After decades of decline in the United States, unions may be poised for a comeback.
Every month seems to bring more promising news for organized labor. Workers at companies like John Deere and Kellogg’s have gone on strike to win pay raises and fight concessions. Workers at Starbucks have organized roughly 100 stores from coast to coast since last fall. REI employees formed the outdoor retailer’s very first union. And Amazon employees defied all the odds and won an 8,000-worker union election in New York City.
Just 1 in 10 U.S. workers now belongs to a union, down from roughly 1 in 3 in the period following World War II. Yet the labor movement is showing more muscle now than it has in years. Emboldened by a tight labor market and two years of toiling through a pandemic, workers are succeeding in organizing companies that have staunchly resisted unionization, and many of them are doing it practically on their own.
