2023 was a very important year for collective bargaining --- perhaps the most important in a generation. This year certainly proved, yet again, collective bargaining can successfully address workplace problems. We already knew that. This year’s collective bargaining brought more. Collective bargaining produced generational changes in workers’ lives. Worker activism and a willingness to strike retired the vestiges of concessions bargaining. Unions and their success at the bargaining table contributed to the expansion and strengthening of the middle class.
The success was not universal. Some employers stubbornly and illegally refused to bargain. But most employers, especially those in mature relationships with their employees’ unions, bargained to resolution. Employers did not always start in the right place. Workers either cajoled or forced their employers to reach the right result in an impressively large number of negotiations.
The aggregate results have been nothing short of historic. According to a Bloomberg Law analysis, as of early November and excluding the massive pay increases in the United Auto Workers’ and SAG-AFTRA’s agreements, unions won 6.6% average pay raises in 2023 --- the largest average increase in more than three decades. The UAW won the largest wage increases for their members in a decade. The Writers Guild of America and the Coalition of Kaiser Permanente Unions won their largest increases of the 21st Century. Of course, collective bargaining addresses much more than wages, but the Bloomberg Law analysis shows workers’ demands on a raft of other issues also produced dramatic gains.
As the end of the year approaches, the time has come for final grades on 2023's collective bargaining. These grades build on my initial assessment back in March and my mid-year assessment from August. A prefatory methodological note. After my mid-year assessment, I was pointedly and understandably called out by readers for failing to include a long list of high-profile negotiations that led to important contracts. There have been enough to fill three blogs. Yet, the assessments you are about to read are not intended to address all collective bargaining in all sectors, or even all negotiations that attracted substantial public attention. In March, I chose three categories of collective bargaining situations with broad and deep importance beyond the instant parties:
(1) first contracts that could influence future organizing,
(2) economically impactful contracts, and
(3) new labor leaders' "measuring stick" contracts (categories explained)
The negotiations in these categories tell us a great deal about where the labor movement stands and where it is going. The barriers between these categories are porous, as I will explain, but they are nonetheless valuable.
As I did at mid-year, I will assign a grade to each category of negotiations. The grades reflect whether I think the negotiations epitomized the category --- that is, did the negotiations demonstrate that they were, are, or will be important beyond the parties to those negotiations in the ways specified?
First Contracts That Could Influence Future Organizing - Grade: F
This category includes only newly unionized Starbucks and Amazon employees, although it easily could have included two sets of negotiations discussed below. By March, when I wrote my initial assessment, these two employers had already succeeded in exploiting (read violating) weak federal private-sector labor laws to avoid negotiating contracts with their employees’ unions. Their goal has been to decertify their existing unions and intimidate their not-yet-organized employees out of joining the unions. Starbucks and Amazon understand that successful collective bargaining can spark further organizing, so they want to avoid the bargaining table like it is an especially virulent form of COVID-19. Their actions also could have an ancillary effect: their anti-union animus could be contagious. Other employers might follow the Starbucks and Amazon models and refuse to bargain. Other business’ employees who have been inspired by Starbucks Workers United and the Amazon Labor Union might be dissuaded from undertaking their own efforts to organize.
I predicted Starbucks and Amazon would persist in refusing to bargain. Sadly, I was right. Neither SBWU nor the ALU has won a contract in 2023. In this sense, these negotiations epitomized this category, but in the most negative way possible.
As National Labor Relations Board General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo and I discussed in a Labor Day blogcast, ineffective legal remedies for employers’ refusal to bargain in good faith are an important culprit. Abruzzo has a plan to persuade the Board’s members to establish a remedy that would make unionized employees whole when employers illegally refuse to bargain in good faith. “Make whole” would mean these workers receive the higher wages and improved working conditions honest bargaining would have produced. Employees would get some of the benefits of organizing. Employers’ costs of law breaking would rise, perhaps incentivizing them to bargain fairly. If the Amazon and Starbucks negotiations help the Board impose that rule, then the grade for this category should be higher. It cannot be lower.
Our broken labor law system is only part of the problem. After all, every union representing private-sector workers operates under that system. Yet, unions like the UAW, the Coalition of Kaiser Permanente Unions, the Writers Guild of America, SAG-AFTRA, UNITE HERE in Las Vegas, and others have sufficient power either in their industry or with a single employer to force their employers, including by striking or threatening a strike. For these unions, the law is less important. Employers confront a union-imposed penalty and opt to bargain.
