The New Labor Activism,a New Labor Sociology

This symposium issue of Work and Occupations on the “new labor activism” appears amidst the contemporary surge in labor mobilization and unionization, a surge in magnitude not seen since the rise of industrial unionism during the 1930s in the United States. The contemporary surge has picked up in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic and recession throughout the U.S. economy, with grassroots and top-down mobilizations occurring in mammoth multi-locational corporations in the hospitality, retail, logistics, tech, and automotive sectors, such as Starbucks, Amazon, Nissan, Google, and Tesla, as well as in schools and universities, arts organizations, civil society and non-profit organizations, and healthcare (Greenhouse, 2022; Scheiber, 2022a).

What is “new” about the new labor activism? Amazon Labor Union leader and former Amazon worker Christian Smalls, commenting on the historic grassroots mobilization of diverse Amazon warehouse workers who unionized on Staten Island, New York in April, 2022, proclaimed “[t]his is Gen Z” (Velasquez, 2022). In response to Time magazine's coverage of the unfolding Starbucks unionization campaign in 2021–2022, Rhodes Scholar and Starbucks labor leader Jaz Brisack expressed her labor solidarity with all workers when she tweeted “We appreciate TIME magazine's coverage of our union campaign. TIME should make sure they’re giving the same union rights and protections that we’re fighting for to the amazing journalists, photographers, and staff who make this coverage possible!” (Scheiber, 2022c). Claire Chang, a worker and labor leader in the successful Manhattan REI unionization campaign, attributed the labor mobilization to the company's disregard for health and safety during the pandemic, noting that “[t]he majority of staff, if not everybody on staff, said that they were not comfortable with [reopening fitting rooms during the pandemic], and they [the company] still went ahead and did it” (Scheiber, 2022b). Tyra Reeder, a pro-union worker at the Apple Store in Towson, Maryland that unionized in June, 2022, stated that “[w]e love our jobs. We just want to see them do better” by improving compensation and advancement opportunities and stabilizing schedules (Mickle & Scheiber, 2022). Adrian Berek, a former Tesla software worker and member of the Buffalo Tesla labor organizing committee, attributes the current Tesla labor mobilization to mounting management demands and tracking of employees, as she put it: “It's gotten very militant over the last few months … [i]f you have to go to the bathroom or have some kind of emergency, you can get penalized” (Ewing & Scheiber, 2023).

Labor journalist Greenhouse (2022) observes that “[t]hese young workers are doing things differently, often doing bottom-up, self-organizing of their workplaces, far different from organized labor's traditional strategy of relying on unions’ paid staff organizers.” The American Prospect editor Meyerson (2022) reports a pro-union “ideological shift of the young [that] tracks an economy that's been particularly dysfunctional for them” during the halting and precarious recovery from the Great Recession of 2008. Greenhouse (2022) emphasized that while this new under-resourced “youth-driven labor movement is busy being born” it will need to be infused with resources from “the richer, older unions, but many of them are showing scant desire to help.”

This symposium issue of Work and Occupations on the “new labor activism” is an academic initiative for comprehending and developing a research agenda for sustaining the contemporary surge in labor mobilization and unionization in the U.S. The symposium was initiated by the Worker Empowerment Research Network (WERN), a new inter-disciplinary network of labor market researchers that had issued its first report, “U.S. Workers’ Organizing Efforts and Collective Actions: A Review of the Current Landscape,” in June 2022 (Kochan et al., 2022). Subsequently, WERN approached this journal about convening the overlapping WERN and Work and Occupations scholarly communities who, responding in dialogue with the WERN report, would generate a comprehensive research agenda about the trajectory of the new labor activism. I invited a wide range of sociologists of work and labor to contribute essays and to select an essay topic from a list of topics ¹ or their own topic. The symposium participants are diverse with respect to theory, research methods, subspecialties in the sociology of work, nationality, career-stage, and socio-demographic background. In responding to the WERN report, the symposium participants have produced a generative and multi-faceted set of essays with rich bibliographies, especially of their own work, that point toward a new generation of labor sociology research for comprehending and sustaining the new labor activism.

Inter-generational competition and collaboration occur during tactical turning points and “ruptures” in the course of social movements, including the U.S. labor movement (Cornfield, 2006, 2015, pp. 121–149; Cornfield et al., 2021). Milkman (2017) maintains that Millennials are indeed a new Mannheimian political generation distinct from earlier generations. At these turning points, a new generation of labor leaders endeavors to reinvigorate an established labor movement which may resist or provide resources to fuel the new generation (Tapia & Turner, 2018), an instance of what Frenette (2019) refers to as “leveraging youth.”

