America’s most powerful union leaders have a message for capital

There was more strike action in America in the past year than we’ve seen in more than two decades. From auto workers to actors, baristas to healthcare workers, the number of US workers protesting tripled from the preceding year. There was “Hot Labor Summer” and “Striketober”. When Joe Biden walked the picket line with the auto workers’ union last September, he became the first sitting president ever to do so. This year promises more, with major organising action aimed at Starbucks, Delta, Amazon and Tesla.

All of it represents a generational turning point. If the Reagan‑Thatcher revolution was about crushing union power, the pendulum seems to be shifting in favour of labour. Unions are changing too. They are fighting not just for better pay and benefits, but for more financial power in companies and control over the use of new technologies such as AI. But even as public support rises, particularly among younger workers, membership remains low. And a new Supreme Court challenge to the legality of the current system poses a major threat.

I sat down with four of America’s top union leaders — Liz Shuler, president of the AFL-CIO (the federation of US trade unions); Claude Cummings, president of the Communications Workers of America; Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers; and Sara Nelson, international president of the Association of Flight Attendants, to talk about what’s happened and where they go from here.

What follows is a lightly edited transcript of a conversation that took place on February 21 in Washington, DC.

Rana Foroohar: Labour has just had an unbelievable year. It’s resonating clearly not only in the US but globally. And not just with the average voting public, but CEOs of major companies. A large majority of people in America now support unions. How do you harness that into increasing membership?

Liz Shuler, AFL-CIO: Seventy-one per cent of the public supports unions generally, and 88 per cent of young people under the age of 30 do. During the pandemic, workers who didn’t have a voice and didn’t have protections came forward and said, “You know what? A union is how we get there.” It was a record year last year, as you mentioned. I think 500,000 workers were on strike; 900,000 got double-digit wage increases through collective-bargaining agreements. We increased private-sector union membership by 200,000. We’re going to have an even better year this year. Several big contracts are up for negotiation. Workers that are fed up; they’re fired up and the economy just isn’t working for them.

Claude Cummings, CWA: I also think that young people are just fed up with corporate greed. Simple as that. During the pandemic, we had issues with management forcing people to work, not giving them the time off or enough protections on the job. So I just believe that young people said, “Enough is enough, we’re ready to have a voice.”

Foroohar: Randi, I know you have thoughts on this because you were so much in the heat of everything in the pandemic.

Randi Weingarten, AFT: Kids, in particular, want some power. And they don’t want somebody to just, you know, do magical thinking or overpromise and underdeliver. Everybody wants a better life. But a union can bring people together to fight that fight together. A union gives people agency.

Everybody wants a better life. But a union can bring people together to fight that fight together. A union gives people agency

Our union is now a union of educators, healthcare workers and public services. We represent all three sectors, so we are now the second largest machine. Between January and December last year, we had 82 new units. That’s never happened before, except for the beginning of when teachers started organising. Together, we can accomplish what’s impossible. It’s not just a fight back. It’s a fight for.

Foroohar: Sara, you have said that unions are the only way to safeguard democracy. What did you mean?

Sara Nelson, AFA: People are fed up. It’s been going the wrong way basically since 1981, when Reagan fired the air traffic controllers and made “strike” a dirty word. He also sent a signal to the corporate elite that it was open season on unions. Then trade deals sent a lot of union jobs overseas. At the same time, Wall Street deregulation shifted the focus away from investing in companies and investing in the workforce, towards extracting as much profit as possible, as quickly as possible, through tools such as stock buybacks. So, the growing inequality puts us on pace for workers to have to fight back.

[Unions bring together people] from all kinds of backgrounds and experiences to coalesce around a common set of demands and to take action together. As they’re doing that, they hear each others’ stories, learn a little bit more about one another. And that’s where the democracy takes place. Not only in those workers participating in changing their own lives, but seeing that this is the only way to change things to be a part of something bigger. It flies in the face of this idea that we are a divided nation. Because, when you look at those strike lines, we’re not divided at all. In fact, there’s a very clear and common message. People want dramatic changes, and they know that they have to fight for it.

