along the upper range of what one might see in a graduate exam.””  If researchers can sufficiently restrict sharing these questions and their answers, this exam might last a while without AI solution, or it could topple within a year or two.

 A new look at an old subject, “Is Artificial Intelligence Really Worth the Hype?” was written by Jeff Sommer and published February 7^th in the New York Times.  Its main cause for concern was about DeepSeek, and, as of this date, investors were “re-evaluating prominent companies swept up in A.I. fever, including Nvidia, Meta, Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, Tesla and the private start-up OpenAI.”  In the week since this piece came out, there have been serious concerns voiced about the legitimacy and credibility of DeepSeek’s claim, and, since there is no other focus of unease in this article, we can’t accept it yet.  There are still plentiful reasons to think AI will not even approximate its highest expectations, and there will be more stories with similar titles, but the DeepSeek controversy – and that’s what it is – has not been resolved yet.  Neither has a clear vision of what AI will be doing, and not doing, even a few years from now.  We’ll see – that’s all.

A Just-Good Employment Report, with AJSN Showing Latent Demand for 17.1 Million Jobs

This morning’s Bureau of Labor Statistics Employment Situation Summary was to have two features: Estimated new nonfarm payroll positions up from 170,000 to 175,000, and many annual data adjustments muddying comparisons with December and other recent months. 

We got the second, but not quite the first.  Jobs as above missed the mark with 143,000.  However, almost all the other results were favorable.  Seasonally adjusted unemployment ticked down 0.1% to 4.0%, with the unadjusted variety up seasonally from 3.8% to 4.4%.  The adjusted number of unemployed lost 100,000 to 6.8 million, with the count of long-term jobless, looking for 27 weeks or longer, down 200,000, on top of last month’s 100,000 improvement, to 1.4 million.  The two best measures of closeness to working, the labor force participation rate and the employment-population ratio, each added 0.1% to reach 62.6% and 60.1%.  Those employed part-time for economic reasons, or keeping such jobs while thus far unsuccessfully looking for full-time ones, gained 100,000 to 4.5 million.  Average hourly private nonfarm payroll wages rose 18 cents, or more than double recent inflation, reaching $35.87. 

The American Job Shortage Number or AJSN, the metric showing how many additional positions could be quickly filled if all knew they would be easy to get, was up 900,000, mostly seasonally, as follows:

The largest change from last month was from official unemployment, as the AJSN is not seasonally adjusted, which added almost exactly the amount that it increased overall.  There were gains from those wanting work but discouraged, like-thinking people not searching for it in the past year, and those only temporarily unavailable.  All of these were more than offset by the count of those in the armed services, in institutions, and off the grid catching up with last time’s jump in the Census Bureau population estimate, as that component reflects the difference between American population aged 15 and over and those in all other categories.  The share of the AJSN from those officially unemployed was 39.3%, 3.4% higher than in December.

Compared with a year before, the AJSN was almost unchanged, with higher contributions from those unemployed, discouraged, and not wanting work cancelled by fewer not searching for a year or more and a large decrease in the assessed number of American expatriates.

How did the adjustments affect this week’s data?  Befitting the change in population with which they had previously been synchronized, almost everything grew.  The employment numbers and percentages changed in inconsistent ways from the previous month, but still seem to have improved.  I don’t know if, with the stated counts of those not in the labor force increasing by about 1 million and 800,000 more not interested, that many people gave up on job searches, but, clearly, many did.  So once again we need to factor down the positive outcomes, which brings the report down from excellent to just positive.  On that, the turtle took a step forward, but only a moderate one.