A Great Week for American Labor [View all]

[BeckyDem]

Today on TAP: Doctors in Philly and auto (well, actually, bus) workers in rural Georgia both go union big-time.

BY HAROLD MEYERSON MAY 16, 2023

Two signal union victories last week suggest that, against all odds, the American labor movement may have a future. The first confirmed a new trend in worker organizing; the second could mean that the government has finally found a way to help workers to join a union.

Residents and fellows at the University of Pennsylvania’s Penn Med hospital voted 892 to 110 to join SEIU’s Committee of Interns and Residents. The election was further validation that workers who can’t easily be replaced (in this case, doctors) are flocking to unions these days. Just on the U of P campus, museum workers unionized recently, and TAs and RAs are expected to during the spring term.

Ever since employers realized in the 1970s and ’80s that they could fire replaceable (chiefly, nonprofessional) workers who sought to go union, successful organizing campaigns, even in a relatively pro-union city like Philly, have ground to a halt. But independent professionals like physicians are responding to the corporatization of medicine by acting like the proletarians of yore (i.e., going union). The victory for 1,400 residents and interns was the largest unionization of any kind that had taken place in Philadelphia in the past 53 years.


The second of last week’s union victories is even more astonishing. Last Friday, largely African American workers at a rural school bus factory in Southwest Georgia joined the United Steelworkers by the decisive margin of 697 to 435. As a New York Times report noted, the landmark legislation and agency rulings of the Biden presidency have tilted the playing field just a bit in the workers’ favor.

https://prospect.org/blogs-and-newsletters/tap/2023-05-16-great-week-american-labor/