Recent victories for unions at Amazon, Starbucks and Apple stores suggest to some a resurgence of America’s long declining labour movement. Amid deepening labour shortages, soaring rents and more concern about class divides, this could be a time for a union renaissance — especially for large, well-financed firms.
The politics will be complex. Democrats, traditionally pro-union, face an embarrassing conundrum, since the companies most likely to face continued union drives — Amazon, Apple, Google and Starbucks tend to be among their big money funders. The recent Amazon vote of a union in one of the company’s high pressure, tech-monitored warehouses was also a slap in the face for Jeff Bezos, a key funder of progressive causes and owner of the gentry liberal mouthpiece, The Washington Post.
On top of these political challenges, the pandemic has had a mixed effect on union drives. Over the last two years, private sector union membership has actually declined, and younger workers’ total unionisation rates now approach 4% of the workforce. In 2021 strike activity was actually well below those of previous years.
But conditions could be changing, in large part due to a mounting labour shortage. U.S. population growth has dropped from 20% in the eighties to less than 5% in the last decade. What’s more, the number of new workers has fallen by two million over the past decade, creating what the consulting firm EMSI calls a “sansdemic” (i.e. without enough people). This could provide an ideal moment for unions to press their case that they do indeed generate higher wages; certainly the public is more supportive than in the past, with 65% favouring union efforts.
As the economy opens, there are massive shortages across the employment front — from nurses and delivery people to farm labourers, retail and hotel workers, truckers and restaurant workers. Nearly 90% of companies recently surveyed by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce blamed a lack of available workers for slowing the economy, more than twice as many as blamed pandemic restrictions. Such labour shortages exert wage pressure, which has resulted in corporations like Target and Walmart announcing sweeping wage increases.
Chase DiFeliciantonio reports in the March 28, 2020 San Francisco Chronicle that efforts to attract office workers back to downtown San Francisco, and consequently to restore the busy “happy hours” at bars are faltering. “Monday and especially Fridays are seeing less foot traffic downtown, which makes midweek after-work happy hours more likely. Some people still working from home are also choosing neighborhood saloons closer to home rather than venturing to other parts of town.”
A financial district bar owner characterized the phenomenon of a packed bar after work is “not dead, but in a coma.”
A bartender aid that “Thursday is the new Friday.”
The article also referred to research findings predicting that workers will use “three midweek days for in-office work, while working remotely on Mondays and Fridays.”
In his second appearance on the Power Hungry Podcast, Kotkin discusses his recent article for Quillette, “The New Great Game,” how China and Russia are allying against the West, why America needs “a new nationalism” to counter this alliance, how California’s administrative state is crushing the poor and the middle class, Michael Shellenberger’s gubernatorial bid, energy, housing, and why despite his many concerns, he remains bullish on the future of the United States.
Joel Kotkin is a demographer, journalist, author, and executive editor of NewGeography.com.
California poses many challenges for the middle- and working-class. As a result, there is a significant migration of people, jobs, and opportunities— both within and outside the state.
Who is leaving California, and who is no longer seeking to move to the golden state? Are there incentives for job creation and how can the state remain competitive?
Join Joel Kotkin, alongside Jorge De la Roca, and Marshall Toplansky as we tackle these questions and more. This expert panel will offer an overview of current demographic trends in California, followed by a discussion around future implications for the state and possible solutions to reinvigorate the California dream. The event will conclude with audience Q&A.
Date: Thursday, March 24, 2022 Time: 10:00AM - 10:45AM Pacific
Statistics Canada reports that remote work reached a pandemic era recently.
“Since the onset of the pandemic, the Labour Force Survey has been tracking the proportion of non-absent workers who worked from home. During the week of January 9 to 15, more than 4 in 10 (43.0%) of those employed worked most of their hours from home, the highest proportion since the initial lockdown in April 2020. Among those who did not usually work any of their hours at home, 30.3% worked at home for at least part of the week.”
Automotive News reports that Nissan will produce two new electric vehicles in metropolitan Jackson, Mississippi at its suburban Canton assembly plant. Nissan announced that: “it will invest $500 million to transform its … assembly plant into a ‘center for EV manufacturing and technology’” In addition, “The investment will include the addition of battery pack assembly operations in Canton.”
The plant will produce Nissan and Infiniti models. Read more here.
Joel Kotkin, Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and Marshall Toplansky, Clinical Assistant Professor of Management Science at Chapman University, plus Holland & Knight Partner Jennifer Hernandez and Raley’s President and CEO Keith Knopf join a Bay Area Council webinar to discuss how we can restore the California dream. The webinar was moderated by Jim Wunderman, President and CEO, Bay Area Council.
"We may remain, as we are now, nominally democratic, but be ruled by a technocratic class empowered by greater powers of surveillance than those enjoyed by even the noisiest of dictatorships.”
Those words were written by Joel Kotkin in a recently published essay on democracy’s demise. Donald Trump is not the villain of the piece, as most pundits want us to believe, nor other populists outside the United States. Rather, Kotkin argues that the withering of democratic process and institutions reflects the deeper transformation of American and European societies: the emergence of a ruling technocracy; the use of the pandemic and the environmental crisis to constrain individual rights; the new concentration of power in governments, and the growing distance between the governing and the governed. All of it is made worse by the mind-boggling concentration of economic wealth, which is as much an issue in China as it is in the United States.
Kotkin’s analysis deserves our attention. What do you think—not about Trump, but about democracy? Who can do what to bend the arc away from the dystopian end game that he and others describe?
The Tällberg Foundation, launched in 1981, exists to explore the issues that are challenging —and changing— our societies. Today, those challenges are profound: the world that we have known since the mid 20th century, which produced unprecedented peace as well as human advance, is changing at a pace and in directions that threaten to evolve towards Orwellian dystopia.
Infinite Suburbia is the culmination of the MIT Norman B. Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism's yearlong study of the future of suburban development. Find out more.
Authored by Aaron Renn, The Urban State of Mind: Meditations on the City is the first Urbanophile e-book, featuring provocative essays on the key issues facing our cities, including innovation, talent attraction and brain drain, global soft power, sustainability, economic development, and localism.
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