Listen: Labor Day’s a Good Time to Talk About Union Power…

WGA strikers picket outside Netflix’s NYC offices earlier this year. Photo by Joe Maniscalco

By Bob Hennelly

This Labor Day, the most pressing question we in the labor movement can ask ourselves is how to reverse the historic decades-in-the-making decline in the percentage of workers represented by a union.

Organizers have won union elections in places like Starbucks and Amazon, but have been stymied from getting their first contract by the corporations’ hardball tactics that use successive legal challenges in round after round of union wins before the National Labor Relations Board. They break labor law and just pay the fine, like it’s just a cost of doing business.

While there’s been a significant spike in organizing and strike activity, the percentage of workers actually represented by a union dropped  from 10.3 percent in 2021 to 10.1 percent in 2022. That’s about half of the union density of the early 1980s, around the time President Ronald Reagan fired all of the nation’s striking air traffic controllers.

Here in New York, the latest data shows a larger decline, going from 24.1 percent in 2021 to 22.1 percent last year, one of the largest declines of the 23 states that recorded a drop in union density. And workers have paid too dear a price as all of the wealth continues to be concentrated at the very top of what has become a very oppressive pyramid of inequality.

In this edition of the Stucknation Labor Radio Hour, we will hear from New York State Senator Jessica Ramos, chair of the New York State Senate Labor Committee, herself a veteran union organizer, about how we can start to move that needle through collective action in the right direction and why it matters for ourselves, our families, our communities, and our nation.  

We will also get a strike update from Judy Danella, RN, president of United Steelworkers Local 4-200, which represents 1,700 nurses striking for safe staffing at Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital in New Brunswick, New Jersey.

PART II

In the second half of our show, we will get an update from Dr. Steve Auerbach, a medical doctor with the Physicians for a National Health Program who tells us why passage of the New York Health Act, single payer healthcare, could be the most significant labor legislation in a generation,