After years of decline, a new generation of organised labour rises in US

Organised labour’s solidarity with Palestine stands in stark contrast to the trade unions of the country’s industrial heyday when New York City construction workers famously attacked students protesting the Vietnam War.

Bill Fletcher, a labour union activist, author and talk show host, told Al Jazeera that the politics of this generation of labour activists is influenced by the sharp economic downturn that began in 2008 and the growing wealth inequalities that resulted from it, protests against police violence targeting African Americans such as George Floyd, what many see as the failure of corporations to protect workers during the pandemic and the social fissures that began to deepen during Donald Trump’s presidency.

“This didn’t pop up out of nowhere,” Fletcher said. “What we’re witnessing is the result of a sort of insurgency that we began to see in 2011 with the Occupy movement. … It demonstrated that something was going on at the base.”

“The frustration has been building over decades, and unions are taking advantage of that,” he added. “Union leaders understood the need for social justice unionism beyond wages and salaries and looked at broader issues.”

Marc Bayard, the director of the Black Worker Initiative at the Institute for Policy Studies and founding executive director of the Worker Institute at Cornell University, said he was impressed with the young labour activists who are pursuing grassroots strategies that are in stark contrast to the top-down approach traditionally deployed by labour leaders, much to the lament of rank-and-file workers, particularly people of colour and women.

Historically, he told Al Jazeera, organised labour has been most effective when it advocates not just for wages and benefits for its members but also when it addresses deficits and issues in the larger community and when union leaders take their cues from the rank and file and not the other way around.

“What these employees are doing adds authentic and real diversity to the landscape,” Bayard said.

“There’s a whole new message and culture in place, and unions and workers have reaped [the] rewards of their advocacy and [their] push for a share of the profits their hard work has produced,” Bayard said.

While not technically a labour union, the mostly East African immigrants represented by the Minnesota Uber and Lyft Drivers Association (MULDA) successfully lobbied the Minneapolis City Council in March to adopt legislation requiring the rideshare companies to pay their drivers a minimum of $1.40 per mile or 51 cents per minute.

Eid Ali, president of MULDA, told Al Jazeera that he and a group of drivers approached the Teamsters three years ago about starting a union but executives were reticent because the NLRB classifies rideshare drivers as independent contractors rather than full-time employees.

“Our issue was that we were not getting paid enough, and we were feeling the pain for quite some time,” Ali said. “Plus there was no due process for our guys. You might go out an invest $30,000 or $40,000 for a car and get fired the next day.”

“But we didn’t have support from the traditional unions. They just didn’t engage our drivers, 98 to 99 percent of whom are immigrants from East Africa, and they don’t classify us as full-time employees, so they were thinking it just wasn’t their fight. And we just said, ‘Enough is enough.’ We started with 22 drivers coming together at a coffee shop in south Minneapolis, and out of that conversation, we realised that the only way to bridge the gap was to raise our voices and advocate for ourselves.”

The group agreed that a strike was not their best option and instead settled on a grassroots campaign lobbying lawmakers to establish a minimum wage for rideshare companies. They held rallies and met with US Representative Ilhan Omar and her predecessor, Keith Ellison, who is now Minnesota’s attorney general

They persuaded a lawmaker to introduce the bill in the state legislature, where it passed, only to be vetoed by the governor. They lowered their sights and tried again in Minneapolis, where the City Council passed the measure only to have the mayor veto it as well.

Finally, MULDA’s third time was the charm. In March, the Minneapolis City Council passed the bill with enough votes to withstand the mayor’s veto.

Executives for both Uber and Lyft threatened to stop doing business in the city when the law is enacted in July, but at least seven rideshare companies have emerged to fill the void, including one workers’ cooperative owned by the drivers themselves.