Foroohar: You brought up the Reagan-Thatcher revolution. Are you saying the pendulum has swung in a different direction?

Shuler: We’re coming full circle. The impetus to form unions back in that day was safety and health. People were literally dying on the job. For every major disruption since the industrial revolution, the labour movement has been the stabilising force that has socialised the change. Whether it’s, you know, the combustion engine or whether it’s AI. Right now, 70 per cent of workers are afraid that technology is going to affect them negatively and take their job away. When people feel afraid, when they feel destabilised, when they feel left behind and frustrated, that’s what leads them into this very caustic place.

Cummings: We can’t stop technology from changing. What we have to do is continue to organise and continue to bargain. You give workers an opportunity to talk about how new technology is going to be implemented. Technology can be implemented in a positive way or it can be —

Weingarten: — used to hurt.

Cummings: Right.

Foroohar: I was fascinated by the Hollywood strikes because it was like, oh, they’re going for intellectual property. They’re going for AI . . . 

Shuler: As Randi said, you know, this notion that you should be able to own your own image, that technology shouldn’t be able to run away from us. The contract is, again, the tool. The union gives you the power to sit across the table from these huge corporations that are making billions of dollars. I think that was a great example of no one really had heard of AI, frankly, out in the mainstream until SAG-AFTRA [in Hollywood]. Until the Writers Guild.

Weingarten: It’s a huge issue, but I want to take one step back. One of the things that I think [defines] the power dynamics in the US, and this is both Republicans and Democrats — with the exception of Joe Biden — is that the caricatures about labour leaders are just wrong. Our members deeply understand their work. And, frankly, they would be many times more effective than managers in making the work better.

Foroohar: I have to stop you because this is a core point. What you’re basically talking about is daily business practice in other countries. America’s labour paradigm is very bizarre in the global context. There’s a large body of research showing that the competitiveness and innovation in places such as Germany or Japan are linked to labour having more influence in corporate governance.

Weingarten: Exactly right.

Foroohar: So how do we get there in the US?

Nelson: When you talk about technology, you have to ask: is it going to help humanity or is it going to control humanity? And the unions are always going to be on the side of “How do we use this to help humanity?”

Weingarten: I mean, think about the two countries you just talked about: Japan and Germany. After the second world war, they were almost emasculated because of what their leaders had done to them. Now think about our history, about Reagan vs FDR. This is a country that has always wrestled with individualism versus the common good. And unions are all about the common good. Our task right now is not just about technology or the environment, it’s also about whether people have a better life.

Shuler: There’s also a system of social dialogue that exists overseas that does not exist here, with labour and management actually listening to each other, building in ways to get worker voice and feedback ahead of a crisis. To actually, you know, look at what’s coming in their industry and solve problems together. That does not exist in the US. We have a very confrontational system, where companies see unions as a threat and workers coming together in a collective way as a curb on their ability to just make outright runaway corporate profits.

We can’t stop technology from changing. What we have to do is continue to organise and continue to bargain

You can choose to follow the old model, where you do everything you can to fight unions, or you can learn lessons from companies like Ford and Microsoft. Microsoft said, “You know what, if this is what workers want and it’s going to actually benefit us in terms of a more engaged workforce, a happier workforce, we all win; we’ll be neutral in an organising campaign.” And that’s what’s happened.

Cummings: That’s how it is with [video-game maker] ZeniMax, owned by Microsoft. You know, we’ve got a neutrality agreement with them. And bargaining is taking place in ZeniMax right now. Bargaining is an opportunity for our workers to have input on how AI is implemented in the workplace. And I think that’s the big question right now that companies need to be thinking about, how can labour help us implement this new technology?

Nelson: Collective bargaining is problem-solving. Companies that have to participate in that usually have a better outcome, because they’ve had to think through things with labour at the table. And you take two groups that, you know, want dramatically different things, but in collective bargaining, they have to come together and there has to be problem-solving. And if we had that kind of thinking more across the US, think about how different our politics would be.

