Will the collective bargaining that takes place in 2024 be as important and influential as the negotiations that occurred in 2023? That’s a high bar. Consider this partial list of contracts settled in 2023: Teamsters and UPS, UAW and the Big 3 automakers (and, separately, Caterpillar), SAG-AFTRA and the Writers Guild of America with the Hollywood studios, the International Longshore Workers Union (ILWU) and West Coast port terminal operators, the Coalition of Kaiser Permanente Unions and Kaiser Permanente, SEIU and the Los Angeles school district, Major League Baseball and the MLBPA, the National Basketball Association and the NBPA, and the AAUP-AFT and Rutgers University. That’s a prodigious list.
I argued that 2023 was the most important year for collective bargaining in a generation (and at least two really smart labor experts agreed). This year also features numerous important negotiations that could have a lasting impact on their industries, the U.S. economy, workers, worker power, and the labor movement. My preliminary conclusion: 2024 will be another important and trend-setting year for collective bargaining. Workers have already used their increased power to bargain for improvements in their lives and strengthen their positions in workplaces across the U.S. The year is only half over, so there is still a lot of bargaining to come.
Collective bargaining is driven by many things, but power matters most. The substance of collective bargaining agreements is a product of the comparative power of unions and employers. Comparatively more worker power means higher wages, better benefits, a rescission of past concessions, and greater job security. Comparatively less worker power puts all those things at risk, potentially including unions’ future. For this reason, workers’ greater willingness to organize and strike to improve their lives has been a critical factor in labor’s resurgence.
Economic conditions have also been important. The unemployment rate has remained at or below 4% for 27 months. Real wages are rising. So, workers can demand more at the bargaining table knowing employers have fewer alternatives. Political conditions favor worker power, as well. The President of the United States has expressed his administration’s enthusiastic support for unions and collective bargaining. He walked the walk on a UAW picket line in 2023 and endorsed that union’s contract demands. Public support for unions and their bargaining positions also remains very high. These contextual factors, and others, have underwritten unions’ hard-won increases in bargaining power.
At this (roughly) halfway point of 2024, several large unions have already negotiated robust contracts with employers. In some cases, they have benefitted from worker power produced by strikes and union solidarity in 2023. These contracts are important in and of themselves, but those I will discuss below also could have implications well beyond the parties who negotiated them. Several other prominent negotiations appear to be headed toward agreements without strikes or lockouts, including bargaining between parties with previously contentious relationships. This change in tone --- or, at least, willingness to bargain sincerely --- may suggest that (some, not all) employers accept collective bargaining as ordinary business rather than a fight to the death. At least, for now. Two large and economically consequential bargaining relationships present meaningful risks of strikes. If strikes occur, they could complicate that story about a new era in labor relations. There are also some unions trapped in negotiations that either never seem to end or never truly begin. So, the news and forecast are not all good. I will provide a final assessment at the end of this year, as I did in 2023, but here is my mid-term take.
2024 Collective Bargaining Agreements with Broader Implications
One of the most important collective bargaining stories of 2023 was the Hollywood movie and television studios’ labor relations strategy. The plan was to force their writers and actors to strike for a long enough period that the workers would lose their homes and have no choice but to capitulate. In addition to being morally disgusting, the strategy failed spectacularly. It appears to be dead in Hollywood, at least in 2024. The studios’ 2023 failure also sent a message to other employers that times have changed and this approach to labor relations, a staple across industries for decades, is no longer going to work.
The latest negotiations confirm that change has come to Hollywood’s collective bargaining. In February, the Hollywood studios reached an agreement with the American Federation of Musicians covering roughly 2,000 workers employed under basic theatrical motion picture and basic television motion picture contracts. The AFM announced that it had won “historic breakthroughs” on streaming residuals and studios’ use of artificial intelligence, which were two of the issues that contributed to the Writers’ Guild of America and SAG-AFTRA strikes in 2023. The AFM’s members ratified the agreement after negotiations that required only two rounds of bargaining and wrapped up seemingly with little conflict. Hollywood’s unions should get a great deal of credit. They have showed an impressive degree of solidarity that ensured the studios would bargain in good faith regardless of the union sitting across the bargaining table. All this bodes well for the recently commenced bargaining between the Hollywood studios and the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE)(see below).
