I learned a clear lesson from covering labor activity in Atlanta and nationally this year: Leverage is incredibly important for growing the labor movement. And that isn’t just for initial union elections, but big contract renewal fights as well.
National union wins drew the headlines this year. Organizing drives and strikes from the Writers Guild of America (WGA), Screen Actors Guild (SAG-AFTRA), and United Auto Workers (UAW) workers pushed TV, movie, and streaming producers and the Big Three automakers to return to the negotiating table for historic contract wins with better pay, benefits and working conditions for union members. The International Brotherhood of Teamsters at United Parcel Service, and the railroad unions also won big contracts this year.
But labor organizing continued to gain momentum in the union-averse South. Georgia has one of the lowest union membership rates in the country – making up just 4.4% of the workforce in 2022, compared with 10.1% nationally. (The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics will release 2023 figures in January.)
Undeterred, new unions like the Union of Southern Service Workers (USSW) and Starbucks Workers United (SBWU) continued their efforts to build the same type of momentum and leverage. USSW organized actions with workers at Dunkin’ Donuts, Waffle House and Burger King, while SBWU organized one-day strikes throughout the year.
These workers are pushing for better wages, updated equipment and, for Waffle House, stronger safety precautions and protections for workers. All say Atlanta’s high cost of living is completely out of step with their low service industry wages.
Local organizing momentum
Most recently, SBWU launched the Red Cup Rebellion on Nov. 16 – Starbucks’ biggest sales day of the year – to turn up the momentum and pressure on the coffee giant to negotiate contracts with the over 380 U.S. Starbucks stores that have unionized over the last two years.
Meanwhile, Emory University graduate student-workers voted by a landslide to unionize, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) announced in November. That historic win – after two years of organizing – made EmoryUnite! the first student-worker union at a private university in Georgia. It’s only the second in the South after Duke University grad students voted to unionize in August.
Fully 92% of the participating grad student-workers chose to join EmoryUnite! under the umbrella of the Service Employees’ International Union (SEIU). Emory Unite! organizers are hoping they can turn that momentum and leverage into a smooth contract negotiation process with Emory. They say they hope to have a contract in place by next fall with better wages, and expanded health coverage and accommodations for graduate student-workers who are parents.
What I’ve seen over the past two years of covering labor is that in 2022, Atlanta service workers at behemoths like Starbucks and Amazon were just starting the fight for their first union, while this year seasoned unions nationally pushed for big, bold contracts and won.
Will the momentum from the big established unions’ national contract wins increase leverage for newly unionized and non-unionized service workers in the South? We’ll find out in the new year.
Newly empowered labor movement
In 2022, covering the emerging labor movement in Georgia felt like reporting on many little fires, as new unions like the Union of Southern Service Workers and Starbucks Workers’ United worked hard to stitch together a more cohesive movement.
I spoke to labor leaders and organizers last year who bluntly characterized the labor momentum in the South, post-COVID-19, as small actions by many local workers learning how to navigate the first steps of labor organizing. Educating workers on holding card checks, initial union elections, and contract negotiations – plus, at times, limited work stoppages, was a major focus.
Some national actions developed local footprints at companies like Starbucks and even Amazon. But many of the workers and organizers I talked to were green and still working on the basics – pushing for their first union election and then, if they won, learning how to push for a contract. For instance, Creature Comforts employees in Athens formed a new craft beer union in January 2023, but then had to struggle for a union election.
This year, there’s been a shift. In 2023, the labor story in the South was still very much about employees banding together with a few coworkers and learning the ropes of organizing – whether through the one-day walkouts for better working conditions at Waffle House and Burger King – or actually unionizing.
But we’ve also seen many national unions hold big actions that spread to the South. Southern workers are seeing huge national unions organize and win. Why? Because those big unions know how to apply pressure.
Big national wins spark local energy
The first seeds for national unions seizing leverage were sewn towards the end of 2022, when railroad workers threatened to strike during the December holiday season. Congress used its power under the Railway Labor Act to quash the strike, arguing that it would cripple holiday package and freight delivery, but rank-and-file workers continued to push for a better contract.
The jockeying between railroad owners, unions, rank-and-file workers, and Congress eventually resulted in a contract that workers ratified in early 2023. To get there, the railroad unions exercised considerable leverage and power.
The railroad fight played out very differently from the organizing battle I’d spent most of 2022 covering: Starbucks. Workers at the coffee giant succeeded in unionizing store by store across the country, but the individual stores have struggled to mobilize the leverage to bring Starbucks to the negotiating table. Unionized Starbucks workers in Georgia and nationally are still grappling with Starbucks to negotiate an actual contract – two years after the first Starbucks store unionized.
WGA and SAG Strikes had public Support
This year, WGA writers, SAG actors, and UAW workers went on strike to wrest historic contract gains from corporate employers accustomed to unions making concessions to preserve jobs.
The WGA and then SAG strikes shut down production for film, TV and streaming shows–which also meant lost income for non-striking production crews in Georgia and elsewhere.
Union members showed enough resolve to convince the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) that the strikes could go on indefinitely. That solidarity gave them the leverage they needed to win key demands over pay and benefits. The industry-wide work stoppages caused discord among TV, film and streaming producers and studio owners and resulted in historic contracts for WGA and SAG workers.
The public and other unions also supported the strikes – notably the Teamsters, who refused to cross picket lines for struck WGA and SAG productions. An August Gallup poll found that 72% of Americans backed the WGA writers and 67% backed the SAG actors. It also reported that 67% of Americans support labor unions overall.
That’s a big change from decades of dwindling support for unions, amid criticisms about corruption, ineffectiveness, and too much cooperation with management at the expense of workers. In another shift, 34% of respondents said unions will get stronger–up from only 19% just five years ago.
UAW’s national push for non-union auto workers
It was a similar story for the UAW’s contract fight, with one big change. After winning markedly more generous contracts from the Big Three auto manufacturers (General Motors, Stellantis and Ford), the UAW is pushing further.
It is mobilizing non-unionized workers at electric vehicle (EV) battery plants and other carmakers to “Stand Up” and push for union elections in 2024. We’ll see how that plays out in Atlanta and the rest of Georgia, where there are considerably more employees for Asian and German auto manufacturers and EV battery plants than for the Big 3 carmakers – precisely because of the South’s non-union status.
Rank-and-file workers standing together
For the big contract wins nationally, the story this year was also about rank-and-file workers pushing back against their union representatives. After both the railroad unions and the Teamsters union for UPS came to tentative agreements with management, it fell to the rank-and-file workers to vote on whether to ratify them. In both cases, they put their union representatives’ feet to the fire to get the best deal possible.
Four of the 12 craft railroad unions voted down the first tentative contract agreement that their union leaders had made with the railroads in September 2022. Despite a 24% wage increase over five years, the initial deal offered no sick days and didn’t address chronic understaffing–priorities for many workers who said understaffing increased the risk of both injuries and train accidents.
Again, the rank-and-file workers had leverage, both with their unions and the railroads. If they didn’t see enough value in the deal or felt like their representatives sold them out, strikes loomed. Those ‘no’ votes from the rank-and-file workers are what made the railroad unions eligible to strike on Dec. 9, 2022, under the Railway Labor Act.
We’ll see who can build coalitions and create more leverage in 2024. I’m learning, alongside many Atlanta workers and organizers, just how big the “collective” part of collective action and bargaining is. If these unions continue to grow locally and learn from the giants of the space, we may see more wins and contracts favorable to workers as the labor landscape in the South changes.