Celebrating worker wins in America

I talk a lot about how much we are getting screwed over in this increasingly corrupt and authoritarian world, but not everything is doom and gloom. In the absence of real representation by elected politicians, workers are beginning to collectively take matters into their own hands, and fighting for what they are deserved. The most recent and significant examples of this are the unionization of 20 Starbucks locations and an Amazon distribution warehouse in America.

You might ask yourself a) why should I care about the union movement if I am not in a union or because I am an educated, white-collar worker, and b) why should I care about these movements in a country that I don't live in? Let me explain...

Firstly, if you do not own the means of production that pay your wages, you are like most of us and have more in common with a minimum wage worker or a trades person or a truck driver, than you have with a landlord, a banker, or an executive. This is true even if you are a people manager, an engineer, a software developer, or even a dentist or a doctor. If you do not set your own wage, you are part of the broad working class.

Secondly, despite it's decline, America is still the economic and cultural capital of the world. This is especially true for the West and even more so for Canada. In fact, our trading relationship is the largest of any two countries in the world. Thus, Canada and America are more connected than any other two independently-established countries in the world.

When wages and working conditions are depressed in America, it makes it a lot harder for workers to demand better here in Canada. This is what I mean by the race to the bottom. If we do not want to keep having to lower our standards to be competitive, we should absolutely care what is happening in America and it is why I so often focus on events transpiring there.

Getting Paid

Workers must rely on what ever wonky calculation our bosses choose to pay us, which is the lowest they can possibly get away with, and we are often told (illegally) to not discuss our wages with our co-workers. The lack of transparency of non-union wages is what leads to disparities in pay between people of different races, genders, and other characteristics. It is not the patriarchy that is the cause of the gender pay gap. It is capitalism and anti-worker, anti-union policies.

More often than not, our pay is dependent on how connected we are and not necessarily how hard we work, or how competent we are. Our wages are certainly not based on the value we provide companies when you consider the immoral amounts of money that CEOs and shareholders are paid out. Remember, any amount of money you are not paid from the value of your labour means you are being exploited, no matter how high your position (let's also not forget that our value is not always measured in dollars).

It is no coincidence that wealth inequality has increased and real wages decreased at the same time as the decline of union membership in America. Beginning in the 1980s and continuing into the 90s, labour laws and corporate regulations were weakened, a shift towards individualism away from collectivism was pushed, and politicians broadly abandoned the working class. We were told that we could individually achieve greater things if we work directly with our employers instead of doing so collectively. On a macro scale, like most neoliberal policies born out of the Reagan/Thatcher/Mulroney era, these all turned out to be lies.

We Are The Working Class

Even if you aren’t in a union and might work in a profession that affords you individual bargaining rights (as I am as an experienced software developer), the existence of unions force companies to compete for workers that may be at unionized workplaces, which forces the treatment of workers up everywhere else. When it becomes harder to pit workers against each other, and companies are forced to use carrots instead of sticks to attract talent, it becomes a net gain for all of us.

Before I was an experienced software developer in a high demand industry, early in my career I realized that getting an education and being a hard worker had little to do with my pay. I don't think I worked at one company that offered me an annual pay raise that was greater than the annual inflation and increased cost of living (and you likely haven't either, especially in this current time of hyperinflation).

This meant that by the time I left the company, I was making less in real dollars than I was when I started there, despite doing everything expected of me. I was privileged enough to be able to get new jobs elsewhere and the pay raises that come with it (this is often the only way an individual can get a real raise), but I recognize just how unsustainable this is on a macro scale.

Winning Back Our Dignity

I am not special and neither are you. But we are people that deserve to be treated equally. We all deserve to be given the equal opportunity for success. We all most certainly deserve to enjoy the fruits of our labour without someone else using their wealth and their political and business connections to exploit us.

Unions won’t solve the aforementioned problems of neoliberal, capitalism-rooted corruption and authoritarianism on its own. However, once momentum picks up, and unions become the norm instead of the exception, the power will shift back into the hands of those of us who actually create the value that economists cheer about.

In the meantime, the Starbucks unionization wave does not appear to be slowing down and workers from 100's of Amazon warehouses around the world, including in Canada, are reaching out to Christian Smalls, the fired Amazon employee who created the independent Amazon Labor Union that won certification on Staten Island. We all should take this moment to celebrate these wins for our fellow workers because what benefits them, benefits all of us.

If you want to learn more about the recent successes of workers in America at Amazon and Starbucks, and how it is freaking out those who exploit us, I invite you to watch this short video on the subject from Krystal Ball at Breaking Points: