NORFOLK, Virginia (AP) – When negotiations failed to produce a new contract at a Volvo plant in Virginia this spring, its 2,900 workers went on strike.
The company soon hung what seemed like a tempting offer, at least to local United Auto Workers leaders who recommended it to its members: pay raises. Signature of bonuses. Health care at a lower price.
However, workers overwhelmingly rejected the proposal. And then a second. Finally, they approved a third offer that provided even higher raises, in addition to account bonuses.
For the union, it was a breakthrough that probably wouldn’t have happened as recently as last year. This was before the pandemic created a labor shortage that left some members of the U.S. union in the United States feeling safer on this Labor Day than in previous years.
With Help Wanted signs in factories and companies across the nation, in the manufacturing industry and in the service industries, union workers like those at the Volvo site are seizing the opportunity to try to regain some of their bargaining power and financial security. , they feel they have lost in recent decades, as unions have reduced their size and influence.
“We were extremely encouraged by the labor shortage,” said Travis Wells, a forklift driver at the Volvo plant in Dublin, Virginia, near Roanoke. “The cost of hiring and forming a new staff would have cost Volvo ten times what a good contract would have.”
In addition to the 12% wage hikes during the six-year contract, the Volvo deal provided other sweeteners: many of the union workers will be eliminated from an unpopular two-tier wage scale that had left lower workers with very high wages. lower than older employees. All current workers will now earn the maximum hourly wage of $ 30.92 after six years. And, enduring the weather they did, workers got a six-year freeze on health care premiums.
Volvo admitted it has had difficulty finding workers for the Virginia plant, but says it offers a strong package of pay and benefits “that also protects our competitiveness in the marketplace.”
Improvements by Volvo workers in Virginia provided a case study on how union workers could gain leverage as companies soar to find enough workers to meet customer demand in an economy that has been steadily recovering. of the pandemic recession.
Growing demand for labor has also benefited lower paid workers in restaurants, bars and retailers. But the economic gains for union workers mean that a category of jobs that have long been considered supporters of a middle-class lifestyle can now be brought closer to that reality.
Chris Tilly, a labor economist at UCLA, said the shortage between burgers and cashiers is remarkable “because these low-end jobs typically have a labor surplus.”
“But there is also a shortage,” Tilly noted, “at higher skill levels, including jobs where there is chronic shortages such as nurses, machinists, and teachers.”
In Ventura County, California, 37 traffic workers voted in July to join Teamsters. They plan to negotiate with management to seek higher wages and eliminate split shifts. Ruby McCormick, a bus driver who voted to join, said job market growth was a major factor in her decision.
“Several years ago, before joining the company, there was an attempt to have the union, but it was rejected,” he noted. “This time, in fact, we went through a landslide.”
For years, companies in most unionized industries have dominated power. During the slow and grinding economic recovery that followed the great recession of 2008-2009, they negotiated concessions and maintained wage increases. Rising health care costs further diluted wages.
By contrast, this recovery has produced an unexpected labor shortage and given many workers more bargaining power than they had since the 1980s, when the Reagan administration set a tone of hostility toward unions and unions. Manufacturers began relocating many jobs abroad, said Susan J Schurman, who teaches labor studies at Rutgers University.
Schurman noted that the current shortage of workers has forced many employers to raise wages.
“Usually, when they have to do this to hire someone, they have to do it to keep the people they have,” he said. “That way you’ll get some sort of general wage effect.”
Unions can also benefit from frustration among working-class Americans over wages that, adjusted for inflation, have been stagnant for decades. This discontent helped propel President Donald Trump’s election victory in 2016, especially in states where the automobile and steel industries once thrived, as well as strong support for Senator Bernie Sanders, who left. run for president as a Democrat.
“They just haven’t benefited from the economy in the last three decades,” Schurman said of many American workers. “It simply came to our notice then. And if I were a union organizer right now, I would be very excited. ”
During contract talks with Volvo Trucks, workers felt more confident in demanding a better contract because there were other jobs open, said Mitchell Smith, UAW regional director in the south.
President Joe Biden, who has often vowed to help create “well-paid union jobs,” has also appointed a more labor-friendly national labor relations board to resolve disputes with employers.
An expanded footprint could help unions organize in places where they were not welcome before. Citing a growing interest in membership, the 1.4 million-member Teamsters union says its organizing unit is looking at Amazon’s vast warehouse and distribution operations. There is a lot at stake for Teamsters. Amazon is expanding its own distribution network, impacting the heart of the union (transportation and parcel workers) and relying less on United Parcel Service, the largest employer of Teamsters members.
Martin Rosas, a union leader for food and commercial workers united in Kansas and parts of Missouri and Oklahoma, said meat packaging workers took advantage of the opportunity created by labor shortages and the dangers of COVID to negotiate salary increases for some qualified positions.
However, to achieve large-scale victories, unions will need much more time. Last year, there were only eight strikes with 1,000 workers or more, said Joseph A. McCartin, a history professor at Georgetown University who studies unions. From 1960 to 1980, a period in which organized labor had much more influence, the annual average total, according to McCartin, was 282.
The Department of Labor reported in January that the percentage of workers who were union members rose 0.5 percentage points last year to 10.8%. And this was mainly due to the loss of jobs during the pandemic of fewer union workers than non-union workers. Membership in the Union fell by 20% of the workforce in 1983, the last year for which comparable data are available.
Delayed wages have been a painful point for unions for years. McCartin noted that worker productivity has grown faster than the average wage over four decades, with disproportionate benefits for executives and companies, not for grassroots employees.
“The very emergence of organizational efforts,” he said of the unions, “will likely encourage employers to try to get ahead of the curve by offering incentives designed to take the wind out of organizational efforts.”
That said, some experts say it is far from clear that any leverage that workers can earn now will last. When the economy began to emerge from the pandemic, companies opened faster than people went back to work. But Tilly, a UCLA professor, suggested that the job market is likely to slow down in the coming months, and once it does, workers could lose some bargaining power.
“As long as the economy grows (and grows at a relatively vigorous pace), this will continue to help workers and, in this case, treat unions with a better hand as well,” Tilly said. “But we’re not necessarily in a new era that’s going to look exactly the same in recent months.”
____
Krisher reported from Detroit.
___
Follow AP coverage of how the coronavirus pandemic is transforming the economy at: https://apnews.com/hub/changing-economy