The ALU and SBWU do not have sufficient power to make their employers pay a meaningful penalty. The ALU represents one warehouse in Amazon’s vast global system. A strike might be disruptive, but Amazon could withstand it. SBWU has greater power, but it represents employees in only 366 stores out of more than 16,000 in the United States as of this writing. A one-day strike can mildly disrupt Starbucks’ "Red Cup Day" promotion and attract attention, but a strike shutting down fewer than 3% of all stores indefinitely likely would not force Starbucks to the bargaining table.
As in the mid-year assessment, two employers, two unions, zero contracts. The grade is F. Starbucks and Amazon fail the final exam.
Economically Impactful Contracts - Grade: A- (with a partial incomplete)
These are the negotiations that could have had large short-term or long-term implications for a broad swath of the economy. These broader economic implications mean the negotiators are forced to withstand added pressure, added attention, and the added risk of third parties, including the government, seeking to intervene. It’s collective bargaining in a high-pressure fishbowl with lots of people banging on the glass.
Two of the three negotiations in this category concluded successfully. To start, the International Longshore Workers Union (ILWU)’s struck a deal with the Pacific Maritime Association (PMA). The ILWU’s members won a very good contract, including a 32% pay increase (slightly over 5% per year) plus a one-time $70 million COVID-19 pandemic bonus to be spread among 22,000 ILWU members. The wage increases and bonuses together bring the deal close to the national average for collectively bargained contracts in 2023; however, the ILWU did not have to claw back years of concessions like some other unions. This pay increase supplements already pretty good pay. The parties also were able to come to terms on the contentious issue of automation of port terminal operations and the attendant potential for job loss. Members ratified the agreement with 75% of the votes cast. That’s a healthy vote of confidence.
The ILWU-PMA deal gave powerful evidence that collective bargaining can succeed under extreme versions of the pressures described above. President Biden, other political leaders, powerful elements of the business community, and the media pushed the parties aggressively to avoid a dispute that might close the West Coast ports and disrupt supply chains still healing from the pandemic. The ILWU-PMA contract expired in July 2022, so a strike or lockout was possible any time thereafter. Instead, the parties quietly, and with only a few leaks to the press, continued negotiating for another year until they reached a deal. Collective bargaining can be powerfully resilient if that’s what the parties choose.
The United Auto Workers (UAW) and Ultium Cells negotiations also concluded this year, but as part of one of the deals discussed below: the electric-vehicle battery manufacturer’s newly organized employees will be covered by the UAW’s master agreement with General Motors. The UAW has been fighting hard to include all employees of joint-venture U.S. battery manufacturers that include the Big 3 automakers under the union’s master agreements. So, the result at Ultium Cells is an unalloyed success for the union and Ultium Cells’ employees. It means these EV battery manufacturing workers will have good union jobs without the need for an expensive, contentious organizing campaign. If this deal (and others like it) set a pattern for the EV industry, then collective bargaining will have done more than set the rules for this workplace. It will have delivered a broadly important public policy outcome: good union jobs in a publicly subsidized, newly developing, important green industry.
The National Association of Letter Carriers (NALC) and the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) are still negotiating in the shadow of a law that prohibits the union from striking. The law also mandates interest arbitration to resolve negotiating disputes. As a result, both parties must calculate whether they can get a better deal from their bargaining partner or an arbitrator. In these negotiations, neither party has abandoned the bargaining table even though their last contract expired in May and a mandatory 60-day mediation period expired in mid-July. On the other hand, no deal had been reached on pay, “non-career workers,” or letter carrier safety as of last month. Arbitration is likely, but bargaining continues. Again, resilience. Some view arbitrated results as part of the collective bargaining process. Others view arbitration as a barrier and replacement for negotiations. I put aside the abstractions and ask how the final deal serves workers.
For the two deals that are finished, the unions and the employers get an A-. The NALC-USPS negotiation requires a partial incomplete. The minus following “A” is only because two negotiations blew through their deadlines. I admit to being a tough grader.
