Strikes rose sharply this past year as more workers turned to organized labor to address their concerns about pay and working conditions.
There were 374 worker strikes in 2022, according to researchers at Cornell University, a hefty 39% increase from the year before. There were several factors at play in the growth, a major one being that workers had far more leverage this past year due to mass labor shortages.
Healthcare workers made up a big contingent of the organized labor movement in 2022. In September, 15,000 nurses in Minnesota staged a three-day walkout in what was likely the largest private-sector nurse strike in the country’s history. There were several other strikes by healthcare workers over the past year as well.
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Johnnie Kallas, project director of Cornell-ILR Labor Action Tracker, told Axios that nurses and other healthcare workers were burdened by understaffing but also have suffered burnout given the high-stress environment of their jobs, something that was exacerbated by COVID-19.
“It’s obvious why health care workers would be burned out after working through a global pandemic, but I think [burnout’s] also extended to places like accommodation and food services,” he said.
And some food service companies did experience a wave of strikes and union activity.
Late in 2021, the first Starbucks store in the United States voted to unionize. That set off a wave of other efforts at stores across the country, and in just months, more than 70 stores in 25 states voted to be represented by a union. Since then, a total of more than 300 of the company’s 9,000 locations in the U.S. have petitioned the National Labor Relations Board for a union vote.
Earlier in 2022, an Amazon warehouse in New York became the first to vote in favor of unionizing, an REI store in New York did the same, and a Trader Joe’s in Massachusetts became the first to file for a union election.
Chipotle also gained attention when a location in Maine, after staging a walkout, had its employees sign union cards indicating their intent to join what was dubbed Chipotle United and filed a petition to unionize.
Earlier this year, as union activity was surging, Dan Bowling, a senior lecturing fellow at Duke University School of Law, told the Washington Examiner that there has been a rise in attention to unions and organized labor, especially among younger workers, the likes of which he has never seen in his career.
Bowling, who teaches labor and employment courses, said the new wave of unionization across the country is coming in part because more highly educated younger people are entering the workforce and is happening in workplaces different from the ones typically associated with unions, such as the auto factories and mines of decades past.
Those younger and more educated workers, who might work as baristas right out of college to pay for schooling, are well connected to social media and the internet — another factor that contributed to the virality of the union wave.
Earlier this year, the NLRB said during the first six months of fiscal 2022, union representation petitions filed at the agency increased 57%, up to 1,174 from 748 during that same time last year. Unfair labor practice charges have also increased 14% during that same period.
Having President Joe Biden in office has also helped the organized labor movement. Biden has styled himself as the “most pro-union president” and has frequently played up his support for unions.
And most people support labor unions, with that support only growing over the past year.
More than 70% of people say they approve of labor unions, according to Gallup polling. That number is up from 64% before the pandemic and is the highest level of support recorded since the 1960s. The growth has been rapid, as fewer than half of the country indicated support for unions in 2009.
Still, even despite the high degree of support, most people aren’t actually involved in organized labor. Polling found that a mere 6% of respondents said they were in a union and only 7% said others in their household were.
Unions also secured a major win during this past year’s midterm elections. Voters in Illinois narrowly voted to enshrine collective bargaining in the state constitution, a strategy that labor organizers might try to replicate in other states.
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Still, the biggest union story of 2022 was a bit of a loss for organized labor. The specter of a massive rail strike loomed over the holiday season after several rail unions voted to reject an agreement between union leaders and railroads that was facilitated by the Biden administration.
Congressional Democrats, including most Republicans, voted to use the legislative branch’s unique power to override the strike and impose the contract anyway. The move, which was supported by Biden, drew criticism from organized labor.