Photo from Pixabay
In April, after five years of negotiations, flight attendants represented by the Transport Workers Union (TWU) ratified a contract negotiated with Southwest Airlines that yielded large immediate and retroactive pay increases. TWU’s 21,000 Southwest flight attendants are now the highest paid in the industry. Beyond its obvious benefits for these workers, this agreement is important for two additional reasons. First, TWU’s members voted down two previous tentative agreements. Negotiating teams need to listen to the front-line members if they want their hard work to turn into a contract. These bargaining parties seemingly listened, eventually, and their deal was ratified. That’s a lesson that's worth repeating in other negotiations. Second, flight attendants’ unions at other airlines have not been able to win contracts from their employers, yet. There is reason to hope that the TWU-Southwest deal will set a pattern for agreements between the other flight attendant unions and their employers (see below).
Two successful negotiations in 2024 built directly off important union victories in 2023, including one of last year’s largest strikes. Just hours before a strike deadline in late April, Daimler Truck and the UAW agreed to a four-year contract. The deal covering 7,300 workers raises wages substantially and provides cost-of-living adjustments, profit sharing, and an end to a two-tiered wage system. This contract was negotiated in the towering shadow of the UAW’s “stand up” strike against the Big 3 automakers that yielded historically rich contracts for 150,000 union-represented auto workers. Yet, the Daimler Truck contract was significantly more popular with the company’s UAW members: it won 94.5% of the ratification vote. Perhaps more important, this bargaining victory occurred in North Carolina. Perhaps it will add force to the UAW’s message that auto and truck manufacturing workers in non-union plants throughout the South would benefit by organizing UAW locals in their facilities. After the UAW’s recent defeat at the Mercedes plant in Vance, Alabama, their organizers can use the help.
In February, the Teamsters also used a strike deadline to force an agreement with AB InBev’s Anheuser-Busch. This contract guarantees job security, raises wages, and eliminates a two-tier health care system. The Teamsters boasted that, like their epic UPS collective bargaining agreement reached in 2023, the Anheuser-Busch agreement clawed back concessions surrendered during past negotiations and protected the jobs of 5,000 drivers. The UPS agreement almost certainly helped to drive this success for Anheuser-Busch’s Teamsters. The beneficial effects of the UPS deal may have had limits, however: Teamsters drivers at Molson Coors in Texas also recently won a robust contract, but only after a strike lasting three months.
Negotiations Underway, Likely to Reach Agreement, But No Deal Yet
As noted above, IATSE and the Hollywood studios have begun their negotiations. The rest of Hollywood labor is standing firmly behind their 45,000 to 50,000 union siblings who work behind the cameras. IATSE President Matthew Loeb has described the union as “constructively engaging” with the trade association that bargains for the studios and streamers. Indications are that the negotiations are more productive than the parties’ last round of discussions in 2021. Yet, there are huge issues to address, including limiting the studios’ use of AI, ending the studios’ subcontracting of union work, and filling a sizable funding hole in these workers’ pension and health care plans. With the studios’ abandonment of their “starve them into submission” strategy, the lack of any talk of a strike, and the negotiations’ apparent focus on important substantive issues, these parties seem to be negotiating seriously to reach an agreement before the current contract expires on July 31. Those behaviors do not always produce an agreement, but they substantially improve the likelihood of reaching a deal.
Photo from Starbucks Workers United
One of the biggest surprises of 2024 was the February announcement by Starbucks and Starbucks Workers United (SBWU) that they had found a “constructive path forward” to negotiating about wages and working conditions for about 10,000 baristas represented by SBWU in roughly 400 company-owned Starbucks stores. While that announcement was undeniably a good sign, the negotiations have been difficult. The parties walked away from the bargaining table for a time.
Negotiations re-commenced in late April. They will be complicated. The parties plan to bargain a national framework, but also to negotiate individual contracts for each store to address local and regional issues. A great deal of work lies ahead. Starbucks and SBWU appear to be on the path to an eventual agreement without the volume of strikes that this relationship has previously generated. Nonetheless, it is entirely possible that the national and local agreements will not be finalized during 2024.
Negotiations between the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU), which represents nearly 30,000 teachers, paraprofessionals, other school-related personnel, and school clinicians, and the Chicago Public Schools, began in late April. These negotiations will test a few propositions. First, the CTU’s list of demands includes bargaining for the common good --- that is, addressing issues that involve the community’s interests (for example, wraparound services for students) as well as their members’ interests. Can bargaining for the common good succeed, especially when the CPS has an almost $400 million structural deficit? Second, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson is a former teacher and CTU organizer. The union has the closest relationship with City Hall that it likely has ever had. Is that enough to produce a union-friendly deal? Johnson’s history will make these negotiations less contentious and less likely to result in a strike than those involving his predecessors Lori Lightfoot and Rahm Emanuel; however, budgetary and political constraints may not allow him to give a blanket “yes” to the CTU. What happens then? Finally, the CTU and Johnson almost certainly will need more money from the State of Illinois to fund their shared priorities. Does this need effectively put Governor J.B. Pritzker and the legislature at the bargaining table? More voices, more issues, more complexity. The bottom line: a CTU strike is unlikely, but negotiations are going to be challenging and a settlement may have to wait for the state to write a large check.
