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.