Labor Unbound? Assessing the Current Surge in Labor Activism

After decades of enduring what UAW President Doug Fraser famously called a “one-sided class war,” the possibility of a renewed labor offensive would seem to have improved. Sectors that have rarely witnessed labor struggles—high-tech firms, new media companies, academic institutions, coffee shops, and retail outlets—are now sites of widespread protests, flash strikes, petitions, and spirited campaigns for union recognition. The number of union certification elections has surged nationally, with workers winning a growing proportion of them. Informal struggles have emerged over the spatial location of work, as many white-collar workers increasingly demand the right to work from home. “Quiet quitting” and anti-work discourse all signal a broad rethinking of the subordinate position that labor has held for generations. As the song has it, “there's something happening here.”

Or is there? Will this upsurge in labor struggle have enduring effects, or will it wither on the vine, a casualty of shifts in labor market conditions and political polarization? Can workers and their allies effect change in the American labor relations system that was established nearly a century ago? Or will these labor struggles merely “change the conversation” for a time (as Occupy did)—or worse, provoke a backlash that reduces workers’ rights even more? These are complex questions that can hardly be resolved here. But scrutinizing the current state of play can help identify the forces that impinge on labor's prospects, drawing attention to strategic openings for the workers’ movement that warrant further consideration.

The Current Context

Two of the most palpable forces shaping the American workplace have been the pandemic (along with the exhaustion and risks it has imposed) and the suddenly favorable labor market conditions it has introduced. Aware that labor markets have grown favorable, workers have felt free to withdraw their labor power, whether individually (as with the “Great Resignation”) and collectively (the growing frequency of strikes, even in non-union settings). Increasing corporate profits, coupled with wage levels that seldom follow suit, have only sharpened workers’ determination to mobilize on their own behalf.

What is remarkable about these developments is that they would seem to reverse a generations-long period in which employers have relentlessly expanded their power in economic and political terms. Economic forces such as globalization have confronted many workers with the persistent threat of job displacement. Financialization has led firms to forego investments in company operations, sharpening already pronounced inequalities within the firm. New managerial practices (outsourcing, the use of temporary work, and the misclassification of workers as independent contractors) have eroded the standard employment relation. The rise of a “career management” ideology has left many workers to their own devices.

Political forces too have thrown workers back on their heels. A pro-business infrastructure has emerged in the form of industry associations, think tanks, foundations, and PACs, strengthening capital's ability to shape the public policy agenda, whether at both the federal, state, or municipal level (e.g., Barley, 2010). Employers have used their political power to enact pro-business trade agreements, anti-trust policies, judicial appointments, and cuts to the welfare state (as with the Personal Responsibility Act of 1996, which has enabled many firms to pursue their low-wage practices). Capital has also used its political power to block improvements in the federal minimum wage and labor law reform. This is why the Employee Free Choice Act was sidelined under the Obama Administration, a fate that now confronts the PRO Act under the Biden Administration.

Arguably, this generations-long concentration of power in capital's hands has deprived workers of not only the organizational but also the cultural resources they need to struggle on their own behalf. It has engendered what Burawoy (1985) once called “hegemonic despotism,” in which workers feel compelled to align their interests with those of management, owing to the lack of practical alternatives. And of course, it has given management an even-freer hand in its labor practices, leading management to view violations of labor law as a form of investment that carries a high rate of return. The result has dismantled much of the institutional power that workers had established during the middle decades of the 20th century, the golden years of what was once called democratic capitalism.

From the Ashes

Yet by its very nature, capitalism generates new currents of resistance to the production regimes it installs. We detect two such currents in the current setting, both of which are the product of new technologies and the discourses that surround them. The first stems from the ascent of corporations within the “new economy,” which partake of Silicon Valley ideology. Here we refer to the rise of corporations that have branded themselves through appeal to a discourse that claims to provide elements of freedom, creativity, and autonomy that industrial capitalism had quashed. This discourse is evident in a culture of informality and “no-collar” attire that many firms affect and the infusion of play and allowance for personal style that the culture of work here allows. “Don’t be evil” was Google's mantra in its earlier days; “changing the world” remains the mission that many tech firms claim. Use of this counter-cultural discourse is hardly limited to Silicon Valley's offspring: many consumer-facing firms (including Trader Joes, Whole Foods, Chipotle, and Starbucks) have used this very discourse to recruit and motivate a younger, educated workforce whose physical appearance and style often serve as a vehicle for the branding of the firm itself. Although this counter-cultural discourse has enabled new economy firms to expand their operations, it has also introduced important tensions and contradictions into the firm, as employers’ ideological claims have increasingly collided with their actual labor practices (Vallas, 2003). These tensions have been especially apparent at Starbucks, Apple, Alphabet/Google, and many other firms, enabling workers to invoke the new corporate discourse and use it to claim an expanded array of rights that companies have virulently opposed.