Photo from IAMAW
Negotiations That May Be Headed Toward Strikes
Boeing has 99 problems, and its forthcoming negotiations with the International Association of Machinists (IAM) is one. Boeing has had a raft of safety and quality control failures, including crashes and parts flying off planes. It has been accused of ignoring a whistleblower’s complaint about safety issues. It lost $32 billion over the last five years. It may be criminally prosecuted. And it recently locked out its 130-member IAFF-represented in-house firefighters corps purportedly to force the union to put its latest contract proposal to a membership vote. None of these developments suggest an easy path to Boeing reaching a deal with the IAM covering more than 33,000 employees in the Pacific Northwest before their contract expires on September 12.
Boeing and the IAM have a controversial bargaining history that certainly will not make things easier. These parties have not negotiated a full contract since 2008. In 2011, when negotiations would have begun for a new contract, Boeing opened a new facility in right-to-work South Carolina and threatened to move production of its 737 Max out of its unionized facilities in Washington state. Boeing’s jobs blackmail forced the union to renew its agreement for four years. Boeing deployed its successful jobs blackmail strategy in 2013 and sought an aggressively concessionary contract. The IAM’s membership overwhelmingly rejected it. Boeing tweaked the contract and demanded a re-vote. The local leadership said “no,” but the national IAM leadership overruled them. The concessions were ratified with only 51% of the vote under circumstances that left a lot of hard feelings among the IAM’s members.
In its first set of 2024 contract demands, the IAM is seeking to claw back prior concessions with substantial wage increases, restoration of workers’ defined-benefit pension plan, reduction in the amount of mandatory overtime, safety protections, and commitments that production will remain in Boeing’s unionized facilities in Washington. The parties are publicly professing optimism that a contract can be bargained without a strike. Yet, the bargaining experiences of the UAW and the Teamsters in 2023, complicated by Boeing’s 99 problems and new leadership at both the company and the union, suggest that a strike by Boeing’s IAM-represented employees is a very real possibility, even if it is by no means certain.
Photo from Wikipedia
The other collective bargaining relationship that may produce a large and economically impactful strike in 2024 is the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA), representing 45,000 dockworkers, and the East Coast and Gulf Coast ports, represented by the U.S. Maritime Alliance (USMX). These parties’ contract expires September 30, but shippers are already sounding the alarm about the risk of a strike and discussing shifting cargoes to West Coast ports. Local contract negotiations ended with tentative agreements in mid-May. The parties began national negotiations immediately thereafter, which suggests that the bargaining process is moving forward in an orderly fashion toward a deal. With respect to the substance, there is some hope that the agreement struck in 2023 between the ILWU and the West Coast ports will set a pattern for the ILA/USMX negotiations. The smart bet is that the ILA and USMX will reach a tentative agreement by October that the ILA’s members will support.
Yet, unlike the ILWU leadership, ILA President Harold Daggett began preparing his members from the earliest days of the negotiations for the possibility of a strike if no deal is struck before the current contract expires. The ILWU and the Pacific Maritime Association (the West Coast ports’ bargaining association) continued negotiating for a full year after their contract expired. Strike threats and strike authorization votes are common means for unions to show their power. More likely than not, Daggett’s warnings are a smart tactic that is one part of a larger bargaining strategy. On the other hand, a strike that idles half the nation’s ports would have epic consequences for supply chains and the economy, particularly inflation, just one month before the 2024 elections. So, no one should be surprised if the Biden-Harris Administration intervenes if these negotiations appear to be sailing in the wrong direction. That intervention would signal a strike is a real possibility.
Deals Unlikely, But Unions Won’t Strike
Sometimes, workers might want to strike, but can’t. In 2024, by far the largest groups of workers bargaining with employers cannot strike, or cannot strike at a time of their own choosing.
Flight Attendants: Collective bargaining between airline unions and their members’ employers are regulated by the Railway Labor Act (RLA), which inserts the National Mediation Board (NMB) into negotiations when a party requests it or if the NMB decides it is needed. Once the NMB begins mediation, no strikes or lockouts are permitted unless and until the NMB releases the parties from mediation and for a period thereafter. There is no legal deadline for a release. The NMB chooses the timing. As a result, negotiations can last for years. Many years. Remember, the TWU/Southwest Airlines negotiations lasted for five years.
