Workers at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum are the latest to announce an effort to unionize. They follow employees at Elmwood Taco & Subs, Remedy House café and other small shops inspired by the Starbucks organizing effort that sprouted from the successful effort at Spot Coffee in 2019.
But will this drip, drip, drip at small shops and cafés amount to little more than a drop in the bucket in the face of a decadeslong decline in the proportion of unionized workers?
Or could the tide really be turning as workers wake up to the fact that organized strength in numbers is the only way to even the odds when confronting management that holds all the cards?
Americans as a whole seem to recognize that power imbalance – and its economic implications – despite a more than half-century decline in union membership. From a peak of about one-third of workers in the 1950s, there has been a nearly uninterrupted drop in the percent of workers who are unionized, to just 20.1% by 1983, 13.4% by 2000, and just 10.1% last year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Yet a Pew Research Center survey in April found that 61% of Americans consider the decline in unions to be bad for working people, and 58% said it was bad for the country.
And what Americans recognize intuitively is borne out by the data. According to the BLS, unionized workers had median weekly earnings of $1,216 in 2022, while nonunion workers earned only $1,029. And the gap no doubt would be even larger if not for the fact that nonunion workers benefit from the efforts of their unionized counterparts. As United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain was quick to note after achieving major pay hikes, improved benefits and other gains by taking on the Big 3 automakers, foreign car makers also quickly gave their nonunion employees pay hikes in a bid to retain workers and pre-empt unionization efforts at their plants.
Yet the United States’ 10.1% unionization rate is anemic compared to…
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