In The New Men of Power, C. Wright Mills (1948) characterized the split between the older craft unionism of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and the new industrial unionism of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) during the 1930s as an inter-generational split. By 1948, after the great surge in labor union membership had plateaued, Mills (1948, p. 73) maintained that the AFL had become a “gerontocracy” led by older leaders and the CIO a “professional bureaucracy” led by young leaders. Compelled by fierce Cold War anti-labor politics that drove an ideological wedge through the labor movement, and having found common ideological ground in the protection of labor rights and expansion of the New Deal welfare state, the labor rivals merged, forming the AFL-CIO in 1955 (Cornfield & McCammon, 2010).

Toward a New Labor Sociology

This symposium issue of Work and Occupations presents a new generation of research in labor sociology on U.S. labor, an agenda of research on the new labor activism. This new generation of research has emerged in tandem with the onset of neo-liberalism and the individualization of risk, globalization, post-World War II union decline and revitalization, and mounting employment precarity (Kalleberg, 2009). The emergence of this new generation of labor sociology is contextualized by increasing social inequality in a socially embedded, two-tier service economy, and by the social movements of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries (Kalleberg, 2011; Mai et al., 2023; Tomaskovic-Devey & Avent-Holt, 2019; Turner, 2005; Vallas, 2003a; Williams, 2021). This new generation of research has also accompanied the rise of a “new” agentic sociology of work (Berg & Kalleberg, 2001; Cornfield, 2015, 2016; Hodson, 2001; Pedulla, 2020; Vallas, 2006).

Over the post-World War II era, research in labor sociology transitioned from the union-centered organizational analysis of the late 1940s and 1950s toward a contemporary worker-centered analysis. The earlier era of labor sociology begins at the zenith of labor's power, when the proportion of the national labor force who belonged to unions was at its highest level ever—i.e., one-third in the mid-1940s (Kochan et al., 2022, p. 9). At this moment in the intellectual history of labor sociology, workers were conceived as bureaucratically constrained, male economic-class actors seemingly void of race. The transition toward a worker-centered labor sociology accompanied the increasing engagement of the labor movement, especially growing public-sector unionism, with the civil rights and women's movements and the rise of social movement unionism, beginning in the 1960s and 1970s. In the contemporary, worker-centered labor sociology, workers are conceived as social actors engaged in symbolic movement discourses and communications and whose intersectional social identities inspire, enable, or stymie their simultaneous alignments with the labor movement and early twenty-first century social movements such as the Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, and LGBTQ movements (e.g., Cech & Waidzunas, 2022; McCammon et al., 2007; Seron et al., 2018; Taylor, 2016; Terriquez & Milkman, 2021).

This transition in labor sociology research was compelled by labor union membership decline over the post-World War II era (Cornfield, 1991). During this period, labor sociology research not only engaged the labor-disempowering forces leading to union decline—i.e., neoliberalism, globalization, economic restructuring, repressive state and corporate action, and mounting employment precarity and social inequality, but also the labor-empowering forces of the late-twentieth century civil rights, women's and immigrant rights movements and early twenty-first century social movements. This transition comprises a cumulating set of three ongoing generations of labor sociology research, each launched at a pivotal historical moment in the post-World War II decline of the U.S. labor movement. These historical moments are the “bureaucratization moment” (beginning in the late 1940s), the “revitalization moment” (beginning in the 1980s), and the “new labor activism moment” (now).

The “bureaucratization moment” in the intellectual history of labor sociology launched during the Cold War of the late 1940s when reactionary business forces effectuated the enactment of the anti-labor Taft-Hartley Act in 1947. The Act contained the rapidly growing labor movement, leading to the AFL-CIO merger in 1955. Women's labor force participation rates were relatively low. The low immigration rates through the 1950s followed several decades of low rates of immigration to the U.S. Immigration rates would begin to rise during the 1990s. The nonviolent civil rights movement to dismantle Jim Crow in the South would mobilize toward the end of the 1950s after the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955–56 (Cornfield, 2006; Cornfield et al., 2021; Isaac & Christiansen, 2002); and the women's movement as a human rights movement for advancing women's full participation in society would mobilize during the 1960s, as signaled by the founding of the National Organization for Women in 1966 (Rupp & Taylor, 1987).

