Labor’s Reawakening

Over a decade and a half ago, Josh Marshall described the phenomenon that he came to call “dominance politics”. The purpose of dominance politics is to attack, attack, attack, and make it appear that the opponent has not fought back. To quote Marshall, “Someone who can’t or won’t defend themselves certainly isn’t someone you can depend upon to defend you”. (As a side note, the “popularism” debate that is currently roiling the Democratic consultant class in some ways revolves around whether Democrats have fought back hard enough against Republicans dominance politics over the years.) Republicans’ decades-long game of dominance politics reached its apogee with Donald Trump. Trump is the supreme master of dominance politics, which is not surprising when you consider he is a serial sexual predator, and he has used his mastery to destroy Democrats and Republicans alike. As Marshall also notes, “the inherent appeal of power and the ability to dominate others…has a deep appeal to America’s authoritarian right”. And I would not be the first to note that, for much of America, the Trump presidency, and now even its aftermath, has been akin to being in an abusive relationship.

For many American workers, the Trump presidency just brought to the political arena an element of abuse that they were enduring at the workplace. Ever since Reagan destroyed PATCO and the emergence of globalization, American workers have been abused by their employers at all levels of the wage scale. The wages for full-time employees at Walmart and other large retailers still leave a family of three earning below the poverty line, leaving American taxpayers to actually subsidize those workers. The psychological distress and family disruption caused by unpredictable work schedules has been well documented. Wage theft is rampant, with the Economic Policy Institute estimating that workers lose over $8 billion a year to wage theft, misclassification of jobs, and minimum wage violations in just the 10 most populous states.

Even under revised regulation, truckers can work 70 hour weeks and long-haulers only are required to be given four hours of rest from 1am to 4am on two consecutive nights as well as potentially forced to do 11 hours straight of driving. (Wage theft is also rampant in the trucking business, with LA and Long Beach port drivers recently winning a $30 million settlement from XPO Logistics for paying them below the minimum wage.)  Amazon drivers have to resort to peeing in bottles and even defecating inside their trucks in order to maintain the delivery quotas set by the company. Poultry workers wear diapers because they are prevented from taking bathroom breaks.

Such employee abuse is not just limited to lower wage industries. Up until the mid-1980s, medical interns were expected to work 90-100 hour weeks with shifts sometimes lasting as long as 36 hours. Current recommendations still allow 80 hour weeks and up to 24 hour shifts. At Goldman Sachs, junior bankers recently complained of 100 hour weeks, describing their working conditions as “beyond the level of ‘hard-working’, this is inhumane/abuse”. Goldman management responded by giving them Saturdays off, which was probably routinely violated and only left workers who actually took that day with less time to complete the same amount of work. (In light of such abuse, it really shouldn’t be shocking that Wall Street produces sociopaths like Steve Bannon and Martin Shkreli.)

For years, employers have had the upper hand, treating employees as easily replaceable parts and threatening workers with moving jobs to lower wage parts of the country or offshoring them entirely. As Harold Myerson notes, since Reagan, “major corporations actually began provoking strikes because they felt they could either get the union to accept far worse pay and working conditions…or just let the members go and hire replacements”. But now it appears that the tables have turned and that the pandemic has finally created an environment where workers are refusing to tolerate employer abuse any longer. The latest unemployment report highlighted what is being called the “Great Resignation”, with workers leaving their jobs in droves across virtually all industries.

Since April, a record number of Americans have quit their job in each successive month. In August alone, nearly 7% of all hotel and restaurant workers told their employer to shove it. During the pandemic, low wage workers who have been told for decades that they are expendable and easily replaced suddenly became “essential” and “heroes”. But their pay and the working conditions that put them at a significant risk of death certainly never reflected that status, so they are leaving their jobs in droves, presumably filling the record number of job openings in other businesses that offer better pay and less abuse. As one worker declared, “when you realize your boss will kill you, it changes y[ou]r relationship to work”. The wave of resignations  may actually be building on itself as employers find it difficult to replace workers under current conditions and wages and are forced to make the remaining workers do even more to keep the business going. This additional burden creates even more burnout in existing staff, who then also quit. In addition, retail employees are exhausted by the abuse they are receiving from customers whose nerves have also been fried by the pandemic. It’s a perfect storm of abuse leading to a massive exodus from jobs.

