The Faces of a New Union Movement | The New Yorker
▻https://www.newyorker.com/culture/photo-booth/the-faces-of-a-new-union-movement
Haag is part of a wave of young workers who have been unionizing in sectors with little or no tradition of unions: art museums, including the Guggenheim and the New Museum, but also tech companies, digital-media brands, political campaigns, even cannabis shops. At Google, around ninety contract workers in Pittsburgh recently formed a union—a significant breakthrough, even if they represent just a tiny fraction of the company’s workforce. More than thirty digital publications, including Vox, Vice, Salon, Slate, and HuffPost, have unionized. (The editorial staff of The New Yorker unionized in 2018.) Last March, Bernie Sanders’s campaign became the first major-party Presidential campaign in history with a unionized workforce; the campaigns of Eric Swalwell, Julián Castro, and Elizabeth Warren unionized soon after. At Grinnell College, in Iowa, students working in the school’s dining hall unionized in 2016, becoming one of the nation’s only undergraduate-student labor unions. Sam Xu, the union’s twenty-one-year-old former president, said, “Mark Zuckerberg was running Facebook out of his dorm room. I’m running a union out of my dorm room.”
The American labor movement has been reinvigorated in recent years, with the teacher-led Red for Ed strikes, the General Motors walkout, and the Fight for $15’s push to raise the minimum wage. A Gallup poll last summer found that sixty-four per cent of Americans approve of unions—one of the highest ratings recorded in the past fifty years. The highest rate of approval came from young people: sixty-seven per cent among eighteen-to-thirty-four-year-olds. Rebecca Givan, an associate professor of labor studies at Rutgers University, said that many young people are interested in joining unions because they’re “feeling the pinch”—many “have a tremendous amount of student debt, and, if they’re living in cities, they’re struggling to afford housing.” Givan added that many feel considerable insecurity about their jobs. “The industries that they’re organizing in are volatile,” she said. Jake Rosenfeld, an associate professor of sociology at Washington University, said, “Underemployed college-educated workers aren’t buying what was until recently the prevailing understanding of our economy: that hard work and a college degree was a ticket to a stable, well-paying job.”