Weingarten: If there was a penalty for performative politics in Congress . . . 

Nelson: Game over.

Weingarten: That’s kind of what Labour 2.0 is right now. It’s basically young people who really want to organise and have some power. But it’s power for what they want; power for a better life. They don’t want to destroy their lives as Americans. They want power for a better life. And that’s part of what the new American labour movement is about.

Foroohar: You’ve got companies like Trader Joe’s, SpaceX and Amazon that want to overturn the legality of the National Labor Relations Board, which is the federal agency that protects the rights of workers to organise. Now, I want to talk about what would happen if that actually came to pass.

Nelson: The NLRB was created [in 1935] on the heels of mass strikes and mass disruption. Workers didn’t wait for the law to be on their side. They took action. To have actual penalties for companies that interfere with workers’ rights to organise, interfere with their ability to form a union, is what we need. We need the clear right to strike. There has to be a dual approach here of the government standing up those protections and the labour movement pushing hard.

The people who want to destroy the NLRB have no idea what’s coming. If they want to get rid of all the guardrails, then I guess there’s no guardrails for labour either and no holds barred. And I promise you, there will be new labour laws very fast.

Weingarten: If the Supreme Court had the audacity to strip workers of rights they now have, the result would not be what Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos think. What will end up happening is that things such as secondary boycotts come back. Things that have been prohibited. We have said, OK, these are the rules in terms of trying to get to an economic meeting of the minds and all of us have played by them. But if you take the rules away, this generation is not going to sit by and say, “Yes, sir.”

Shuler: We can go back there. And, in fact, some in the labour movement have argued for that. Take the guardrails off because we will win.

Foroohar: Right now, you all have a certain amount of political power via a labour-friendly president. You also have market power, via worker pensions, and also procurement power. How are you leveraging that power?

Shuler: We need to use all kinds of strategies and tactics, all the tools in the toolbox. You’re talking about leveraging labour’s power as an institution. We are in those shareholder meetings because we actually own stock in a lot of companies, and we can use our shares to influence the way policies are made. I think the change here is that some corporations have decided they are going to fight us with everything they have, instead of being solutions-driven. Starbucks is a great example.

Weingarten: Corporations are not monolithic. Look at the difference right now between Microsoft and Amazon. There’s a difference in strategy. Long term, the Microsofts of the world will actually figure out how to endure. Walmart was the biggest warehouse company, and now Amazon is the biggest warehouse company . . . Amazon and Starbucks, look who their CEOs are. They don’t seem to have respect for the people who work for them.

But I want to say one more point that Sara made earlier. Sometimes it takes a strike, and sometimes it takes other kinds of actions. Sometimes, it takes rewriting the rules, the economic rules. Maybe we’ve got to have more Keynesian rules again.

But what you have here with us is that we’re all Americans. We love our country. We love our democracy; we love our freedom. And we’re making a bet that doing it together as a labour movement where workers can rise — that is the patriotic way.

Foroohar: You mentioned unions owning shares. Shareholders have power. I’m wondering how — in all of your organisations — you’re thinking about how to use your financial might?

Shuler: We have, as a movement, been strategic when it comes to leveraging our strength, whether it’s the shareholder approach, that we do that analysis and see where the weak spots are. There are many examples where we’ve been able to influence whether perhaps a potential merger happens or not. Amassing our power, whether it’s on the strike line or within the company and its decision-making inside the boardroom . . . 

Nelson: I’m just going to interject one little thing, and that is that it’s a tool, like Liz said. We have to use every possible leverage point that we have in order to move worker power. But if we think that any one of these tools by itself is enough, then we’re fooling ourselves. Fundamentally, worker power has to be on the worksite. It doesn’t have to be a strike, but it needs to be a credible threat that the workers are willing to do what it takes to have their demands met.

