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Union groups as diverse as actors, writers and auto workers have recently won contract demands with employers, and pro-labor sentiment in the US shows no signs of stopping.
President Joe Biden even became the first commander in chief to walk a picket line when he joined the United Auto Workers in Michigan in late September.
In October, after a six-week strike, the UAW won a landmark contract for its members in negotiations with Detroit’s Big Five auto companies. The The contract included record wage increases (25% at General Motors and 20% at Ford, for example), with additional cost-of-living increases, according to a Washington Post analysis.
These recent labor victories may not directly affect the construction industry, but contractors and workers will feel the impacts of the UAW strike, experts told Construction Dive.
The UAW victory is a “huge, seismic” moment in the labor movement, said Catherine Creighton, director of the Buffalo Co-Lab School of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University.
Setting a new tone
Creighton said the strike and contract will affect other industries beyond workers’ and unions’ demands for higher wages. Making front-page headlines for weeks, the strike has brought labor issues front and center in many sectors.
With his aggressive messaging, UAW President Shawn Fain aimed to reach beyond UAW members and blue-collar workers in general, including wear and tear an “EAT THE RICH” T-shirt.and throwing a auto manufacturer’s contract proposal in the trash. He too he called on other auto worker unions set their contracts to expire in April 2028, so workers can strike together that year on May 1, International Workers’ Day.
“It wasn’t just his message. He backed it up with a really strong win and really unheard of earnings,” Creighton said. “Everybody needs to sit up and take notice.”
The UAW isn’t the only union to make gains this year. In August, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters ratified new contract with UPSfollowed by the Writer’s Guild of America approves new contract in October In November, SAG-AFTRA, the actor’s union, ended a 118-day strike to new contract with Hollywood film studios.
WGA and SAG-AFTRA members strike on September 18 in Los Angeles. Both unions won many of their demands in new contracts with major studios.
Mario Tama via Getty Images
Major companies in various industries have made headlines with workers trying to form labor groups: Starbucks continues to fight with workers who have begun forming unions at their locations and workers at one Amazon warehouse voted to unionize in April 2022.
“Five years ago, if someone had told me you’d have a union campaign organizing over 350 Starbucks stores, even a single Amazon warehouse or a bunch of Trader Joe’s and REI stores, it seemed impossible,” said John Logan. , professor and chair of the department of labor and employment studies at San Francisco State University’s Lam Family College of Business. “Certain things are possible now that five or ten years ago didn’t seem possible.”
A ripple effect
Under construction, Union membership remains historically low, decreasing from 13.6% to 12.4% in 2022; 1 million of the nation’s 8.7 million construction workers are union members, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. As recently as 2000, 18% of The construction workers belonged to unions.
However, union membership in construction is still higher than in all other industries: unions accounted for about one in 10. salaried workers in the US in 2022.
Some construction unions had already sought higher wages and overall growth in wage packages before the UAW strike, said Dan Rosenberg, principal at the Chicago-based law firm Much Shelist. For example, in October, the Middle Atlantic Regional Council of Carpentersagreed to a five-year contract extension with a local union contractor representative that provided a 4 percent annual raise split between wages and benefits, according to the Chicago Sun-Times.
“I don’t know if this is directly related to the UAW, but it reflects what’s going on in the market,” he said.
As construction employers estimate future jobs and future work, “they need to look carefully at what their built-in assumptions are about job rates,” he added.
There’s also no counterweight to those sentiments, he added, especially with a pro-labor presidential administration and a tight labor market where one in five construction workers is 55 or older. according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
“You’re not in the driver’s seat from a bargaining position if you’re employing construction workers,” said Scott R. Green, vice president of employment and labor at the New York City law firm Goldberg Segalla and member of Associated Builders. and Contractors. “Everybody feels it.”
Despite low union numbers in construction, pro-union sentiment remains high. Two in three Americans approve of unions, according to an August Gallup poll. That’s slightly below the 2022 high of 71% approval, but marks the fifth consecutive year above the long-term average of 62%.
“Workers feel they can take more risks and be bolder because there’s a friendly administration in the White House now,” Logan said. Biden has touted his administration as the most worker in history.
The UAW victory will add to that sentiment.
“[The UAW] they got what they needed in a relatively short period of time, and public sentiment wasn’t incredibly negative,” Green said. “It’s only going to encourage more people to strike.”
