Jenny Brown

When Amazon workers at a St. Louis fulfillment center walked out on Black Friday demanding $30 an hour, the Twitter trolls came out, too: They’re wimps, they’re whiners, they’re making inflation worse. Quit if you don’t like the job!

But it’s not just trolls. Many people are confused about how when one set of workers stands up, it raises the standards for all working people. They assume that if someone demands a bigger piece of the pie, the rest of us will get less.

2022 in Review: Harsh Conditions, Good Surprises

Was it the pandemic? Was it new disasters from climate change? Was it the fact that employers are still begging for more workers?

Whatever it was, workers were ready to throw down this year. In the face of inflation and short-staffing we demanded more money in our paychecks, and more time for our lives outside of work. We organized; we even exercised our strike muscles. And crucially, union members stood up to demand more from their unions and their leadership.

Workers overturned a lot of conventional wisdom in 2022.