Reviving Labor During The Big Burnout

The combination of a tight labor market, rising working class anger, and the growth in left militancy in some unions all point toward the huge potential to revitalize the labor movement. At the same time, the pandemic has exhausted and isolated millions of workers, and most labor leaders are failing to seize the moment. To map out an effective strategy forward, socialists need to be sober about the challenges ahead.

By Ty Moore

Last October, as the US left buzzed about the the #Striketober uptick in work stoppages, The Guardian published an op-ed by former Labor Secretary Robert Reich headlined “Is America experiencing an unofficial general strike?”

Reich’s question, of course, was more click-bait than serious prognosis. But his article still reflected the exaggerated hopes many on the left were feeling. Connecting the historic number of workers quitting their jobs, the bosses’ hand-wringing over the so-called “labor shortage,” and the uptick in strikes, Reich optimistically suggested that “American workers are now flexing their muscles for the first time in decades.”

“No one calls it a general strike. But in its own disorganized way it is related to the organized strikes breaking out across the land […]. Disorganized or organized, American workers now have bargaining leverage to do better. After a year and a half of the pandemic, consumers have pent-up demand for all sorts of goods and services. But employers are finding it hard to fill positions.”

Reich is right to highlight the huge leverage workers have in this economic moment, but his optimistic spin was premature. 

Jane McAlevey, the famed guru of labor organizing, was more sober in her December article in The Nation, “How Workers Can Win in 2022.” McAlevey points out that “In 2021, through November, only 76,000 workers participated in large work stoppages” compared to “more than 485,000 workers” in 2018, meaning last year mainly continued labor’s long decline and “doesn’t come close to what is required to create the scale of crisis that will force the corporate elite to negotiate with the working class in significant ways.” 

“Instead [of mass collective action], labor’s discontents have been channeled into individual actions, like quitting,” McAlevey explains. To be fair to Robert Reich, alongside his understandable excitement about #Striketober, he also flagged the bigger story of American labor in 2021. “My take: workers are reluctant to return to or remain in their old jobs mostly because they’re burned out.” Indeed, a June poll by the job site Monster.com found 95 percent of workers were thinking about quitting their job and “burnout” was the top reason cited.

The Big Quit

Each month since April last year around 4 million workers – 3 percent of the US workforce –  have quit their jobs, rising to a high of 4.5 million in November. That’s an all-time record, and substantially more than the previous highs around 3.5 million per month in the two years before the pandemic. 

All summer business leaders made shrill demands to end Covid relief benefits, blaming them for the “labor shortage.” But the “Big Quit” only accelerated as summers’ end saw 7.5 million workers lose their pandemic unemployment checks. So what’s really going on?

At first the media was filled with stories of tech professionals quitting their jobs, buying tricked-out campervans and choosing the simple life, but these feel-good stories obscure the larger reality. The viral social media posts of workers telling their bosses to “take this job and shove it” paints a more accurate picture.

While every empowering quit-story deserves cheers of solidarity, the hard facts paint a grimmer picture of Covid capitalism than any of the contending media narratives. It’s also the most obvious explanation. Labor Department data shows the jobs with the highest increase in resignations are filled by the low-wage and frontline workers hit hardest by Covid: hospitality, food service, healthcare, social services, transportation and warehousing.

Most of those who quit are not downsizing out of the rat-race to choose the simple life; they are taking advantage of the tight labor market to find new jobs with somewhat less risk of death, marginally better pay and, if they’re lucky, maybe a bit more respect and dignity on the job. Hospitality wages did increase an impressive 12.3 percent in November, and some other low-wage industries saw similar gains, but over-all workers continued to fall behind in 2021. 

The New York Times reported in January that “[t]he Consumer Price Index rose 6.8 percent in November, a nearly four-decade high; average hourly earnings rose 4.8 percent in November, and other measures likewise show pay gains lagging price increases.” It’s still a rat race where “winning” is just not falling further behind.

Women workers are absorbing the heaviest blows. Frontline service and care work remains highly gendered, and the pandemic has placed huge new pressures on home-life which mostly fall on working women. One in three women who lost their jobs during the pandemic remain out of work. 

Childcare workers were already in short supply due to chronic low-pay, and are now quitting in droves to escape Covid. Even wealthy families are having trouble finding childcare, and the shortage has sent daycare costs skyrocketing out of reach for millions of working-class families. The failure of the Democrats to pass universal childcare, which virtually every other advanced economy on the planet enjoys, is further feeding this vicious cycle and forcing millions of women back into the home. 

Extreme Inequality

The pandemic has exhausted the working class, but it has also been eye-opening. Support for unions is up to 68 percent, the highest point since 1965, according to Gallup. Labor’s popularity is especially impressive when you consider how weak and ineffective unions are today compared to their post-World War 2 highpoint. Union membership fell again in 2021 to a new low of just 14 million or 10.3 percent of the total workforce, compared to nearly a third of all workers in 1965.