The NMB is also deeply sensitive to the congressional calendar. If the NMB releases parties from negotiations, the RLA permits the President to appoint a Presidential Emergency Board (PEB) that writes a suggested contract for the parties. Congress can preempt or stop a strike or lockout by legislatively imposing the PEB report or some other deal on the parties. The NMB does not lobby Congress either way, but it is careful to ensure Congress is in session when a PEB report is issued so legislators can decide how to proceed. With Congress out of session during parts of June and July and most of August and October, and largely ineffective after Election Day, the NMB is not likely to release any parties from mediation soon.
Photo from APFA
The Association of Professional Flight Attendants’s (APFA) negotiations with American Airlines seem to be heating up. The parties met for two weeks at DFW Airport and the NMB called them to Washington for negotiations before and after Memorial Day. Critical economic issues remain to be resolved, so a settlement does not appear to be imminent. Progress toward an agreement seems likely. The Association of Flight Attendants-CWA (AFA-CWA) is in negotiations with 13 airlines. Its members’ frustration with the protracted NMB process caused the union to enlist 178 members of Congress to sign a letter partly praising the agency, but also politely criticizing the NMB: “100,000 flight attendants are currently in contract negotiations, many of whom are working under the terms of contracts that are now several years past the contract amendable dates.” Without outright calling for all airline parties to be released from negotiations, the letter nudges the NMB in that direction. Regardless, a union that gins up a congressional letter like this one likely is not confident deals are imminent.
Photo from APWU
Postal Workers: While flight attendants eventually may have the opportunity to strike, the members of the American Postal Workers Union (APWU), the National Association of Letter Carriers (NALC) , and the National Rural Letter Carriers Association (NRLCA) will not. Federal law prohibits it. Their alternative is binding arbitration, which involves an arbitration panel with a neutral chair (who is the de facto decisionmaker) writing the parts of the contract about which the parties cannot agree.
NALC and the U.S. Postal Service are privately saying that they are on a path to a negotiated contract, but they have also appointed a neutral arbitration channel chair in case the negotiations fail to produce a deal. The lack of agreement after more than one year of bargaining and one year after the last contract expired suggests these negotiations could be headed to binding arbitration. NALC represents more than 210,000 city letter carriers. Its last negotiation in 2020 ended in binding arbitration, as have six other negotiations of its last 13 rounds with the Postal Service. So, the substance of this contract may depend more on lawyers’ arguments than letter carriers’ bargaining power. Members would not have an opportunity to vote on contract ratification; rather, the arbitration award becomes the contract.
The NRLCA, which represents 115,000 rural letter carriers, and the U.S. Postal Service is earlier in the process. The parties have agreed to continue negotiating even though their contract expired on May 20. That’s a good sign, but the lack of an agreement before the contract’s expiration is not.
APWU, which represents more than 220,000 U.S. Postal Service employees, will begin bargaining in June. The APWU’s collective bargaining agreement expires in September. Like NALC, the APWU has a lot of experience with binding contract arbitration (known as “interest arbitration”), so these negotiations will proceed with one eye on a deal and the other on how a neutral arbitrator will react to the parties’ proposals. It’s too early to know what that will mean for the APWU’s members.
Conclusion
2024 will feature a lot more intense bargaining, a fair number of strikes and lockouts, informational picketing by unions unable or unwilling to strike, and aggressive worker organizing. It’s entirely possible that the whole picture will look quite different at the end of the year than the partial picture known to us today.
Nonetheless, there are some trends developing that are worth noting with the first half of the year behind us. First, more negotiations, at least between large unions and large corporations, are culminating in contracts without strikes or lockouts in 2024. This may be a new era of collective bargaining as ordinary business rather than mortal combat. Second, the substance of contracts appears to be leaning strongly in workers’ favor, although it is too soon to compare 2024 to 2023. If proven true by the end of the year, this would mean comparative worker power remains strong. Third, concessions are no longer on the table and some unions are winning back wages and benefits relinquished in prior negotiations. As I declared last year, the era of concessions bargaining is over.
Finally, the laws limiting strikes in certain sectors are proving to be a meaningful barrier to negotiations concluding after a reasonable amount of time. Most strikingly, the parties’ comparative power cannot dictate the substance of agreements when strikes are unavailable or unreasonably delayed. We will see what happens over the next six months, but it may be time to reconsider those laws.