Beyond the essential workers, others who have been forced to stay at home during the pandemic may have also discovered just how out of whack their work-life balance had become. As Derek Thompson writes, because of the pandemic “[m]ore families today work at home, cook at home, care for kids at home, entertain themselves at home, and even school their kids at home…By eliminating the office as a physical presence in many (but not all!) families’ lives, the pandemic may have downgraded work as the centerpiece of their identity”. Obviously, government support in the form of pandemic relief checks, rent moratoriums, and student loan payment suspensions made altering employees’ work-life balance far easier, but many may have realized that they can actually get by with less. Thompson continues, “[W]e may instead look back to the pandemic as a crucial inflection point in something more fundamental: Americans’ attitudes toward work. Since early last year, many workers have had to reconsider the boundaries between boss and worker, family time and work time, home and office”.

The current wave of resignations is also being matched by a wave of strikes across multiple industries, another indication of workers’ intolerance for abuse and the chance to improve their conditions. “Striketober”, as it is being called, has seen work stoppages and strike votes among Hollywood TV and film crews, Alabama coal miners, John Deere factory workers, Buffalo health care employees, California nurses, and Kellogg and Nabisco cereal producers and bakers. An even more surprising indication of increased worker power is the recent Gallup poll that showed that public approval of unions stands at 65%, the highest level since 1965. All this labor action follows successful teacher strikes and unionization in the media industry over the last couple of years.

This record support for unions also coincides with what initially appears to be the most pro-worker administration in generations. While the PRO act will once again probably die in Congress, the administration looks prepared to take on the massive misclassification of jobs and rampant wage theft, real anti-trust enforcement, and expanding overtime regulations that died with the election of Trump in 2016, in addition to finding ways to make it easier for workers to organize.

At the same time Americans’ attitude toward work is apparently changing, the pandemic is also highlighting the critical weaknesses of the globalized, just-in-time economy that has been built over the last few decades. The links in the supply chain are weak and fragile and there are virtually no redundancies built into the system. The problems are exacerbated by the decades-long failure of anti-trust enforcement resulting in highly concentrated industries in which there is little actual competition. Hurricanes that devastate Puerto Rico create a shortage of IV bags because that’s where most of them are manufactured. COVID outbreaks in Taiwan create a shortage of semiconductors. A coup in Guinea creates a shortage of bauxite needed to manufacture aluminum. COVID, flooding, or an economic downturn in China can create shortages of goods around the world, simply because China has become integral to much of the world’s supply chain.

The current supply chain disruptions are not just due to increased post-pandemic demand or shortages of employees, but are a structural problem of globalization. As David Dayen writes, “With its thin margins and consolidated structure, the globalization of production magnifies disruptions of any type”. Matt Stoller adds, “The consolidation of power over supply chains in the hands of Wall Street, and the thinning out of how we make and produce things over forty years in the name of efficiency, has made our economy much less resilient to shocks. These shortages are the result”. There is now a fear that, even post-pandemic, supply chain disruption and resulting shortages will be with us for years to come. As one supply chain software executive declared, “There is no end in sight. Everybody should be assuming we are going to have an extended period of disruptions”.

Harold Myerson has compared the current moment to the post-World War I and post-World War II labor revolutions in America. In both cases, Americans who had put their life on the line and been labeled as “heroes” returned to the work force but refused to accept the jobs that were on offer. Today’s “heroes”, to quote Myerson, “are often in some of the most low-paying, no benefit, and often unable to control one’s work hours…to which workers’ response is ‘We don’t want to go back'”. Combine employees’ reassessment of work with the most pro-worker administration in decades and the structural failings of the existing globalized, just-in-time economy, and we might just be on the verge of seeing the greatest transformation for workers since the destruction of the Reagan era, this time in labor’s favor. One can only hope so.