THE ANDERSON FILES LABOR UPSURGE PROMOTES DEMOCRACY AND PROSPERITY

BY DAVE ANDERSON

We had “Hot Labor Summer” across the country, and working-class discontent continues to smolder. Health care employees, flight attendants, pilots, television and film writers and actors are either on strike or threatening to strike amid labor agreement negotiations.

Workers at Amazon and Starbucks have won amazing victories despite the companies’ multi-million dollar campaigns to intimidate and harass them.

During an inaugural “State of the Unions” address on Aug. 29, AFL-CIO president Liz Shuler said there have been more than 200 strikes so far in 2023, 10 times more than there were two years ago. She partly blamed “corporate greed and inequality.”

AFL-CIO’s “Executive Paywatch” found that the average pay for a CEO of an S&P 500 company in 2022 was $16.7 million, more than 270 times the amount the average worker earned.

As part of her speech, Shuler discussed findings from a national poll of registered voters that showed twothirds of Americans support unions, with voters under 30 showing “near universal approval” at 88%.

The U.S. Treasury recently released a first-of-its-kind report by its Office of Economic Policy on the benefits of unions to the U.S. economy. Here are some of the findings:

● “Middle-class workers reap substantial benefits from unionization. Unions raise the wages of their members by 10%-15%. Unions also improve fringe benefits and workplace procedures such as retirement plans, workplace grievance policies and predictable scheduling.”

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