Evidence of this contradiction between new age ideology and the actual suppression of labor has been especially salient at Starbucks. One journalist quotes an 18-year-old barista in Ithaca NY as saying “We want to be able to sit down with Starbucks, with the higher up executives, and make a plan so that we, as employees, feel as valued as they say we are.” Or in the words of a 22-year-old shift supervisor in Rochester, “Starbucks is quote-unquote ‘progressive,’ ‘woke,’ whatever. They give us decent benefits… But we’re literally selling our lives and time and bodies to this corporation. Tell me why I don’t deserve a living wage” (quoted in Molla, 2022).

A second current of the workers’ movement is the product of capital's deployment of logistics knowledge and expertise, which have provided many firms with a novel technology of control in both the engineering and Foucauldian meanings of the term. Though labor studies scholars and cultural geographers have drawn attention to the logistics revolution (e.g., Bonacich & Wilson, 2008), it has yet to receive the attention it deserves. Involved here is a phenomenon that has catapulted Walmart and Amazon into their current position as global retail leviathans. It has also underpinned the deployment of newly coercive production regimes that rely heavily on digital technologies of control and surveillance and that have provoked worker resistance that has taken many forms (Dörflinger et al., 2021).

While often associated with the burgeoning gig economy (Johnston et al., 2023), these digitally enforced regimes have transformed many sectors within the conventional economy, as is especially apparent within the nation's transportation, trucking, warehouse, and package delivery systems. Here, workers have experienced the deployment of algorithmic scheduling, automated storage and retrieval systems, advanced robotics, GPS, and digital performance monitoring systems, among others. Though debates about the effects of technology have raged for decades, it seems clear that these systems have enabled capital to tighten its grip on many labor processes, intensifying workers’ jobs, reducing staffing levels, and regulating worker performance in ways that have proved especially onerous during the pandemic.

One feature of the new technologies is their capacity to link staffing levels ever more tightly to fluctuations in consumer demand, enabling capital to reduce its labor costs. A case in point has occurred in the nation's freight rail system, which handles a massive proportion of the country's producer goods. Over the last two decades, virtually all the major rail carriers have introduced one or another version of Precision Scheduled Railroading (PSR), which enables carriers to eliminate nearly all slack in their staffing levels. This dramatically reduces the operating costs of the firm, gratifying investors. Yet PSR requires railroad workers to be on call for weeks or months without a day off; even calling in sick can be cause for discipline or suspension. These issues exploded into public view during the second half of 2022, when a hugely consequential rail strike was averted only by Congressional action, a legacy of the century-old Railway Labor Act. Technologies that are similar to PSR and that also use algorithmic scheduling have become major sources of contention in the retail sector as well (Wood, 2020).

Technologically enabled forms of coercion have emerged with particular clarity at Amazon's fulfillment centers, where scanners are used not only to process packages but also to extract detailed data on each worker's performance. One measure of productivity—Units per Hour—records and ranks each worker's pace, while a second (Time off Task) captures the number of minutes during which each worker has apparently been idle. These data are collated algorithmically, ranking workers against one another and against the production quotas management demands of them. Workers whose rankings lag face discipline or termination, yielding a form of labor control that is especially effective among workers who are weakly positioned in the labor market (Vallas et al., 2022). These systems inevitably generate resistance, prompting Amazon not only to invest in anti-labor consulting firms but also to introduce technologies that can produce “heat maps,” identifying sites where unionization is likely to occur. Although many workers respond by “exiting” from such coercive labor conditions (hence Amazon's extraordinary turnover rates), others have exercised the “voice” option with growing frequency, generating an outbreak of flash strikes over safety, COVID conditions, unfair firings, racial discrimination, and pay. Protests and demonstrations have broken out, some outside the homes of the company's CEO, and worker associations have emerged in many cities, all challenging the company's coercive production regime. Most important of all has been the growing number of Amazon workers petitioning for NLRB certification elections, one of which (at JFK8 in Staten Island) succeeded in 2022.

As these two currents of the worker’s movement unfold, what prospects are they likely to face?

Institutionally, the barriers to trade unionism are formidable. For one thing, however inspiring the Starbucks campaigns may be, the direct effect of such struggles is likely to be quite limited. As of March 2023, the 280 stores that have won union representation account for roughly two per cent of the company's 400,000 employees. Because representation has been won on a store-by-store basis, labor law permits the company to engage in collective bargaining at the same scale, severely limiting baristas’ leverage and constraining their associational and structural power. Workers’ struggles have also prompted important shifts in employers’ practices. Indeed, some journalists speak of the rise of “bossism,” a reassertion of managerial imperatives that in effect rescinds the counter-cultural framing that firms had previously invoked. The idea here is that “management has given up too much control and must wrest it back from employees,” bringing an end to the “years of management indulgence that left them with a generation of entitled workers” (Rawlinson, 2023). How workers will respond to this shift in managerial regimes, especially given the recent rise of layoffs, will provide an important barometer of labor's prospects.

