2024 in Review: Strikes and Organizing Score Gains, but Storm Clouds Loom

Union workers broke open the cookie jar in 2024, after years of stagnant wages and rising prices. With strikes and the threat of strikes, workers did more than forestall concessions: They gained ground. Union workers in the private sector saw 6 percent real wage rises for the year.

Just the fear that workers would organize drove up wages at non-union employers like Delta Airlines, Amazon, and Mercedes.

Meanwhile, unemployment rates of around 4 percent made strikes easier to maintain. For instance, many Boeing workers were able to get side jobs during their 53-day strike this fall. Relatively plentiful jobs have also made it easier for workers to organize new unions, since the threat of getting fired is less daunting.

Nearly 28,000 school employees in Virginia and 10,000 nurses in Michigan joined unions in the two biggest organizing victories of the year. At the first Southern auto plant to organize in decades, Volkswagen in Chattanooga, Tennessee, 5,000 workers won a union in April by a decisive 73 percent.

But even with a union, working conditions are often abominable. Speed-up and long hours make work risky and wear us out.

And storm clouds are on the horizon. Even our current weak labor laws and safety enforcement are on Trump’s chopping block. Expect attacks on immigrant workers, public employee unions, safety regulations, climate protection, and the very idea of labor law.

WAGE GAINS—FINALLY

After a strike that shut down production in the Pacific Northwest, Boeing Machinists bagged a 38 percent general wage increase over four years. A three-day port strike netted 20,000 Longshore (ILA) workers 61 percent over six years. It was the first East Coast-wide longshore strike since 1977.

Continuing the uptick in strikes since the onset of Covid, 2024 is on track for as many strikes as 2022, though it didn’t match the huge walkouts of 2023 in Hollywood, at Kaiser, and at the Big 3. Johnnie Kallas of the Cornell Labor Action Tracker reported 34 strikes in manufacturing through November.

Workers gained just by threatening a strike. At Daimler Truck in North Carolina, 7,400 workers chanted “Tick tock” as the contract deadline approached. They defeated tiers and won a 25 percent increase, with more for lower-paid workers.

After a vigorous contract campaign and 99.5 percent strike vote, American Airlines flight attendants (APFA) secured an immediate 20 percent pay increase, back pay from their 2019 contract expiration, and boarding pay for the first time. (Most flight attendants aren’t paid till the aircraft door closes.) Southwest flight attendants (TWU) won big wage gains; United flight attendants (AFA) voted 99.9 percent to strike, and may still do so. Airline workers have to navigate a lengthy obstacle course sanctioned by the Railway Labor Act, if they want to strike.

Teacher strikes yielded gains for teachers and students. In Massachusetts, where reformers lead the statewide union, but strikes are illegal, teachers in several districts struck anyway. They won more student services, time to plan classes, and raises for the lowest-paid aides—60 percent in 10 schools in Andover in January.

Gains from 2023’s strikes raised expectations for 2024. Unions that pushed sub-par contracts on their members faced revolts. Machinists leaders at Boeing backpedaled furiously when a contract they recommended was voted down by 95 percent in September. Letter Carriers are organizing a vigorous “vote no” campaign after union leaders submitted a contract with 1.3 percent annual wage increases.

Employers often coughed up pay but fought union demands on overtime, staffing, automation, and the moving of work. Longshore workers, for example, suspended their strike with a big pay promise, but job-killing automation issues remained unresolved, with negotiations ongoing.

The strike threat at Daimler Truck, and the strike at Boeing, did extract contractual promises on where work would be done. But enforcement may require additional job action. Stellantis has so far broken its promise to the Auto Workers to reopen its Belvidere, Illinois, assembly plant—a condition of ending the UAW’s 2023 Stand-Up Strike. Auto workers are debating how to enforce that demand, and many Stellantis locals have taken strike votes.

In the Daimler contract, workers won a renewed promise of a guaranteed daily truck output, to dispel fears that the work would be moved to Mexico—a threat the company deployed regularly in negotiations.

At Boeing, the new contract promises to locate production of the next passenger jet in the Puget Sound area. But the work will likely start after the contract expires, and union leaders expect it may require another strike to enforce the agreement.

Despite big strike leverage, Boeing workers didn’t get a ban on mandatory overtime, though they can no longer be forced to work two weekends in a row. “I don’t think that people should be required to work more than 40 hours a week to keep their jobs,” said Boeing Machinist Mylo Lang.

Continuing 2023’s trend of defeating solidarity-crushing tiers at UPS and the Big 3 automakers, tiers were eliminated at Allison Transmission and Daimler Truck, while solar Ironworkers in California were able to end tiers in a multi-year effort to make commercial solar installation a union job.

REFORMERS SPUR ORGANIZING

Reform movements and new leadership in the Auto Workers and Teamsters led to big investments in new organizing. In February, the UAW announced it would spend $40 million to organize non-union auto and battery plants through 2026.

In October, the Teamsters announced they had added 50,000 members in the two years since new leaders took office. The Teamsters have made organizing Amazon a priority, and the Staten Island Amazon Labor Union voted to affiliate in June, as ALU-IBT Local 1. The New York Times reported that the Teamsters have committed $8 million toward organizing Amazon as well as access to their $300 million strike fund.

Amazon warehouse workers in California and New York have been marching on their bosses, demanding recognition. Newly organized Teamster drivers at Amazon have been setting up roving picket lines to disrupt operations until the company recognizes the union.

