In 2023, the US Working Class Fought Back
Striking United Auto Workers members rally in Center Line, Michigan, on September 22, 2023. (Photo by Kamil Krzaczynski / AFP via Getty Images)
More than half a million workers in the US went on strike this year, winning gains not only for themselves but for nonunion workers too. While there’s much more work to be done, 2023 was a year when the working class punched back at the capitalist class.
In 2023, the US working class fought back. After decades of stagnating wages and concessionary contracts, this year workers in a vast range of industries went on the offensive.
More than 500,000 workers walked off the job this year, more than double the 224,000 that struck last year, which itself was double 2021’s numbers, according to Cornell University’s Labor Action Tracker. Baristas, journalists, actors, manufacturing workers, professors, autoworkers, health care workers: they all shared in the terrifying, exhilarating experience of walking off the job. More importantly, they won.
Autoworkers at the Big Three — Ford, General Motors, and Stellantis — wrestled back many of the concessions they’d made in recent decades, particularly in the aftermath of the Great Recession. They didn’t succeed on all fronts — some members still don’t have pensions, and not every worker is satisfied with their raise — but between the conversion of scores of temporary workers to full-time positions, hefty raises over the length of the contract, the reopening of an idled Stellantis plant in Belvidere, Illinois, and the creation of pathway for electric vehicle (EV) workers to be folded into the union’s master contracts — it was a decisive victory.
As is so often the case with unions, these gains didn’t only help their members. Nonunion autoworkers are seeing raises, too — Honda, Toyota, Hyundai, and Subaru have all announced plans to increase worker pay — as their employers try to deflate pro-union sentiment among the workforce, many of whom are dead set on joining the UAW, having seen what a union can win. The employers’ efforts may be too little, too late as the UAW moves forward with its plan of organizing roughly 150,000 nonunion autoworkers nationwide, the same number as are currently covered under the Big Three contracts.
Also this year, workers at the West Coast health care giant Kaiser Permanente won 21 percent raises after a three-day strike, and nurses in New York secured safe staffing provisions. Locomotive manufacturing workers in Erie, Pennsylvania struck for green technology and the right to strike over grievances — a critical tool when an employer persistently violates workers’ contracts — and while they didn’t emerge victorious on everything, they did win some of it. The entertainment industry’s writers and actors — nearly 175,000 people in total — grabbed raises and a host of workplace protections, including reining in generative artificial intelligence (AI).
In the first quarter of 2023 alone, unionized workers’ wages jumped an average of 7 percent in the first year of their contracts, the biggest single-quarter uptick since 2007, according to Bloomberg Law. Overall, some 900,000 union workers secured double-digit raises this year through new contracts.
“That’s Just Class Consciousness”
It’s not just about the ballooning numbers in union workers’ paychecks. This year saw a qualitative shift too, a sense of things adding up to more than the sum of their parts. There were always bright spots in the US labor movement in the last decade or two — militant democratic unionism from the Chicago Teachers’ Union (CTU), the work of the longstanding reform caucus Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU) — but now, discrete fights are starting to flow into one another.
“Take the Hollywood strikes,” said labor historian Gabriel Winant, reflecting on this year. “They did it together — the Teamsters didn’t cross the picket lines — and the public was with them and seems to be with every strike now. The UAW strike, too, is a product of autoworkers’ militancy, but it also has to do with Labor Notes, DSA, and with graduate student unions. And people seem to be able to see the connection also to Amazon and Starbucks and so on.”
“That’s just class consciousness,” he added. “It feels like there is class consciousness coming out of these strikes as opposed to just trade-union consciousness.”
And strikes aren’t the only positive trend. Reform efforts within existing unions gained steam in 2023. Taking the decades of work by TDU as a model, unionized workers have gotten serious about democratizing their unions, drawing on rather than shutting down the rank-and-file initiative by which union battles are won or lost.
Unite All Workers for Democracy (UAWD), the recently formed reform caucus in the UAW, notched a huge win in electing seven members to the union’s international executive board in the union’s first-ever direct election, and then immediately getting to work preparing the rank and file to pull off a historic strike.
UAW president Shawn Fain is one of UAWD’s members, and as he said at this year’s TDU convention, UAWD wouldn’t exist without TDU.
“When he said, ‘Without TDU, there would be no Shawn Fain. Without TDU, there would be no UAWD. Without TDU, there would be no stand-up strike,’ I was completely blown away,” Teamsters Local 804’s Antonio Rosario told me.
Rosario joined TDU in 2016, and as an organizer for the Teamsters’ United Parcel Service (UPS) local in New York City, he’s part of another key labor story this year: the Teamsters’ preparations to strike UPS, where some 340,000 members labor under the largest private-sector contract in the country. There, just the threat of a walkout was enough to force the company to agree to the strongest contracts the workers have won in decades.
“After economic and social disruption, [there’s] a working out of a new arrangement of power,” labor historian Nelson Lichtenstein told me. “Today, the wind is at the back of the working class. Sean O’Brien and the Teamsters had the intelligence to recognize that the wind was at their backs, and then that in such a case, you can be bold.”
Reform caucuses are now popping up in quick succession inside existing unions. As Labor Notes’s Jenny Brown wrote in her own 2023 reflection:
