The state of unions in America

Writer and scholar Jane McAlevey talks about whether recent momentum can reverse the trend of declining union membership in America.

Courtesy of Wiki Commons

Union membership has continued to decline in recent years after decades of erosion. But there have been some high-profile labor wins that could reverse the trend.

“We’ve got a young generation coming up under climate change with a bad economy all around them, with crappy jobs.” — Jane McAlevey, The Nation

Starbucks workers have been unionizing. And so too have some Amazon workers. Why is this happening now? What does this mean?

 


Listen: Writer and scholar Jane McAlevey talks about the state of the labor movement in 2022.

 


Guest

Jane McAlevey is a strikes correspondent for The Nation and a senior policy fellow at the University of California’s Institute for Research on Labor and Employment. She has written several books, her most recent one being, “A Collective Bargain: Unions, Organizing, and the Fight for Democracy.

“We’ve got a young generation coming up under climate change with a bad economy all around them, with crappy jobs…the destruction of pensions, the destruction of benefits… so the social context really matters,” says McAlevey.

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