Diverse Workforce Reaps Benefits of Strikes as Contracts Kick In

Workers are beginning to see the wins that the swell of strikes in 2023 produced, as pay raises and other benefits uplift a broader population of jobholders than in decades past.

Labor activism fueled by post-pandemic resentment boiled over in 2023, with more than a half million people walking off the job, according to Bloomberg Law’s database of work stoppages. The US Department of Labor recorded 4.5 million lost workdays in October due to strikes, the highest in 40 years.

The beneficiaries of these new collective bargaining agreements are also increasingly diverse. Women and people of color are unionizing at higher rates than white men, comprising nearly two thirds of union-represented workers, a Bloomberg Law analysis of federal data found. That means earnings from the contracts will be distributed across a wider cross section of the workforce even as overall union membership continues to atrophy.

The 2023 strike wave is representative of the country, said Gregory Floyd, president of Teamsters Local 237 in New York.

“There are a lot of first time, first generation union members who didn’t really understand what being in the union is,” said Floyd, who is Black. “They landed in these unions jobs but didn’t really know what it means. This is their introduction.”

Recipients include people like Louis Maldonado, a United Parcel Service Inc. worker in California’s San Gabriel Valley and a local shop steward. His $5-an-hour raise, including additional pay for his nearly two decades of service, has allowed him to work part-time and coach his 11-year-old daughter’s softball team.

“Instead of having to milk the clock for hours,” Maldonado said, “I’m cool with just getting three or four. I’m OK with that now.”

Pickets to Paychecks

It’s a story that has unspooled over miles of winding picket lines, including one on a weathered road outside a Jeep plant in Toledo, Ohio, in September, where a group of mostly young Black and Latino workers wondered aloud how they would afford school supplies on meager strike pay.

Workers like these are increasingly the face of the US labor movement—Black and Latino workers made up 31% of union-represented workers in 2022, compared to a quarter in 2002—and stand to make big gains from the new deals.

“It’s sort of a Renaissance,” Floyd said. “Now everyone is paying attention.”

Three months after reaching tentative agreements with Ford Motor Co., General Motors Co., and Stellantis N.V., nearly half of the United Auto Workers union’s 25% pay raise has kicked in on top of a $5,000 ratification bonus. Over the next four years, base pay will increase to more than $40 an hour. The companies also significantly upped the amount they’re contributing to retirement investment funds, but didn’t bring back defined benefit pensions like the union wanted.

After the longest strike in Hollywood history—118 days that ground film production and shows to a halt—TV and film actors have been receiving their 7% raise since Nov. 9. The deal also included $40 million for actors in streaming-service shows to recover lost pay from reruns they would otherwise get on network television.

SAG-AFTRA members and supporters picket outside Paramount Studios during their strike against the Hollywood studios, in Los Angeles, Calif., on Nov. 8.

Photo by Robyn Beck/AFP via Getty Images

For every worker that went on strike, others were able to win better contracts by simply threatening to do the same. Maldonado and his coworkers attended demonstrations but never walked out; the Teamsters reached an eleventh-hour deal in July with the shipping giant that provides an average of $170,000 a year in pay and benefits for drivers, in addition to raises for warehouse workers.

And Las Vegas hospitality workers won a $2 billion contract last month, negotiating right up to the deadline but never walking off the job.

The same was true for West Coast dock workers, who won a pay increase of nearly a third after more than a year of grinding negotiations. No strike was issued.

“The biggest thing that workers achieved this year is an understanding that they can successfully increase their expectations,” said Stuart Applebaum, president of the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union. “And I see that everywhere.”

More Than Money

As strikes dragged on, it became clear that workers were motivated by more than pay raises, especially concerning leaps in technology changes that could reshape their jobs.

“Money alone does not cause strikes or organizing because the employer could prevent it by just giving a little more money,” said Kate Bronfenbrenner, director of labor education research at the Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations. “These issues that workers stayed out for were AI, or electric vehicles, or health and safety, or paid time off.”

Even after wages were settled, the UAW remained on strike to win representation rights at major electric vehicle battery plants, gaining an important foothold as the industry begins shifting away from gas-powered cars. It negotiated the reopening of an assembly plant in Belvidere, Ill., and the construction of a new battery plant at the site.

SAG-AFTRA members won the right to deny the use of their likeness for artificial intelligence generation—and the right to be paid for it.

And yet some feel there’s more to be done. Maldonado’s UPS hub is the slowest it’s been in years at peak holiday season, he said, attributing the lag to the company limiting hours to avoid paying more expensive overtime under the new contract. UPS Spokesman Malcolm Berkley said there has been no effort to limit hours, adding that any slowdown would be due to lower package volumes.

It doesn’t affect him much, Maldonado said. But some of the newer workers in his union who make $21 an hour aren’t convinced they came out ahead.

“There’s mixed emotions, mixed feelings,” he said.