In these two unions, effective strike threats and dedication to organizing are no accident. They started with reform movements: Unite All Workers for Democracy in the Auto Workers and Teamsters for a Democratic Union in the Teamsters. More victories are coming down the pike: Rail Machinists (IAM District 19) elected reform leadership in 2024, as did New York City teacher retirees (UFT), a 70,000-person chapter. Up next are reformers in the Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW), Theatrical and Stage Employees (IATSE), Professional and Technical Engineers (IFPTE), and maybe soon the Letter Carriers (NALC), thanks to an insulting contract offer pushed by the leadership.

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The troublemaking wing of the movement continues to grow, as evidenced by the 4,700 workers who showed up at the April Labor Notes Conference, and the thousands more who wanted to attend. (There just wasn’t space!)

MOST ELECTIONS IN A DECADE

Unions continue to be more popular than at any time since the 1960s, with 70 percent public approval. Private sector union elections this year involved 107,000 workers, the highest in a decade, up from 63,000 in 2022 and 93,000 in 2023.

More than 20,000 new graduate student workers won unions since last December.

After changing state law to allow bargaining, 27,000 Virginia school employees won wall-to-wall representation in Fairfax County, creating one of the largest K-12 unions on the East Coast.

In November, 10,000 nurses at the Corewell hospital chain in southern Michigan won the biggest unionization election in recent memory, organizing with the Teamsters.

However, the pace of organizing “is not enough to keep up with employment growth, let alone meaningfully increase [private sector] union density,” wrote union researcher Chris Bohner.

Starbucks is a case in point. In February, Starbucks Workers United forced management to negotiate after two years of organizing. Ten months later, they’re still in contract talks, and 130 more stores have voted union. That adds up to 522 union stores, with 11,000 workers. But Starbucks operates 10,000 stores in the U.S.

PLANT-BUILDING BOOM

The Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act stimulated a building boom for electric vehicle and battery plants—many in the South—opening the possibility of organizing drives at dozens of facilities as they ramp up production. The UAW extracted a promise during its 2023 Stand-Up Strike to include in the master contract 6,000 new General Motors jobs at four planned battery plants.

Workers at the first of these, Ultium Cells in Lordstown, Ohio, signed a contract in June. The union announced a majority at BlueOval SK Battery Park in Kentucky in November.

New Flyer electric bus manufacturing workers in Anniston, Alabama, won their first contract in May, scoring raises up to 38 percent, through the Electrical Workers (IUE), a division of the Communications Workers.

After the big win at Volkswagen, the UAW hit a speed bump in its drive to organize German, Korean, and Japanese-owned plants when workers at Mercedes in Alabama voted down the union 2,642 to 2,045. Companies have been pulling out all the stops on the propaganda Wurlitzer, enlisting hostile politicians (and even preachers!) to stop workers from uniting.

CEASEFIRE SWITCH

Unions opposed a Democratic presidential administration on a military issue for the first time in memory. Advocating “ceasefire in Gaza” had been something staffers faced discipline for. But it came to be viewed as common sense by most of the labor movement.

Support for a ceasefire started with unions like the United Electrical Workers (UE), whose members had long studied and debated the situation. It spread as dissenters—from teachers to painters—began speaking up, insisting that it was the place of unions to oppose mass death supported by our government. “The main question that came up was, ‘What does this have to do with us?’” said Texas IBEW member Dave Pinkham. “We made an appeal to humanity: ‘U.S. military support to Israel is supporting violence there. Let’s stop.’”

In October 2023, Postal Workers (APWU) President Mark Dimondstein was alone in calling for a ceasefire at the AFL-CIO executive council, and was denounced by others. By February, the AFL-CIO was calling for a ceasefire. By July, seven unions representing nearly half the union members in the U.S. were calling for a stop to military aid to Israel.

At some colleges, workers struck to defend members who had faced discipline and even attacks by campus police for protesting U.S. support for Israel.

Israel is still raining U.S.-made bombs and missiles on Gaza and Lebanon, showing the limits of union resolutions. But a Cold War-era taboo has broken. Perhaps unions can go one step further and figure out how to block the manufacture and transport of weapons destined for wars of aggression and genocide.

STORM CLOUDS

Federal workers and immigrants are likely to be the first targets of the incoming Trump administration and Republican-dominated Congress. Trump and his lackeys plan to slash federal spending, install a corporate-friendly National Labor Relations Board, stop subsidies for the electric vehicle transition, and dismantle public education.

Tools to protect immigrant workers from labor law violations, like the Department of Homeland Security's Deferred Action for Labor Enforcement program, are likely to be shelved, along with speedy elections and other efforts at labor law enforcement that we have become used to from the NLRB. Mass deportations are unlikely, given that Trump’s corporate sponsors rely on the labor of immigrants for their profits. But some showy raids are likely, and the terror of arrests will make it even harder to stop abusive bosses—which is the main point of the policy, as Magaly Licolli writes. Solidarity will be needed from all of us.

But even an NLRB determined to enforce labor law has been unable to force big corporations like Amazon to comply, so it’s not clear that organizing these companies will be significantly harder with a hostile board. As Chris Bohner and Eric Blanc point out, it was during Trump’s first term that the “Red for Ed” illegal teacher strike wave swept the country.

Workers’ demands for union democracy have fueled more fights, more wins, higher expectations, and more new organizing. It’s obvious that workers want and need unions that can match and defeat the billionaires.

If there are enough of us, and our bonds are strong enough, bosses, politicians, and even the law will give way. As strikers proved, the power is in our hands.

Labor Notes staff contributed reporting throughout the year.