Robert Bruno is a professor of labor and employment relations at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and the director of the Project for Middle Class Renewal, a research-based initiative tasked with investigating labor policies in today’s economy. Bruno, the author of the book “What Work Is,” spoke with News Bureau business and law editor Phil Ciciora about the state of the American worker.
What’s the state of labor and the labor movement in 2024?
It’s a tale of varying perspectives on a different set of numbers, each of which tells a different story.
On one hand, the national unionization rate in 2023 held steady at 10% of the eligible labor force. However, the country added union members for the second consecutive year. In total, there were 14.5 million union members in 2023. But overall employment has grown faster than total union membership, causing membership rates to fall to their lowest levels in 10 years. On a positive note, the number of unions filing election petitions with the National Labor Relations Board is up and the number of workers organizing is the highest since 2014.
Importantly, workers are organizing in industries traditionally considered difficult to organize and largely written off. Organizing also is now following some of the forces of economic development — for example, logistics, warehouse, technology, retail, online media, professional services, education. Today, roughly 100,000 of the United Auto Workers’ approximately 400,000 members are university employees. Workers not historically viewed as ripe for organizing are also joining unions. For example, 46% of workers covered by union contracts have a bachelor’s degree or more. And it’s the first time since labor’s “glorious 30 years” of the 1940s-1970s that new labor organizations are being formed.
The biggest example is the Amazon Labor Union, which has merged with the Teamsters union. These are campaigns spearheaded by workers themselves, with professional labor organizers playing a supportive role.
The UAW is also actively organizing auto facilities in the South and at current electric vehicle plants, and is positioned to do so as EV assembly plants come online. Success at these employers would represent important growth that would have a ripple effect across the labor market.
The past year has been a contentious one for labor. Have strikes increased or decreased?
The total number of work stoppages, approximate number of workers involved in stoppages and strike days have increased each year over the past three years. The reason why? Unions have demonstrated more capacity to use the strike to improve working conditions and wages.
President Biden has been labeled the most pro-labor U.S. president ever. Now he’s a lame duck, and former President Trump has made some in-roads with organized labor. How do you explain that?
First of all, President Biden has earned the status of most pro-labor president ever. On every measurable indicator, he’s used his office to herald the benefits of collective bargaining and protect and promote the rights of workers to organize beyond what other presidents have ever done. And without question, labor unions have done considerably better during the Biden administration than when Trump was in office.
Nonetheless, Trump did attract some white male union worker support in 2016 and 2020, and will likely do so again in the 2024 election. While Trump offers no genuine support for organized labor, decades of bipartisan genuflection to myths about the free market have harmed, angered and disillusioned working class folks. In response, some union and nonunion workers have sought out an avatar to express their feelings of alienation.
The disenfranchisement that working class voters felt in 2016 also fueled the populism on the left of Sen. Bernie Sanders. Sanders and Trump are radically different in character and politics. Sanders’ critique of the political economic system was informed by an understanding of extreme income and wealth inequality, and the role of racism. Sanders’ prescription was to bring democracy to the marketplace. Trump’s prescription was massive tax cuts for the wealthy and greater extraction of wealth from the bottom to benefit the top. Sanders believed in more democracy inside and outside of the workplace. Trump fashioned himself like a 19th-century robber baron and insisted that workers and citizens simply do what was dictated to them by the corporate elite.
Despite their differences, however, both were able to tap into white middle-class discontent. One post-2016 election report found that 12% of Sanders’ primary voters eventually voted for Trump. Then workers, including 43% of union members, voted in 2016 for Trump, who never delivered any genuine relief to working people. On the contrary, his administration acted against workers’ interests. Despite campaign promises to take on companies that move jobs overseas, two years into his administration, Trump had already awarded over $115 billion in federal contracts to companies that offshored jobs.
How would labor fare under each of the respective presidential tickets?
Organized labor and all members of the working class would fare substantially better under a Kamala Harris presidency than another Trump presidency. Harris would maintain the support for bargaining, unionization rights and policies that expand justice for workers that President Biden championed, including paid leave, expanding the child tax credit and signing the Protecting the Right to Organize Act.
Her choice for vice president, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, has supported and signed what’s arguably the most pro-worker state legislation in the country. He promoted a broad pro-worker agenda that included giving workers up to six paid “sick and safe” days a year; a $2.6 billion infrastructure bill; a law that creates a statewide “standards board” to set minimum pay and benefits for nursing homes workers in the state; and much more.
Alternatively, we have the anti-worker agenda of the Trump-Vance ticket, whose labor policies are explicitly laid out in the Heritage Foundation’s “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, Project 2025.” The section on labor is a blueprint on how to dismantle unions as an effective workplace and political representative of workers.