President Biden has been heralded as the most pro-labor president ever. So why are American workers – from Hollywood actors to auto workers – mired in so much labor strife? Robert Bruno is a professor of labor and employment relations at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and the director of the Project for Middle Class Renewal, a research-based initiative tasked with investigating labor policies in today’s economy. Bruno, the author of the forthcoming book “What Work Is,” spoke with News Bureau business and law editor Phil Ciciora about the state of the American worker.
Ahead of Labor Day, what’s the state of labor and the labor movement in 2023?
I would describe the state of labor in the U.S. as very agitated. There’s a lot of disquiet and anger within the labor movement and among rank-and-file workers. And that is reflecting decades of flat wage increases and deteriorating job quality while, simultaneously, the economy has boomed and management has profited at exorbitant rates.
To be sure, there have been a couple of serious recessions and, of course, workers suffer the most during recessions. Nevertheless, companies have still managed to turn profits and CEOs have extracted ample compensation for themselves. Before the pandemic, workers had fallen into a kind of malaise. A political environment that, since the early 1980s, has been tepid if not outright hostile to workers, seemed to create a new normal of low pay and bad jobs. Workers feared this was going to be as good as it gets. Organized labor couldn’t seem to get much of a foothold to improve the lives of working-class people, and there didn’t seem to be any room or capacity for workers to do better.
And then the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and workers experienced extremely difficult working conditions in just about every sector of the economy. As a result, workers went through a double-barrel consciousness-raising experience where they not only came to think about how vulnerable they were – but also how valuable they were.
Then the economy opened up in a wholly unprecedented way: there was all this pent-up consumer demand, and employers were just desperately looking for workers. Workers, all of a sudden, had newfound leverage, and labor unions, which can collectively speak for those workers, now became powerful mechanisms for protecting worker rights.
I think it’s safe to say that we’re now at an inflection point for labor in the U.S. As a result, you see workers staying out of the labor market until they are paid better. You see unions winning not only sizable pay increases for their members, but also better working conditions.
It’s not surprising that we’re now experiencing more union organizing. Campaigns are rippling throughout the economy, whether it’s writers or actors in Hollywood, cultural workers in Chicago, coffee shop workers in upstate New York, or warehouse workers.
Do you foresee a coming worker backlash against technology such as artificial intelligence?
Even though the robots haven’t come yet, the advent and integration of new technology in the workplace has historically been a difficult issue for labor. There will always be a push to introduce more advanced technology to increase productivity and efficiency at the expense of human labor.
That’s certainly the big issue at stake in the Hollywood strikes, with both the actors and the writers asking for protection against AI and how it could potentially be used to affect their jobs and compensation. But it’s also a genuine concern for U.S. auto workers, who will soon need to work on hybrid or fully electric cars instead of internal combustion vehicles.
Automakers are investing huge sums to move away from gasoline-powered automobiles. On the one hand, an investment of that scale will translate into billions of dollars of manufacturing in the U.S. On the other hand, fewer car parts are needed for electric vehicles, which means fewer workers. And what guarantees that the carbon-free jobs will be high paying and unionized? That’s why auto workers are looking for not only robust pay increases but substantial commitments to job protections from the Big Three automakers.
So yes, new technology is an existential threat to many jobs, while also at the same time, creating new work opportunities. It’s just a matter of how well paid and how high quality the new work will be. And this is a central role that labor unions can play: as a shield for those concerns.
The Hollywood writers and actors strike has gone well beyond the point anyone thought it would, and now the major studios are pushing some movies into 2024. Why are the parties seemingly deadlocked?
There are two reasons they’re deadlocked. First, what’s making this strike more intractable than previous ones is that the actors and writers have decided to strike together, which didn’t occur before. Second, writers and actors weren’t staring down the existential threat from AI and the shift from the theatrical experience to streaming, which really accelerated during the pandemic.
It’s pretty clear that the studios want to retain the ability to control an actor’s image and likeness, because they’re betting that this is how revenue will be generated in the future. It’s also obvious that studios want to reduce the number of and power of writers through AI-generated storytelling.
This is shaping up as one of those strikes that’s going to be really long and difficult, and there won’t be a resolution until enough pain is felt. Meaning the studios lose out on their major 2024 releases and television programs go back to being nothing but unscripted reality TV shows. Audiences have really come to appreciate premium scripted programming since the last writers strike, so if you’re a studio, I’m not sure how long that pivot back to reality TV can last.
At the same time, I think the studios are demonstrating some desperation. They may be reaching a breaking point where if they don’t get a deal soon, they’ll be seriously damaging their brands. So in the midst of a standoff, we might counter-intuitively be getting to a new phase where a deal is possible.