At the zenith of its power, the labor movement had bureaucratized, its transformative militancy defused as it entered into what Mills (1948, p. 119) termed a “junior partnership in the productive process.” The labor sociology of the 1950s was consumed with the inexorability of Robert Michels’ iron law of oligarchy as it applied to the U.S. labor movement. Gouldner (1955, pp. 503, 506) regarded the iron law as “morosely pessimistic” and offered his “iron law of democracy” as counter-narrative: “if oligarchical waves repeatedly wash away the bridges of democracy, this eternal recurrence can happen only because men doggedly re-build them after each inundation.” The organizational studies of Gouldner (1954), Lipset and his colleagues (1956), and Chinoy (1955) identified the rare instances of organizational change and structure that enabled worker insurgency and factionalized democratic partisanship inside workplaces and unions, as well as the new non-transformative, labor union role of facilitating the realization of the American Dream for factory workers. For Mills (1953, p. 312), the future trajectory of unionism among the growing stratum of status-anxious white-collar workers was uncertain as their claims to prestige were threatened by the “concentration of white-collar workers into big workplaces and their down-grading and routinization.”

Following the decades-long decline of labor union membership and strikes, labor sociology entered its “revitalization moment” during the neo-liberal decades of the 1980s and 1990s (Cornfield, 2016; Turner, 2005). This generation of labor sociology launched an examination of “labor action, the purposive action of labor organizations” that is embedded in a “web of labor organizations’ relationships with workers, employers, and the state” (Cornfield & McCammon, 2003, p. 3). This turn toward the socially embedded strategic action of labor unions responded to labor's growing, if halting and incomplete, self-transformation into a social movement unionism engaged with the civil rights and women's movements of the 1960s and 1970s and post-1990 immigrant worker rights movement (Burawoy, 2008; Carter, 1995; Clawson, 2003; Cornfield & Fletcher, 1998; Ganz, 2000; Isaac et al., 2006; Isaac & Christiansen, 2002; Lopez, 2004; McCammon, 2001; Milkman, 1987; Milkman et al., 2021; Steinberg, 1990; Turner et al., 2001; Vallas, 2003b; Voss & Sherman, 2000). The turn to labor action also responded to mounting political and corporate resistance to the labor movement—witness newly elected, neo-liberal President Ronald Reagan's crushing of the air traffic controllers union in 1981, the rise of the anti-union consulting industry, the diffusion beyond the South of anti-labor state right-to-work laws into the U.S. interior through the 2010s, and the exodus of (unionized) manufacturing out of the U.S.

Five research themes were launched during the revitalization moment of labor sociology. First, labor sociologists turned to historical-sociological analyses of working-class formation. These studies comprise political-economic analyses of the rise and decline of the U.S. labor movement and labor action (e.g., Cornfield, 1986; Dixon, 2020; Griffin et al., 1986; Isaac & Griffin, 1989; McCammon, 1990; Murray & Schwartz, 2019; Stepan-Norris & Zeitlin, 1996; Vallas, 1993).

Second, labor's increasing engagement with social movements led to studies of the realization of labor solidarity within inclusive labor movements. These studies address the problems and prospects for realizing labor solidarity by ethnicity-race, gender, and nativity (e.g., Bronfenbrenner, 2005; Chun, 1997; Cornfield, 1989; Kim, 1997; Voss & Bloemraad, 2011).

Third, the “spatialization” of labor sociology addressed social movement unionism that occurred outside of workplaces in cities, nations, and world regions (Brady & Wallace, 2000). Spatialization research focuses on the formation of urban labor-community coalitions (e.g., Greenberg & Lewis, 2017; Milkman, 2006; Milkman et al., 2010; Turner & Cornfield, 2007), as well as cross-national comparisons of labor transnationalism and social movement unionism in the Global North and Global South (e.g., Adler et al., 2014; Burawoy, 2009; Cornfield, 1997; Seidman, 2007; Turner, 2005).

Fourth, revitalization research addresses the socioeconomic impact of the labor movement. These studies examine the impact of unionization on trends in income inequality, race-ethnic and gender differentials in the wage returns from unions among unionized and non-union workers, and worker health (Brady et al., 2013; Kalleberg & Colbjørnsen, 1990; Leicht, 1989; Rosenfeld, 2014; Rubin, 1986; Wallace, 1987).

Fifth, a cultural turn in social movement studies and the sociology of work contextualized the transition toward a worker-centered labor sociology (Dowd & Pinheiro, 2013; Frenette, 2013; Lingo & Tepper, 2013; McCammon et al., 2007; Roy, 2015; Skaggs, 2019, 2022; Vallas & Christin, 2018). The cultural turn consists of a growing analysis of cultural symbols, workplace cultures, and discourse in mobilization communications during labor actions (e.g., Billings, 1990; Cavalcanti, 1998; Coley, 2015; Cornfield, 2015; Fantasia, 1988; Isaac, 2009; Isaac et al., 2022; Korczynski, 2014; Mai, 2016; Roscigno & Danaher, 2001).

