Workers and organized labor are cool again. Young Americans are the country’s most pro-union generation. Labor has poll ratings most politicians only dream about, and the Biden administration is making workers’ pay, benefits and rights its calling card.
“Working people are reclaiming our power,” AFL-CIO president Liz Shuler declared in her pre-Labor Day speech last week. You’d expect her to say that, but there’s a difference this year: Any labor leader making that claim a decade ago would have been on far shakier ground.
Let’s stipulate: Although membership in unions is ticking up again, the organized share of the workforce is still stuck at about 10 percent.
But so many other indicators suggest that labor’s long decline is over. Heralds of change include well-publicized organizing efforts in new sectors of the economy, broad public sympathy for the Hollywood writers’ struggle, and big wage gains by workers increasingly willing to strike for them.
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