The gains in union membership in 2023 were driven entirely by workers under the age of 45, says Heidi Shierholz, president of the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute.
“After you are kicked around for long enough and you feel like you’ve done everything in your power to be a partner with an employer, at some point you’ve got to fight back. Workers are realizing their power because they have been pushed so far."
For May Day, we talked to young workers—in tech, retail, food service, and more—about what brought them to the labor movement. Those under 35 overwhelmingly approve of organized labor—77 percent.
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Unions have narrowed class and ideological divides to make Generation Z America's most pro-union generation.
Of all the employers that have seen union drives over the past year, Chipotle—with 100,000 employees across 3,000 stores, and long-term plans to double its footprint in North America—is the most similar to Starbucks.
Young people in the labor movement want to bargain on climate issues in contract negotiations.
In light of the youth-driven surge of union drives at Starbucks, Amazon, Apple and elsewhere, the AFL-CIO – the main US’s labor federation – is facing growing pressure to undertake a bolder effort to help today’s burst of unionizing expand far faster
Based on current filings alone, the Starbucks Union is already on track to have 6,400 workers at 230 stores.
Between 2019 and 2021, the overall percentage of U.S. union members stayed flat. But the percentage of workers ages 25-34 who are union members rose from 8.8% to 9.4%, or around 68,000 workers, according to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics.
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