Weingarten: There are times as an AFT trustee, when you’re sitting on the board of a pension fund and you see $4bn in front of you and you have to make an investment decision. Wow. So every year we now have a trustee institute where we train trustees. We’ve invited our colleagues to join us because we are a communal, you know, movement. But what we’ve started to think about, and we’re starting to organise this, starting this week in our executive council meetings, is a centre for working capital.

Foroohar: It seems like we’re seeing more cross‑sectoral and cross-industry labour actions. Sara, you did a lot of work with Shawn Fain and the auto workers’ union (UAW) during their strike. Also, in the airline industry itself we’ve seen machinists, pilots and flight attendants all standing together in various actions. There’s a big organising drive at Delta Air Lines right now. Tell us a bit about that.

Worker power has to be on the worksite. It doesn’t have to be a strike, but it needs to be a credible threat that the workers are willing to do what it takes

Nelson: For flight attendants, most of the organising happened in the 1940s. The legacy contracts are still in place, even though they took massive hits during the bankruptcies. And now, with all the consolidation, Delta’s role in the industry — setting the terms for flight attendants, mechanics, ramp workers, gate agents — is incredibly powerful. They have the ability to set those market rates. They’re making almost twice as much as any other airline.

So we’re taking on the largest, single-unit private sector organising drive in the country; 28,000 flight attendants. Really big hurdle. But not doing it is essentially saying that we are going to let our lives be controlled by a non-union company that wants to keep us devalued. This is existential. This is about finally being able to push through the devaluation of our jobs because it was defined as women’s work early on. The bargaining that’s going on right now is also about fighting that legacy sexism. It is important to recognise that social justice is directly tied to economic justice. We can’t separate the two.

Foroohar: Getting back to the idea that the majority of people support unions, but membership is still low. What is one powerful tool that you plan to deploy this year in terms of increasing membership?

Shuler: A sectoral approach to organising, bringing multiple unions together across an industry. That we are actually acting in solidarity with each other, and pooling our resources and our strategies to make sure that we have the most opportunity for the working people who need better wages and pathways to the middle class. We’re excited about that because it is, again, an opportunity, particularly in industries that have been shrinking.

Cummings: We say we’re one union, but sometimes we don’t act like it. And so what I’m doing is I’m trying to unite CWA and the auto workers and making sure that wherever we have a fight going on, the entire country is involved.

Weingarten: Having each others’ back and talking with each other. And that basic agency and engagement. Relational organising. Chaos versus community.

Foroohar: Sara?

Nelson: I have to end with Mother Jones. She said the capitalists say there is no need of labour organising, except the fact that they themselves are continually organising.

Shuler: Love it.

Nelson: They are. They’re constantly organising. They talk about how they may be fierce competitors in the airline industry, but they also understand that more stability is better for them. It’s not helpful if one airline is going through troubles because it’s very likely going to affect the other airlines.

We had a flight attendant day of action on February 13, where three unions came together, two-thirds of all flight attendants across the industry, representing 100,000 flight attendants that are in bargaining right now. They stood together for the first time in history to say, “We’re going to take the industry on together. We’re not going to let you pit us against each other at Delta.” The company has always been very successful at pitting workers against each other and unions against each other. This coalition that we have organised with the Teamsters and the machinists is really groundbreaking.

And guess what happened? The pilots, who had been taught for decades that if the other workers at Delta organise it’s going to take a piece of their pie, they’re standing with us for the first time. My favourite line from 2023 was the chair of the Air Line Pilots Association at United Airlines standing out in front of the pilots, broadcasting to all the locations where United has bases for pilots and other unions standing there with him. He pointed to his collar, which was white, and he said, see this collar? This is not a white collar, this is a blue collar. I never thought that I would hear a pilot say that. That is the difference right now. That is the difference in 2024. There is suddenly this understanding from workers that rugged individualism is going to take us down a path of ruin, and collective action is actually how we gain our freedom.

Foroohar: Well, I think that might just be the mic-drop moment. Thank you all.

Rana Foroohar is the FT’s global business columnist

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