This year, the American labor movement has more than just its history to celebrate on Labor Day. Most Americans support labor unions, and recent years have seen a surge of unionization efforts in retail—a sector of the economy not known for forming unions.
Sixty-eight percent of Americans approve of unions, the highest level since 1965, according to Gallup. There are at least 143 unionized Starbucks locations. Earlier this year, Chris Smalls organized the first successful union drive in Amazon history at a Staten Island warehouse. And this summer, employees at an Apple store in Maryland voted to form a union—the first in the chain’s history—while Chipotle employees in Michigan became the first store in the restaurant chain to vote to unionize.
“This is going to be one of the most hopeful Labor Days that the American labor movement has seen in many a year,” says Joe McCartin, an expert on U.S. labor history at Georgetown University. “For a long time, the labor movement has struggled to get a foothold in some of the growing industries in the private sector, and now you’re seeing that happen in places like Starbucks—even Google, Trader Joe’s, REI. There has been a real upsurge of organizing activity [in] the private sector and that is something we haven’t seen for quite a while.”
Nelson Lichtenstein, expert on U.S. labor history at the University of California, Santa Barbara, describes this 2022 wave of union activism as “the most encouraging and largest pro-union sentiment and activism in two or three decades,” perhaps since the successful 1997 UPS strike, which involved several hundred thousand workers and had a lot of public support.
Read more: Who founded Labor Day? The answer is complicated
But in search of historical parallels, McCartin looks even further back: He says the organizing activity…
Source : time
