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For the past 35 years, the Shepherd Express has worked with Project Censored to help get these important, yet seldom reported, stories out to the American people. We have great respect for the researchers and reporters at Project Censored and are privileged to be able to work with them.
We are posting this year’s top under reported stories in count down fashion toward number one. Today: Censored Story #6.
6. Unions Won More Than 70 Percent of Their Elections in 2022, and Their Victories are Being Driven by Workers of Color
Unions won more than 70 percent of their certification elections in 2022, according to reporting by NPR and The Conversation, and workers of color were responsible for 100% of union growth, according to an analysis by the Economic Policy Institute reported by Payday Report and the New Republic. 2,510 petitions for union representation were filed with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) in fiscal year 2022 (Oct. 1, 2021-Sept. 30, 2022), up 53 % from Fiscal Year 2021; 1,249 certification elections were held, with 72% voting to certify a union as their collective bargaining agent.
“The entire increase in unionization in 2022 was among workers of color—workers of color saw an increase of 231,000, while white workers saw a decrease of 31,000,” EPI wrote in a Feb. 2023 press release. EPI also noted that “Survey data show that nearly half of nonunion workers (48%) would vote to unionize their workplace if they could.”
That means that more than 60 million workers wanted to join a union but couldn’t. The Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act and the Public Service Freedom to Negotiate Act provide crucial reforms that would strengthen workers’ rights to form a union and engage in collective bargaining.” It passed the House in 2020 and 2021 but died in the Senate, where it needed 60 votes to pass because of the filibuster.
“Seventy-one percent of Americans now support unions according to Gallup—a level of support not seen since 1965,” Project Censored noted. “Dismantling existing barriers to union organizing and collective bargaining is crucial to generating a more prosperous, equitable economy,” EPI concluded.
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More than a quarter of 2022 union elections, 354, were held at Starbucks, Marick Masters explained in his January 2023 article for The Conversation. “Workers at Starbucks prevailed in four out of every five elections. Workers at Chipotle, Trader Joe’s and Apple unionized for the first time, while workers at Microsoft and Wells Fargo also had wins,” Project Censored reported.
Union activity spikes during times of social unrest, Masters reported. Unionization rose from 7.6 to 19.2% from 1934 to 1939, during the Great Depression, and from 20 to 27% between 1941and 1945, during World War II. “Masters described the current wave of union activity as driven by record levels of economic inequality and continued mobilization of workers in “essential industries,” such as healthcare, food, and public safety, who were thrust into harm’s way during the global pandemic,” Project Censored noted. “Whereas Republican and Democratic politicians often separate concerns over working conditions and pay from issues of identity, these data demonstrate how identity and workers’ rights are closely connected,” Project Censored added.
“Unionization and labor struggles are direct mechanisms to better accomplish racial and social equality; the ability for people to afford to live happy and dignified lives is inherently tied to their ability to enjoy fundamental social and civil rights within those lives, too,” Prem Thakker noted at the New Republic.
Despite these gains, “the power of organized labor is nowhere close to what it once was,” Project Censored wrote. “As Masters pointed out, more than a third of workers were unionized in the 1950s, whereas only a tenth were in 2021. Before the 1980s, there were typically more than 5,000 union elections in any given year, and as recently as 1980, there were two hundred major work stoppages [over 1,000 workers],” compared to just 20 in 2022, which was still 25% above the average over the past 16 years.
“Corporate media coverage of the labor resurgence of 2022 was highly selective and, in some ways, misleading,” Project Censored reported. There’ve been hundreds of articles on union organizing at Starbucks and Amazon and among graduate students; “Yahoo republished Masters’ The Conversation article about union success in elections; and Vox, Bloomberg Law and the Washington Post all remarked on organized labor’s recent string of certification vote victories,” they noted. “Yet corporate coverage of current labor organizing often fails to address the outsized role played by workers of color in union growth.”
Nor has it placed recent union successes in the historical context of prolonged decline, largely due to private employers’ heavy-handed efforts to undermine organizing campaigns and labor laws that strongly favor employers.
