The Militant Revival of California Labor

Article by Fred Glass — Image via California Labor Federation

It’s been quite a ride for California’s multiracial working class over the past fifteen months. We’ve seen a spate of successful union contract campaigns, largely due to a spectacular wave of smart strikes, alongside a brand-new anti-war movement boasting an unusually early level of participation by unions.

These campaigns have been bolstered by the support of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), whose youthful activists have popped up on picket lines and in various other forms of solidarity. And just to signal my awareness of who’s publishing this piece, yes, some of the action has been taking place in San Diego.

The Events

The upsurge got its jumpstart with the University of California academic worker strike in late 2022.  The strike, with 48,000 workers walking the lines at all ten campuses, was the biggest in academic labor history, and so successful that it inspired a spate of copycat strikes around the country. It also featured leadership and staffing drawn from DSA, including the president of the largest of the four unions involved, Rafael Jaime of UAW Local 2865.

It didn’t take long for the next big one: SEIU 99, representing classified workers in Los Angeles Unified School District, struck for three days in February, winning a 30% raise for the lowest paid workers. The secret ingredient to the union’s success? Full on solidarity from United Teachers Los Angeles, who left their classrooms to honor the picket lines of their support workers. The enormous numbers in the streets and popular support from parents and students demonstrated to a chastised administration that it would be best to settle with UTLA as well, which, without the need for its own walkout, negotiated a strong contract on the basis of its obvious ability to mobilize its members. Dozens of dual DSA/UTLA members played a strong role in the actions leading up to the contract settlement.

Soon enough these public sector unions were followed by their siblings in private industry. A third of a million UPS workers represented by the International Brotherhood of Teamsters across the country prepared to hit the bricks, with demonstrations and “practice strikes” following a 97% strike vote. As with UTLA, UPS workers didn’t have to strike due to their evident readiness to do it. At the last minute of an extension on the first strike deadline the union and corporation reached a deal. Despite arguments over whether UPS workers could have gotten an even better contract if they had struck, everyone agreed that the contract was the best since the 1997 strike, bringing up the least paid workers and gaining important health and safety improvements.

In Hollywood, the Writers Guild of America (WGA) and Screen Actors Guild (SAG/AFTRA), representing 175,000 writers and actors, did have to strike against the arrogant movie studio bosses, and these were long ones, with WGA out on the lines for 148 days and the actors for 118. Determined to gain pioneering protections against potential damage to their livelihoods from advancing artificial intelligence, and make up for years of inflation eroding wages, movie workers received unprecedented solidarity as they outlasted the wealthy and powerful movie studios. 

Dual DSA-LA/UTLA members helped to organize a big turnout of UTLA to the WGA lines in June, and the LA DSA chapter, with its innovative “Snacklist” deliveries, raised $87,000 worth of food by the end of September, earning a shoutout in WGA publications. Movie workers returned to the sets with strong wage gains and a solid foot in the door on AI.

Overlapping with the Hollywood strikes were rolling strikes by hotel, restaurant and casino workers in UNITE HERE-represented workplaces in LA, Las Vegas and Detroit. More than thirty Starbucks stores in the Golden State have gone union. 

Besides the public and private sector strikes and organizing, the non-profit world has seen organizing and militancy in formerly non-union spaces like museums and Planned Parenthood, where last fall 93% of its more than 500 workers in San Diego, Imperial and Riverside counties voted to unionize with SEIU. The largest health care worker strike in US history erupted in October for three days with 75,000 members of a Kaiser union coalition in four states, including California, walking out.  

The big enchilada

But the big enchilada was the United Auto Workers “Standup” strike starting September 15 against the Big 3 carmakers in the union’s traditional jurisdiction. Shawn Fain, elected in spring with a rank-and-file caucus majority to control of the international executive board, had promised that these negotiations would be different, and he was as good as his word. Replacing the traditional class collaborationist approach of his corrupt predecessors with a sharply militant rhetoric and actions to match, he headed up an innovative strategy of striking selected factories owned by all three automakers at once. 