History, Intersectionality, and Worker Agency

This symposium issue of Work and Occupations develops a research agenda for this third and contemporary pivotal moment in the course of the U.S. labor movement. It is a contemporary “new labor activism moment” in the intellectual history of labor sociology for comprehending and sustaining the surge in labor mobilization and unionization.

In their essay immediately following this introductory essay, Thomas Kochan and his WERN colleagues summarize the original WERN report on the state of the U.S. labor movement and labor-management relations and the problems and prospects for sustaining the new labor activism. The WERN group invites the symposium participants, as respondents to the WERN report, to offer a conceptual methodology for research on the sustainability of the new labor activism by asking “[w]ill these developments be a temporary phenomenon, or a historic inflection point in the trajectory of U.S. labor-management relations?”

Together, the symposium essays can be classified by three themes that predominate in the “new labor activism moment.” These themes are “history,” “intersectionality,” and “worker agency” which I discerned inductively from the symposium participants’ essays. “History” refers to assessing the political obstacles and opportunities posed by the contemporary historical moment for sustaining labor action. “Intersectionality” assumes a holistic concept of “worker” and assesses the prospects for realizing labor solidarity in labor action among workers with wide-ranging configurations of multiple social identities. “Worker agency” refers to assessing biographical, interpersonal, and micro-structural factors that enable or thwart worker activism in fields of labor action. Running through all three research themes is a fourth theme of “hierarchy.” “Hierarchy” pertains to realizing labor solidarity by dismantling social hierarchies, including race and gender hierarchies, that marginalize and divide workers, and building inclusive labor movements, workplaces, and communities by engaging early twenty-first century social movements. All of the essays are cross-classifiable across the first three research themes and are organized here by their dominant themes.

The “history” essays pertain to the pockets of political resistance and opportunity posed for labor activism by the contemporary historical moment. Wingfield assesses opportunities and obstacles in racialized power structures within workplaces and the state. Within workplaces, racialized hierarchies privileging whiteness marginalize and exclude Black workers and challenge the labor movement to realize labor solidarity by pursuing inclusive organizing and bargaining goals. Wingfield's overview of state repression of racially inclusive labor actions since the late nineteenth century compels social scientists and labor activists to anticipate repressive state reactions to contemporary, racially inclusive labor activism. Isaac presents an historical overview of social movement unionism and a three-point political-culture framework for discerning a turning point in the course of the labor movement. The three requisite conditions for changing political culture and sustaining the new labor activism are anti-racist social movement unionism based in civil rights; changing discourse about the political-economic role of unions; and labor law reform. Walters & Misra examine the growing and largely non-union U.S. retail sector as a case in point for how contemporary adverse working conditions and organizational practices of multi-locational employers in low-wage sectors may inform the development of strategic labor actions. These strategic actions include social media-based organizing across the geographically dispersed workforces of a single multi-national employer; communitywide, political labor actions for legislating favorable labor laws, such as living-wage ordinances; assigning organizers of color to central roles in labor organizing campaigns; and, in light of interactive worker-customer relations in the service economy, building worker-consumer solidarity by boycotting and calling out employers that commit social injustices. In their analysis of the formidable obstacles to unionization posed by the rise of “new economy” corporations and the mammoth corporations of the logistics sector, Vallas & Johnston discern two long-term strategic labor actions for disrupting, overriding or circumventing these obstacles. The first, based on labor's disruptive potential at “critical chokepoints” of logistics systems, is conducting coordinated, multi-locational strikes. The second, in light of the strong digital communications capacity of new-economy workers, is to build solidarity between the demographically distinct workforces of the new-economy and logistics sectors by engaging in coalitional politics that illuminate labor and social injustices faced by both sectoral workforces.

