Thousands of workers are on strike across the country, demonstrating their growing power in a shrinking economy. A work report on Friday shows that the impact of U.S. employees on people signing salaries has been strengthened, with employers adding workers at a much slower rate than expected in September.
According to the government, the unemployment rate has fallen 0.4 points a month to 4.8%, and wages continue to rise in all industries as employers are desperate to hire and retain workers. It has been reported that at the beginning of October only there were more than 10 strikes happen, including workers at Kellogg’s factories in Nebraska, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Tennessee. A school bus driver in Annapolis, C. Porter at Denver Airport. This does not include nearly 60,000 union members involved in film and television production who voted almost unanimously to empower the union president to strike.
Of course, there aren’t many strikes in the United States yet compared to half a century ago. There were 5716 strikes in 1971 alone, based on government data when the government tracked small strikes. In addition, the proportion of union workers in the United States is close to a record low, with only 12.1% of workers represented by unions last year.
Jess Deyo is one of nearly 700 nurses on strike as part of the longest-running health care strike in Massachusetts history. For the past seven months, Deyo has been a nurse at Worcester, Massachusetts for over 15 years, sometimes taking her daughter out in the cold and heat of summer. Nurses are demanding a higher ratio of nurses and patients after a staggering 19 months of work during the pandemic. “There is no choice but to give up the strike,” he said. “It’s bigger than us, it’s for everyone.”
Most of these strikes have not been explained by the federal government. The federal government began counting only in the 1980s, with strikes involving more than 1,000 workers detected and lasting more than a full shift. So far, there are only 11 places like Volvo Trucks and Nabisco, according to government data.
But on May 1, Cornell University scholars used social media and Google Alerts to create a strike database for all strikes and protests in the United States, even if only a few workers were involved. A student of Dr. Johnny Crow, director of labor behavior at Cornell University, said the database is a growing worker of small behavior that tells how people in large and small workplaces feel after 19 months of the global epidemic. Shows photos of the activities of. Tracker. In 2021, 169 strikes have been recorded so far. “Workers are fed up with low wages and too few staff, they have a huge impact on the labor market and employers now have to hire,” he says. “He feels a little more anxious about his work.”
Of course, there aren’t many strikes in the United States yet compared to half a century ago. There were only 5,716 strikes in 1971, based on government data when the government tracked small strikes. In addition, the proportion of union workers in the United States is close to a record low, with only 12.1% of workers represented by unions last year.
But even among Republicans, activism occurs during periods of high union approval, and the low unemployment rate favors workers who have been in poor shape for a long time and have raised wages. According to a Gallup survey released in early July, 68% of Americans have approved unions for more than a few years, well above the 48% approved during the 2009 Great Depression. increase. Polls also said that 47% of Republicans agreed with the union, the highest rate since 2003, and 90% of Democrats agreed.
Inequality Leads to more Strikes
Tom Kochan, a professor of labor and employment research at MIT, said that some support from unions and organizations is American dissatisfaction with growing inequality, just as inequality triggered the labor movement a century ago. It states that it may come from. In the United States, as of August 17, millionaires with net worth of $ 4.7 trillion have increased (708 in August). That’s more than the sum of the poorest 50% of Americans’ net worth.
Some of this labor movement took place before the pandemic, Kochan said, even government strikes showed increased anxiety. State teachers such as Arizona and Oklahoma went on strike in 2018 due to low wages and lack of public funding. In 2020, NBA players stepped out of the playoff game to protest Jacob Blake’s shooting in Kenosha, Wisconsin.