Rising support for unions seems more likely driven more by rising rage at the extreme inequalities of our new Gilded Age, and a desire to fight back, than any widespread excitement over the limited gains labor has delivered lately. To explain it in Marxist terms, workers’ sense of alienation – the experience of seeing the very wealth we create for our bosses being used to further exploit us – has grown through the pandemic. 

This understanding was heightened by the naked hypocrisy of bosses and politicians talking about “shared sacrifice” while they enriched themselves. Pumped up by public spending, Wall Street soared as “essential workers” were forced to risk their lives to keep profits flowing. 

Since 2020, the wealth of the richest 1 percent rose by $10 trillion, 15 times more than the gains of the bottom 50 percent of America – and even those gains were mainly due to the temporary pandemic relief payments. By early 2021, the top 1 percent held 32 percent of our country’s wealth while the bottom 50 percent owned just 2 percent of the national pie. This is the most extreme inequality since records began.

Elon Musk’s wealth grew from $25 billion to $150 billion while Jeff Bezos crested toward $200 billion on the backs of Amazon’s vast low-wage workforce (Amazon warehouses, by the way, now have a turnover rate equal to 100 percent of their entire workforce every nine months, underscoring the huge challenges facing ongoing union drives in Alabama and now Staten Island).

Labor’s Potential

The popularity of unions, and the excitement generated every time workers do rise up in struggle against our corporate overlords, point to the huge potential in this moment. Maybe Robert Reich was premature to declare last October that “American workers are now flexing their muscles for the first time in decades,” but he isn’t wrong that millions are looking to fight.

“For many, the pandemic was the last straw. Workers are fed up, wiped out, done-in, and run down. In the wake of so much hardship, illness and death during the past year, they’re not going to take it anymore.”

To channel this mass anger into effective collective mass action requires organization, leadership, and a fundamentally different strategy on the part of most unions. Again Jane McAlevey’s December article says things clearest. Both her critique and her strategy for labor outlined here is fully consistent with the arguments we have been hammering away on in Reform & Revolution, which are worth quoting at length:

“Unfortunately, most national unions squandered 2021 by prioritizing behind-the-scenes jockeying for access to the Biden administration and crumbs from the bosses’ table—the kinds of actions easily overturned in a next administration—while the working class watched the president abandon one campaign pledge after another: free community college, cheaper prescription drugs, real relief for students and homeowners in debt, paid medical and family leave, and robust action on climate change that would shift subsidies toward unionized, high-paying jobs for a livable planet. Biden’s refusal to do away with the filibuster in 2021 vanquished many desperately needed structural changes—starting with the restoration of the Voting Rights Act and the passage of its workplace companion, the Protecting the Right to Organize, or PRO Act.

What should national unions have been doing? Mobilizing members to take the only action—strikes—that could have given them real power in the legislative fights that have ended badly for workers and have most certainly damaged the Democrats’ electoral prospects heading into 2022. Biden clearly doesn’t have the power to move Congress. Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema aren’t going to change their votes because of personal pleas from the president or the leaders of the Progressive Caucus. What their ilk do respond to is when the corporate elites whose bidding they do phone them and tell them to switch their votes because profits are being dented by the chaos of too many workers on strike. National legislation that’s good for most Americans passes only when workers create untenable crises that make that legislation seem like a far better option than expensive strikes, pitchforks, or falling bottom lines.”

Even among socialists, there is a tendency to think of the labor movement in narrowly economic terms rather than as a primary tool for workers to shape our political future. McAlevey is absolutely right to make those connections, but she stops short of drawing some necessary conclusions. 

To secure a decent future, the working class will need to go beyond mass pressure on capitalist politicians and parties. Organized labor, with socialists pushing the envelope, will need to link strikes and mass protests to a concerted political struggle to defeat and replace capitalism’s political representatives and to challenge the system as a whole.

For those of us in DSA, this horizon must remain at the heart of all our day-to-day work within our unions and of our debates over socialist strategy for revitalizing labor. From our solidarity rallies with Starbucks baristas to our salting efforts in Amazon, the pandemic has opened a growing space for socialists to get a wide echo for our call to fundamentally re-orient labor – toward mass strikes and protests, toward independence from the Democratic Party, and toward socialism.

Graphic: Union density. Doug Henwood summarized: “Union membership fell by almost 2 percent in 2021 as employment rose by over 3 percent. That took union density — the share of the workforce belonging to unions — down from 10.8 percent in 2020 to 10.3 percent last year, where it was in 2019. Density rose in 2020 because more nonunion workers lost their jobs in the COVID crisis than their unionized counterparts, but 2021’s return to employment undid that. For the private sector, just 6.1 percent of workers were unionized last year, down from 6.3 percent in 2020, an all-time low for a series that goes back to 1900.” (LBO News, January 23, 2022)Graphic by Doug Henwood. Sources: official numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics began in 1983; Dough Henwood assembled figures for earlier years from various sources (tinyurl.com/DougHenwood-LBO).