The “intersectionality” essays address the implications of worker intersectional identities for realizing labor solidarity and sustaining labor activism. In his analysis of preliminary findings from his fieldwork on the prospects of unionization of African-American lower-tier workers, Young maintains that these workers do not necessarily view workplaces and unions as vehicles for enhancing their career mobility, let alone addressing the indignities they face as “doubly marginalized” workers. As marginalized workers came to be labeled “essential” workers during the Covid19 pandemic, some began to discern the value of their work, as well as contradictions between their statuses as marginalized, at-risk, and essential workers, creating an embryonic opening for empathetic unions to address the economic well-being and dignity of African-American lower-tier workers. Lee & Tapia adopt a “critical industrial relations” theoretical lens for extending labor organizing beyond the framework of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA). In order to address systemic inequality, they argue for “whole worker” labor organizing by Black, immigrant and woman-identified workers in place-based labor organizations, such as worker centers, and in conjunction with abolitionist social justice movements. Kristal's counter-factual analysis of the Current Population Survey produces estimates of union wage premiums associated with hypothetical increases in the union density rate in the U.S. between 1983 and 2020. Her findings indicate that throughout most of this period, the estimated union wage premium of median-wage men workers exceeded that of low-wage women workers with hypothetical increases in union density, suggesting that union bargaining power and union wage premiums would have been distributed unevenly across different demographic groups of workers. Torre's analysis of General Social Survey data on women's attitudes toward unions between 2002 and 2018 focuses on respondents’ agreement with this statement: “Workers need strong trade unions to protect their interests.” She finds that women tended to be more pro-union than men; women's pro-union attitudes increased at a greater rate than men's pro-union attitudes; and that Black and younger women, women with less than a high school education, and women employed in female-dominated occupations tended to harbor more pro-union attitudes than other women. Torre concludes that women can play a role in the new labor activism especially if unions are responsive to the needs of new cohorts of workers.

The “worker agency” essays extend the late Randy Hodson's (2001, p. 16) concept of agency, namely, “the active and creative performance of assigned roles in ways that give meaning and content to those roles beyond what is institutionally scripted.” Coley & Schachle develop a research agenda on “occupational activism,” the socially transformative enactment of one's occupation. Based on the case of the statewide walkout by Oklahoma school teachers in 2018, Coley & Schachle examine how biographical and micro-political forces shaped activism during and after the walkout. They find that austerity budgetary politics led to the walkout, cultivating activist identities and oppositional cultures among striking teachers who subsequently formed a social justice and equity committee and new inclusive curricula in their schools to challenge the state's post-walkout ban on teaching critical race theory, sexual orientation, and gender identity in 2021. Sallaz & Trongone develop the concept of a “labor movement field,” derived from field theory, for understanding how multiple strategic actors in a field struggle over the rules of the “game” for engaging in labor action. They illustrate this meso-level struggle with classification struggles over the definition of “worker,” such as the classification struggle over freelancers and independent contractors, and the use of sumptuary labor during the Covid-19 pandemic whereby firms passed along public health enforcement responsibilities to front-line service workers. Skaggs & Aparicio compare the possibilities for engaging in inclusive labor action among artists and creative workers who are employed in organizations (e.g., museums) and occupational communities (e.g., Nashville songwriters). In the case of unionized museum workers, the definition of an arts worker is determined through collective bargaining, but the bargaining framework is limited as a mechanism for dismantling racialized workplace hierarchies. In contrast, informal occupational communities determine who is an artist, tend to drift toward homophily, but can expand their logic of mutualism to apply to formerly excluded artists, especially as they engage with non-profit artist advocacy organizations. The authors present an organizational and network methodology for examining the possibilities of inclusive labor action in formal organizational and informal occupational workplaces. Hipp & Krzywdzinski examine the possibilities for sustaining labor action among the growing group of remote workers whose ranks have expanded during the Covid-19 pandemic. Remote work arrangements challenge the “ideal worker” norm and blur work-family boundaries, producing gendered benefits and inequities. The authors maintain that union advocacy for remote workers can help sustain the new labor activism for several reasons: unions can tap into the largely non-union white-collar workforce who have a greater interest in working remotely than other workers and can be reached easily via digital communications systems that circumvent conventional collective bargaining frameworks and networks. Sheehan & Williams conduct a cultural discourse analysis of how the contradictions between values and organizational practices shape uncertain prospects for labor action in the tech sector. Tech workers internalize the “new economy” values of corporate social responsibility and familial organizational values that are routinely contradicted by social injustices committed inside and outside the workplace and increase prospects for labor action; however, coercive employment-at-will practices and all-consuming career paths generate burnout and high turnover rates that thwart labor action.

In sum, the symposium essays point to a new labor sociology for comprehending and sustaining the new labor activism. This new worker-centered labor sociology identifies the contemporary pockets of political resistance and opportunities for labor activism; worker intersectional identities that inform empathetic whole-worker approaches to labor organizing; micro-structural fields of labor action; and social hierarchies that divide and marginalize workers. This symposium on the new labor activism, then, illuminates multiple pathways for dismantling social hierarchies and seizing the opportunities posed by the contemporary historical moment for sustaining the new labor activism and advancing the labor movement.