Sitting at three negotiations tables, the union punished the companies when bargaining progress stalled by striking additional workplaces; when the companies were demonstrating good faith, no more factories were struck—until progress slowed and more facilities were called out. The picket lines were solid; once more DSA members showed up wherever they could. In California that meant parts suppliers in Ontario and Rancho Cucamonga, where picketers withstood private goon squads, attempts to ram them with cars, and in one instance, a drawn gun.

Following the pattern of other unions’ recent settlements, when negotiations were concluded at the end of October after the UAW’s longest strike in a quarter century, auto workers had achieved their best results in decades: a 25% salary increase over the life of the contract (and more for the lowest paid categories of workers), strengthened retirement benefits, and the right to strike over plant closures, among other advances.

More strikes and heightened class consciousness

Over half a million American workers hit the bricks last year. The strike wave shows no sign of abating, with the California Faculty Association, representing full- and part-time professors in the 23-campus California State University system shutting down four campuses in December and the entire system for a day in January over issues of low pay, two tier salary schedules, and inadequate staffing. CFA members voted to ratify their tentative contract agreement by a 74 – 26% margin, with the relatively high “no” vote relating to uncertainties over part of the salary agreement:  a 5% immediate general increase to be boosted by another 5% in July—but only if the CSU line in the state budget is not cut—not a given, due to this year’s large deficit.

Elsewhere across the CSU structure students have been busy too, with eight thousand student assistants voting overwhelmingly to join the California State University Employees Union. As one might imagine in the second most expensive state to live in in the country, they are concerned front and center with low wages, but also need paid sick leave, affordable parking, and an increased cap on hours of work.

The wave of union militancy has boosted rank and file solidarity and produced a new level of class conscious rhetoric out of the mouths of leadership. While top AFL-CIO officers continue, alongside most Democratic politicians, to refer to union members as the aspirational “middle class” of America, leaders of these striking unions have moved on to a more precise vocabulary, and their public pronouncements reflect that understanding. After four decades of neoliberal attacks on wages, unions, government, taxes and regulation of corporations, large sectors of the working class have gained an insight: only their own collective action can reverse the tide. 

Shawn Fain exhorted his members to make the connection directly, saying “Let’s stand up for ourselves and for the working class.” Taking a page out of Bernie Sanders’s book, he told the media that billionaires have no right to exist. Teamster leader Sean O’Brien, elected with the support of Teamsters for a Democratic Union, warned during bargaining, “The longer this contract negotiation goes on, the longer Wall Street is going to be affected. And that’s OK, just as long as Main Street gets taken care of at the end of the day.”

Fran Drescher, president of SAG-AFTRA, dispensed with euphemism, telling an interviewer: “I am anti-capitalist”. She also said, “I cannot believe it, quite frankly, how far apart we are on so many things. How they plead poverty, that they’re losing money left and right when giving hundreds of millions of dollars to their CEOs. It is disgusting. Shame on them. They stand on the wrong side of history.”

Where does it go from here?

Since October, alongside the upsurge in labor, a massive anti-war movement has arisen opposing US support for Israeli carpet bombing of Gaza. Despite national AFL-CIO admonitions for local labor councils to stay out of foreign affairs-related issues, a nascent “Labor4Palestine” effort, also featuring strong DSA involvement, represents a further expansion of union political consciousness. 

The UAW became the largest national union calling for a permanent ceasefire in December, joining the United Electrical Workers, the Painters, and the American Postal Workers, as well as a growing number of local unions.

No one can predict where things are going; few crystal balls function perfectly in the class struggle. But as Rosa Luxemburg noted in her classic The Mass Strike, political consciousness often lags behind economic consciousness of workers involved in mass actions. Until it doesn’t, when it can take a leap not readily foreseen the previous day. 

That dynamic in a nutshell helps explain the current revival of labor’s fortunes. A generational cohort of young people facing growing economic inequality, climate crisis and a stalled democracy entered the workplace as the Bernie Sanders phenomenon proposed socialism as an answer to their problems. Now a large plurality of workers under thirty identify with that ideology, and unions are more popular with the general public than they have been in a half century. Nowhere are these attitudes more prevalent than in the Golden State. And it’s about time.

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Fred Glass is a retired union communications director, the author of From Mission to Microchip: A History of the California Labor Movement (University of California Press) and a member of the California DSA State Committee. He lives in Berkeley.