American workers are exploited, and they’ve had enough, writes onesarahjones
Union members get pro-labor slogans painted on their cars during a rally at the Motion Pictures Editors Guild IATSE Local 700 in September. Photo: Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images The numbers are astonishing: 1,400 workers at four Kellogg’s plants have gone on strike, 10,000 John Deere workers went on strike at midnight, 60,000 entertainment industry workers are ready to follow on Monday, and more than 34,000 Kaiser Permanente health-care workers have authorized a walkout too.
Examine the demands made by workers in each current or pending strike and certain common themes emerge across industries. At Kellogg’s, workers represented by the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers, and Grain Millers International are protesting the proposed expansion of a two-tier wage and benefit system that, as Alex Press recently explained in Jacobin magazine, “created a ‘transitional’ class of employees with lower pay and benefits.
Beyond obvious commonalities like the dreaded two-tier wage and benefit system, there’s another underlying explanation for Striketober: American workers are exploited, and they’ve had enough. Union members are feeling bold. The John Deere strike, for example, occurs within a larger context; UAW members are getting ready to vote in a referendum to allow the direct election of union officers by individual members, rather than by delegates. Supporters say this would democratize the union, which has been plagued by recent high-profile corruption cases. “I don’t think direct elections are a panacea,” the labor historian Nelson Lichtenstein told The Guardian in May.
Then there’s the labor shortage, proof that even nonunion workers are unwilling to settle for jobs that don’t pay well or otherwise justify the demands of employment. Quit rates are rising, most notably in the restaurant and hospitality industries, where workers may be at high risk of contracting COVID from the public. Consider that alongside the emergent strike wave and the resulting picture is one that should put American employers on notice. Striketober wasn’t inevitable.
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