CHICAGO (WBBM NEWSRADIO) — On Wednesday, the Hollywood writers strike reached its 100th day, but they’re not the only ones walking off the job. Over the past few years, the number of workers who have gone on strike, unionized or walked off has reached a level not seen in the U.S. in decades.
On this week’s deep dive episode of Looped In: Chicago, WBBM’s Arielle Raveney dug into what’s driving this spike in strikes and unionizations. Raveney spoke with Dr. Steve Macek, department chair of media communications studies at North Central College, and Kim Kelly, journalist and author of the book “Fight Like Hell: The Untold History of American Labor.”
Both Kelly and Macek pointed to the same inflection point: The COVID-19 pandemic.
Kelly said workers from a wide range of industries — including health care, food service, food retail (think: grocery stores), shipping and more — got an “up close and personal view of how important their work is.” She added that having this experience led to a change in what workers were willing to accept.
As the country shifted back toward pre-pandemic norms, though, Kelly noted that a lot of the appreciation that these workers felt went away.
“It went back to normal,” she said. “By which I mean it went back to being awful.”
For so-called “essential workers,” Macek noted that their experiences of laboring through the worst days of the pandemic contributed to a sense that they weren't being fairly compensated.
“Many of them were working jobs that did not have health insurance, and they saw the disparity between their bosses who were working remotely,” Macek said. “The fact that they were kind of out on the front lines … earning a lot less and and and without the benefit of health insurance, they started to get upset.”
It wouldn’t be the first time that increased unionizations and strikes followed a major event. After World War I and World War II, there was an uptick in labor revolutions and legislation meant to protect workers, such as the 1947 Taft-Hartley Substantive Provisions Act, which outlined six new unfair labor practices. America’s last labor uprising of this scale was in the ’70s, at the tail end of the Vietnam War.
Although COVID wasn’t a war in the traditional sense, Kelly said she doesn’t believe we would have seen such a swell in the workers rights movement without the experiences of the pandemic.
“People aren’t necessarily willing to put up with nonsense anymore,” Kelly said. “People have really gotten a very clear view of how important their labor is [and] how nothing works without them. I think that is underpinning the moment we’re in right now.”
You can listen to the full episode in the audio player embedded in this story. You can also find this episode on the Audacy app or wherever you get your podcasts.
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