Every morning after I wake up, I always check my Apple News app to see what’s going on in the world. This week, the United Auto Workers’ union began a stand-up strike for increased wages. Around 9% of their Teamsters are currently on strike, a small fraction of their roughly 400,000 members. Detroit’s Big Three automotive corporations; Ford, General Motors, and Stellantis, have seen record profits in the past few years at the expense of their workforce’s wages.
Personally, I will always support a worker’s strike, especially one with wage increases as a motive. However, lately, I have seen increased sentiment that these workers’ mission to be paid liveable, honest wages is somehow negative because of its effects on the nation’s economy. I see countless headlines proclaiming that the strike is “bad for the economy” from publications on both sides of the political spectrum. The idea that a group of regular Americans simply trying to receive fair compensation for their work drags down the entire country’s productivity is frankly disgusting. We need to stop blaming our economic issues on striking unions.
I’ve noticed this anti-union bias for a long time now. It was really bad around 2021 when U.S. railroad workers attempted to launch a nationwide strike. President Biden blocked this attempt and was almost universally hailed as a hero for this action. According to this viewpoint, it was a miracle that the strike was stopped, as it could have had detrimental effects on our nation’s supply chain. I am not trying to jump to conclusions, but it was not much longer after this block that Norfolk Southern experienced a colossal derailment that had catastrophic effects in East Palestine, Ohio.
Of course, our federal government has had bipartisan union opposition since the 1980s with Former President Reagan’s air-traffic controller strike shutdown. He set the precedent that an executive official has the power to block workers from seeking fair compensation; a criterion we’ve still yet to move past.
This past summer, I worked at a local model train store. One day, my coworker and I, a man of about 60 years old, were having a conversation about the UPS workers’ strike. He was not concerned that they sought to have their delivery trucks air-conditioned so they may escape the summer’s heat. Instead, he expressed concern to me that his packages may not be delivered if the workers did not just “get over it.”
The workers are not the problem. The problem is that so many of these massive corporations with much better media, government, and even local representation than most unions, are getting greedier as time passes. Bob Iger, CEO of Disney, is allowed to gross $31 million annually, but his writers who provide him with this income are irrational in seeking better wages and protected jobs. Any economic downturn should be blamed on the grifters that we call billionaires, not the workers seeking better compensation for the work they provide that creates their wealth.