New Labor Leaders’ “Measuring Stick” Contracts - Grade: A
This category included two sets of negotiations originally, but probably should have included three. Specifically, SAG-AFTRA and the Hollywood studios should have joined the Teamsters-UPS and the UAW-Big 3 automakers. SAG-AFTRA President Fran Drescher was newly elected in 2021 and re-elected in 2023 during her union’s long strike. So, she is not a brand new leader, but she is pretty close to it.
The Teamsters-UPS negotiations were a huge success for the Teamsters. They won one of the best contracts of the year, maybe the 21st century, without a strike: pay increases for full-time and part-time workers, the end of a hated two-tier employment system, the end of forced overtime, moving thousands of part-time workers to full-time jobs and hiring for more than 20,000 unfilled jobs, a holiday for Martin Luther King, Jr.'s birthday, and a plan to address potentially deadly heat hazards in delivery trucks. This contract marked an exorcism of concessions bargaining for the Teamsters. Members agreed. They ratified the deal with a whopping 86% of the vote. Job applications for UPS driver jobs have surged as tens of thousands of eager workers clamor to get in on this great deal. Success may have many definitions, but this is certainly one.
The UAW-Big 3 negotiations ended almost as successfully for the union, but it took a lengthy strike to get there. The UAW’s stand-up strikers and negotiators won huge pay increases, cost-of-living adjustments, retirement savings improvements, and added job security, among other provisions. They could not eliminate the automakers’ two-tiered employment system, as demanded, although they shortened the time needed to reach the top tier. The UAW also did not reinstate pensions for all employees, as they sought to do. So, if a partial exorcism is possible, this is it for the auto industry’s concessions bargaining. UAW members ratified the agreements at Ford, with almost 70% of the vote, and at Stellantis, with exactly 70%. Yet, the UAW’s members at General Motors ratified the agreement with only 55% of the votes cast. That surprisingly low vote total may have been the product of a hangover from the disappointing 2019 GM strike or frustrations around dashed expectations related to eliminating the two-tier system, pensions failures, or other substantive issues. Internal politics, still a raw subject for some UAW members and leaders after the UAW’s first direct election of its new president, also may have contributed.
The SAG-AFTRA negotiations also ended successfully for the union and its members. After a strike provoked by the Hollywood studios’ misunderstandings and gross miscalculations, SAG-AFTRA won $1 billion in gains over three years, including impressive wage increases, expanded residuals payments, better health care funding, stronger rules around self-produced audition tapes and, at the cutting edge of the future of work, protections against problematic uses of artificial intelligence. Seventy-eight percent of the union’s members voted to ratify the agreement --- greater than the UAW’s ratification results, but not quite the Teamsters’ result or the eye-popping 99% vote to ratify by SAG-AFTRA’s union siblings in the Writers Guild of America.
These negotiations have two big ramifications beyond the deals themselves. First, the results measured up to Presidents O’Brien’s, Fain’s, and Drescher’s campaign promises. Accordingly, their leadership positions in their unions and as leading voices in their industries are likely secure, at least for a while. Both O’Brien and Fain also have laid claim to a more prominent leadership role in the broader progressive movement, although Drescher could have more influence in 2024, if she so chooses.
Second, even beyond these leaders’ futures, these 2023 contracts have implications for other challenges facing their unions. Like Starbucks and Amazon, the Teamsters and UAW know that successful collective bargaining can fuel organizing. The Teamsters want to deploy the momentum from the UPS deal to organize Amazon drivers. The UAW has announced it will seek to organize 13 U.S. and foreign-owned non-union automakers operating in this country. The rich and robust contracts these two unions negotiated in 2023 serve as a terrific sales pitch to Amazon drivers and non-union autoworkers to join those organizing drives.
SAG-AFTRA’s ultimate verdict may come in its current negotiations with video game manufacturers. Many of the issues there mirror those addressed in the Hollywood studio negotiations. If the first deal sets a floor for a second deal with different employers, especially with respect to AI, then SAG-AFTRA’s actors will have won two contracts in one negotiation. They also might have established valuable precedents for other unions preparing to negotiate over AI’s role in their workplaces.
Three unions with three new (or new-ish) leaders. High expectations and lofty promises largely achieved through historic agreements. Concessions bargaining consigned to the dustbin of labor history. The unions get an A in this category.
