Class cultures, culture classes, and the labor renaissance

We are going through something of a renaissance in United States labor relations. By labor relations — maybe a term not used by many, I mean the collection of informal expectations and formal agreements between employers and employees. The federal agency that oversees labor relations is the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).

The Board has not been this busy in decades. Here is a quick rundown of the highlights over the past two years.

Starting in 2021 at a store in Buffalo, NY, and accelerating into 2022, Starbucks workers began to unionize. By the end of 2022, 243 other stores had voted to join the union. In 2022, Amazon’s first warehouse was unionized by Chris Smalls in Staten Island. It was considered a major victory, as Amazon has been exceptionally hostile to unionization at their warehouses.

The renaissance accelerated in 2023.

After a week-long faculty strike at Rutgers University, the faculty union and the university administration came to a deal in principle to improve salaries and job security. The new agreement will primarily benefit adjuncts and graduate students. This was a notable strike — at least in academia. Part-time adjuncts and grad students generally do not rock the boat. And there is an obvious but unstated separation between full-time professors who enjoy enviable job security and their part-time, untenured colleagues. Yet, the adjuncts agitated, and the full-timers agitated with them.