According to the available statistical measures, strike activity has radically increased in 2023. The question is, why? Many commentators --- including me --- have focused on workers and their rising organizing activity, activism, and militancy. I have said that workers are angry at their employers because of the pandemic and bloated profits. However, workers are only one half of the equation. It takes two to make a strike. The other half of the reason for America’s historic strike wave is employers’ failure to comprehend that times have changed and the model they developed and exploited during an earlier time is no longer relevant in 2023.
Let’s begin with the numbers. Unions represented only 10.1% of the U.S. workforce in 2022 --- likely the lowest union density rate since before Congress enacted the National Labor Relations Act in 1935. Yet, strike activity in 2023 has reached a level we have not seen since the turn of the century when union density was higher. Employers lost 7.4 million labor hours to strikes in 2023 so far --- the largest loss in 23 years, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. BLS also reports that roughly 4.1 million labor hours were lost to strikes in August 2023 alone. That’s the most in a single month since August 2000. The current UAW and Coalition of Kaiser Permanente Unions strikes began in September and October respectively, so August’s strike peak did not include 100,000 more workers who struck during those later months.
Strike activity has accelerated in 2023. According to the Cornell ILR Labor Action Tracker, the number of strikes beginning each month has increased through August 2023 and the total number of strikes underway each month has increased during that period. Most important, the number of workers who are striking increased markedly this summer, largely because 65,000 SAG-AFTRA members struck the Hollywood studios beginning in July. The number of currently striking workers likely will grow when the UAW and Kaiser Permanente strikes are counted. It could grow further if UNITE/HERE’s culinary workers and bartenders strike the Las Vegas casino-hotels and SAG-AFTRA’s members strike video game manufacturers. Those two potential strikes would add another 100,000 workers to the count.
Strikes have not been isolated in one industry sector. The accommodations and food services industries have experienced a large number of strikes, as they did in 2022, partly driven by Workers United taking direct action against Starbucks and a strike against Los Angeles’ hotels. Health care workers have engaged in a sizable number of strikes. Higher education has seen strikes at Temple University, the University of Michigan, Rutgers University, and other colleges and universities. The Los Angeles’ public schools and a major railroad equipment manufacturer have experienced strikes. The strike wave is washing over industries across the U.S.
Certainly, this historic strike wave is built, in part, on worker anger, workers’ greater willingness to take the risk of striking, and strong support from President Biden and the public. But the untold part of the strike wave story is employers’ role in forcing workers to strike.
To illustrate the point, imagine the following scenario. A union and an employer meet to bargain a contract. The union makes demands. The employer immediately agrees to all those demands. Outcome? A deal with no strike. Now, consider the opposite scenario. The union makes demands. The employer rejects every demand. Thereafter, in bargaining session after bargaining session, the employer refuses to change its positions to agree to any of the union’s demands. Outcome? A strike is more likely. These two extremes are not the common cases, although the latter scenario is all too common, especially in bargaining over first contracts. Ask the Starbucks and Amazon unions. Nonetheless, these scenarios make the larger point: employers’ behavior and decisionmaking play a critical role in unions launching strikes.
In particular, the current strike wave has been caused, in part, by employers whose behavior and decisions are wholly inconsistent with the economic reality, worker activism, and worker power that defines labor relations in 2023.
Employers and their labor relations staffs can follow either of two models. The first model was illustrated by the Teamsters-UPS bargaining. UPS's leadership may not have begun the negotiations with the requisite understanding, but eventually they seemed to understand their situation and the state of their relationships with their employees, and bargained accordingly. Teamsters drivers were angry. The company had earned immense profits and drivers’ wages had not risen commensurately. Employees felt insulted, divided, and cheated by a two-tier employment structure. Heat hazards in UPS’s ubiquitous brown trucks were posing serious and rising health risks. Work that could have been performed by UPS's Teamsters was being outsourced. Perhaps most important, the Teamsters had new leadership that demanded solutions and made absolutely clear that a strike was inevitable if mutually agreeable solutions were not found. In the broader economy, low unemployment and otherwise tight labor markets closed the door to UPS finding an alternative path forward other than reaching a deal with the Teamsters. Further, the Teamsters' sophisticated and relentless public advocacy strategy built public and political support for the workers' contract demands. These workers had power again and they were prepared to wield it.
So, under intense pressure from the Teamsters, UPS negotiated a contract that addressed their employees' concerns. Wages increased, the two-tier system disappeared, and air conditioning will be added to delivery trucks, among other improvements. Jobs will be insourced so that the largest private-sector bargaining unit in the U.S. likely will grow further as UPS expands its workforce. This is not to suggest that UPS would have made these changes by itself. The Teamsters forced these results. Yet, UPS seemed to have accurately assessed its situation and negotiated a deal it could afford and the Teamsters could accept. Eighty-three percent of Teamsters UPS members who voted marked “yes” in the ratification vote.
The second model is the Hollywood studios model. From the beginning, the studio leadership and their trade association, the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP), made clear their priorities were to cut costs and jobs, including by using artificial intelligence for script writing and script supplementation, and to structure more writing jobs as contingent work arrangements. They would achieve these goals, the studios believed, by delaying negotiations for months and inflicting as much pain as possible on Writers Guild of America members to force concessions. One studio executive said the quiet part out loud to Deadline: “[t]he endgame is to allow things to drag on until union members start losing their apartments and losing their houses.”
Disney CEO Bob Iger disclosed the reasoning behind the strategy in a television appearance. He derided the writers’ and actors’ bargaining positions as “not realistic” and “adding to the challenges that this business is already facing . . . .” In other words, after AMPTP’s members oversaturated the streaming market and built an untenable competitive environment that threatened profits, they expected to squeeze additional profits out of their employees. Writers and actors would subsidize the studios’ competition with concessions at the bargaining table around pay, staffing, and job-displacing technology.
In fairness, the Hollywood studios’ strategy is not new. It has been the common strategy among private-sector employers in many industries for decades. Employers have had the power to force workers to subsidize them as businesses have navigated how to maximize profit in the context of rising global competition and tectonic technological change. Unions have been forced into concessions bargaining to save jobs, prevent offshoring and other forms of outsourcing, and ward off technology displacing their members. Often, concessions did not work. Jobs were lost. Employers fissured employment relationships. Real wage increases stagnated, although unionized workers continue to earn more than non-union workers. Newer unionized workers in some workplaces, like UPS and the automakers, were forced to surrender wages, retirement security, and quality health insurance that longer tenured workers bargained for in earlier years. Unions were outright busted.
The Hollywood studios and AMPTP did not understand that the days of concessions bargaining are gone, at least for now. UPS realized it. The result for the studios was a writers’ strike that ended just a few days shy of becoming the longest ever. The Writers Guild did not get everything it wanted at the bargaining table, but it got most of what its members demanded and needed, including job protections, limits on technology, and robust residuals from streaming. Guild members are voting on ratification through October 9, but the likeliest outcome is an overwhelming vote to ratify. At the end of the day, the writers won a strike that their employers forced on them. SAG-AFTRA remains on strike, but the writing is on the wall for the studios in those negotiations (probably put there by a union writer).
In sum, when answering "why are there so many strikes," one part of the answer is certainly that workers, worker power, and unions have changed. Workers are showing immense courage. Worker power has risen. Unions have changed leaders, bargaining objectives, and strategies. But the other part of the answer is that employers often make strikes necessary and urgent. Employers follow the Hollywood studios model, not the UPS model. That’s the part of the story too often left out in the telling. The role of employers’ lack of awareness, failed insight, and questionable decisionmaking in the current strike wave should be central to our answer to this important question.
