NORFOLK, Va. (AP) \u2014 When negotiations failed to produce a new contract at a Volvo plant in Virginia this spring, its 2,900 workers went on strike.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The company soon dangled what looked like a tempting offer \u2014 at least to the United Auto Workers local leaders who recommended it to their members: Pay raises. Signing bonuses. Lower-priced health care.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Yet the workers overwhelmingly rejected the proposal. And then a second one, too. Finally, they approved a third offer that provided even higher raises, plus lump-sum bonuses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For the union, it was a breakthrough that wouldn\u2019t likely have happened as recently as last year. That was before the pandemic spawned a worker shortage that\u2019s left some of America\u2019s long-beleaguered union members feeling more confident this Labor Day than they have in years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
With Help Wanted signs at factories and businesses spreading across the nation, in manufacturing and in service industries, union workers like those at the Volvo site are seizing the opportunity to try to recover some of the bargaining power \u2014 and financial security \u2014 they feel they lost in recent decades as unions shrank in size and influence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWe were extremely emboldened by the labor shortage,\u201d said Travis Wells, a forklift driver at the Volvo plant in Dublin, Virginia, near Roanoke. \u201cThe cost of recruiting and training a new workforce would\u2019ve cost Volvo 10 times what a good contract would have.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In addition to 12% pay raises over the six-year contract, the Volvo deal provided other sweeteners: Many of the union workers will be phased out of an unpopular two-tier pay scale that had left less-senior workers with much lower wages than longer-tenured employees. All current workers will now earn the top hourly wage of $30.92 after six years. And by holding out as long as they did, the workers achieved a six-year price freeze on health care premiums.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Volvo conceded that it\u2019s had difficulty finding workers for the Virginia plant but says it offers a strong pay and benefits package \u201cthat also safeguards our competitiveness in the market.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The improvements achieved by the Volvo workers in Virginia provided a case study of how union workers may be gaining leverage as companies scramble to find enough workers to meet customer demand in an economy that\u2019s been steadily recovering from the pandemic recession.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The growing demand for labor has also benefited\u00a0lower-paid workers\u00a0at restaurants, bars and retailers. But the financial gains for union workers mean that a category of jobs that have long been seen as supportive of a middle-class lifestyle may now be moving closer to that realty.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Chris Tilly, a labor economist at UCLA, said the shortages among burger-flippers and cashiers is notable \u201cbecause those low-end jobs more typically have a labor surplus.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cBut there are also shortages,\u201d Tilly noted, \u201cat higher skill levels \u2014 including jobs where there are chronic shortages like nurses, machinists and teachers.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In Ventura County, California, 37 transit workers voted in July to join the Teamsters. They plan to negotiate with management to seek higher pay and eliminate split work shifts. Ruby McCormick, a bus driver who voted to join, said the booming job market was a big factor in her decision.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cSeveral years ago, before I came on to the company, there was an attempt to have the union, but it was voted down,\u201d she noted. \u201cThis time, we actually passed by a landslide.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For years, companies in most unionized industries have commanded an upper hand. During the slow, grinding economic recovery that followed the 2008-2009 Great Recession, they negotiated concessions and held down pay raises. Rising health care costs further diluted wages.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
By contrast, this recovery has produced an unexpected labor shortage and given many workers more bargaining power than they\u2019ve had since the 1980s, when the Reagan administration set a tone of hostility toward unions, and manufacturers began moving many jobs overseas, said Susan J. Schurman, who teaches labor studies at Rutgers University.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Schurman noted that the current worker shortage has compelled many employers to raise pay.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cTypically, when they have to do that to hire somebody, they kind of have to do it to keep the people they have,\u201d she said. \u201cSo you get kind of an across-the-board wage effect.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Unions may also be benefiting from frustration among working class Americans over wages that, adjusted for inflation, have been stagnant for decades. That discontent helped drive President Donald Trump\u2019s 2016 election victory, particularly in states in which auto and steel industries once thrived \u2014 as well as the outsize support for Sen. Bernie Sanders, who ran for president as a Democrat.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThey simply have not benefited from the economy over the last three decades,\u201d Schurman said of many American workers. \u201cThat anger is going to go somewhere. And if I were a union organizer right now, I\u2019d be really excited.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
During the contract talks with Volvo Trucks, workers felt more confident about demanding a better contract because other jobs were open, noted Mitchell Smith, regional director for the UAW in the South.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
President Joe Biden, who has frequently vowed to help create \u201cgood-paying union jobs,\u201d has also appointed a more worker-friendly National Labor Relations Board to settle disputes with employers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
An expanded footprint could help unions organize in places where they haven\u2019t been welcome before. Citing growing interest in membership, the 1.4 million-member Teamsters union says its organizing unit is eyeing Amazon\u2019s vast warehouse and distribution operations. Much is at stake for the Teamsters. Amazon is expanding its own distribution network, striking at the union\u2019s heart \u2014 transportation and package workers \u2014 and relying less on United Parcel Service, the largest employer of Teamsters\u2019 members.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Martin Rosas, a union leader for the United Food and Commercial Workers in Kansas and parts of Missouri and Oklahoma, said that meat packing workers seized the opportunity created by the labor shortage and the dangers of COVID to negotiate pay increases for some skilled positions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Still, to gain major victories on a widespread scale, unions will need much more time. Last year, there were only eight strikes involving 1,000 or more workers, said Joseph A. McCartin, a Georgetown University history professor who studies labor unions. From 1960 to 1980, a period when organized labor commanded far more influence, the average annual total, McCartin said, was 282.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Labor Department reported in January that the percentage of workers who were union members rose 0.5 percentage point last year to 10.8%. And that was due mainly to fewer union workers losing jobs during the pandemic than nonunion workers. Union membership has fallen from 20% of the work force in 1983, the last year for which comparable data is available.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Lagging wages have been a sore point for unions for years. Worker productivity has grown faster than average pay for four decades, McCartin noted, with the benefits going disproportionately to executives and corporations, not rank-and-file employees.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe very emergence of organizing efforts,\u201d he said of unions, \u201cis likely to prod employers to try to get ahead of the curve by offering incentives intended to take the wind out of organizing efforts.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That said, some experts say it\u2019s far from clear that any leverage that workers may now be gaining will endure. As the economy began to emerge from the pandemic, businesses were opening faster than people were returning to work. But Tilly, the UCLA professor, suggested that the job market is likely to slow in the coming months \u2014 and once it does, workers may lose some bargaining power.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cAs long as the economy is growing \u2014 and growing at a relatively vigorous pace \u2014 that\u2019s going to continue helping workers, and for that matter dealing unions a better hand, too,\u201d Tilly said. \u201cBut we are not necessarily in a new era that\u2019s going to look exactly like it has for the last few months.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
____<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Krisher reported from Detroit.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
NORFOLK, Va. (AP) \u2014 When negotiations failed to produce […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":808,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-807","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-business"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.viewworld.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/807","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.viewworld.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.viewworld.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.viewworld.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.viewworld.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=807"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.viewworld.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/807\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":809,"href":"https:\/\/www.viewworld.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/807\/revisions\/809"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.viewworld.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/808"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.viewworld.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=807"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.viewworld.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=807"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.viewworld.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=807"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}