Labor struggles in the logistics sector face equally long odds. Rail workers are saddled with federal limits on their right to strike. Truckers are now largely defined as independent contractors, rendering collective struggle for many drivers that much more difficult. And despite the Amazon Labor Union's success at JFK8 in Staten Island, union certification elections at Amazon have repeatedly failed: twice at Bessemer, Alabama; once at a Staten Island site across the street from JFK8; and once at ALB1, near Albany, NY. The reasons are partly tactical but are also partly rooted in the structural resources the company can invoke. In addition to Amazon's high degree of monopoly power, workers must also reckon with the company's ruthless deployment of technologies for surveillance and control and intimate embrace of virulent anti-labor tactics.

Yet at least two possibilities exist that might enable logistics workers to make substantial gains. One hinges on logistics workers’ ability to use their latent powers of disruption, since their work often places them at critical chokepoints that can bring the capital accumulation process to a sudden halt (Bonacich & Wilson, 2008). The danger of losing public support for such actions is real, but is counteracted by several considerations, among which is the goodwill that logistics workers have gained as “essential workers” during the pandemic. Conceivably, coordinated strikes could draw attention to the abusive conditions many workers confront. A 2021 study conducted by Data for Progress found that Amazon's anti-labor tactics meet with widespread disapproval, with majorities of registered voters “strongly disapproving” of company intimidation and unfair terminations. A key question is whether the historical divide between workers and consumers can to some extent be overcome, providing workers with allies on the other side of the e-commerce screen. Some inspiration can be found in the 1997 Teamster strike against UPS, when drivers leveraged their visibility and personal ties to their customers, eventually winning the struggle to defend their own job security. With the apparent entry of the Teamsters into the effort to unionize Amazon, one can imagine a strategy that organizes workers not simply along sectoral or industry lines but horizontally, along the supply chains on which business depends.

A second point hinges on the possibility of coalitional politics that might unite the two currents of the workers’ movement that we have discussed. There are important social distinctions between “new economy” and logistics workers, of course, based on class, education, age, race, and generational norms. Yet an alliance between the two strands of the workers’ movement would be both powerful and logical. Logistics expertise depends on software systems authored by the very high-tech workers currently struggling against employers who care little for their priorities (as layoffs are making clear). Can solidarity be nurtured in ways that reach downstream from Silicon Valley to Inland Empire? Perhaps Starbucks workers, who have marched alongside Amazon Labor Union members, can serve as an example, generating new forms of solidarity and coalitional power that would otherwise be unthinkable.

All this presupposes that unionization remains a viable path. Reflecting the many challenges that labor faces at the federal level, activists have increasingly engaged in alternative forms of struggle at the state and municipal levels. Here, worker associations (such as Fight for Fifteen and United For Respect), along with worker centers and trade union support groups, have pressured local and state authorities to adopt minimum standards that can govern sectors where unionization has been blocked. Some of the most recent examples have occurred in California, involving AB 701, a 2021 bill that targets key aspects of Amazon's production regime, and AB 257, the FAST Recovery Act of 2022, which authorized an industry council to establish minimum terms and conditions of employment at fast food and fast-casual restaurants.

This last path—the legal enactment of labor standards and rights—is hardly a panacea. For one thing, employers have shown a willingness and an ability to engage in massively well-funded efforts to block or overturn these initiatives. California's FAST Recovery Act is now subject to a state-wide referendum that would overturn it in 2024. These struggles are similar to those that surrounded Proposition 22, which affected gig workers in that state. For another, legal enactment may leave workers dependent on state bodies or inspectors with few provisions for worker empowerment at the establishment level itself. This problem is exacerbated by the problem of enforcement, a perennial weakness of labor law. Moreover, relying on legal enactment of labor standards will surely be limited to “blue” states, generating a patchwork in which workers in different locales encounter dramatically different standards of employment. This may be an inevitable feature of 21st-century capitalism, especially given the growth of political polarization—and even the fracturing of liberal democracy itself. It may be too much to hope that the pursuit of workers’ rights can cut across such polarization, with appeals to workers’ class interests gaining traction in place of authoritarian movements and culture war politics. In the end, this may be the single most important challenge the workers’ movement will need to confront—and a necessary condition if the surge of labor struggle is to have enduring effects.