How Millennials Are Trying To Revive The Labor Movement

“I think [Janus] has got the potential to be extremely destructive, like national right-to-work laws,” Cohen worries. “I’m expecting at some point Trump’s administration is going to turn their full attention to labor. I’m fearing the worst.”

Cohen isn’t being dramatic. One of the most direct effects of both the “gig economy” and right-to-work laws has been to deprive unions of their members and, therefore, the dues they need to fight back. As much as millennials might approve of unions, few of them are members: Only 10.7% of wage and salary workers currently belong to a union, according to the latest count by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, compared with 20.1% in 1983.

One of the reasons for that, says Larry Williams, Jr., the 30-year-old president of the Progressive Workers Union, is that millennials literally don’t know that labor unions exist. Williams, whose union represents about 200 national field employees at the Sierra Club, says that he himself knew little about the labor movement before he took a temporary job with the Teamsters nine years ago. “I thought, ‘Why did I not know about this? Why is this not something that’s taught to every young person in the world, that they have rights as a working person?’”

His “discovery of the labor movement as a young man,” he says, inspired him to create UnionBase, which he describes as “the first social networking platform for organized labor.” Launched this past Labor Day, UnionBase allows workers to search for organizations that might represent their profession. Union leaders can also use it to verify their organizations’ information and, eventually, communicate with members. Ultimately, he hopes, the platform will help unions move beyond the traditional “servicing” model, where employees pay dues for union leaders to negotiate with employers on their behalf, to an organizing model, where workers mobilize to defend their own interests.

In that way, Williams says, “Janus is an opportunity. We need to stop this ATM that dispenses the contracts, and become an actual organization” that recruits and persuades. “Speaking far into the future,” he envisions the 14.6 million workers who belong to unions in the U.S. agitating for benefits that extend beyond the boundaries of their memberships and the corporations they work for.

“Union contracts can cover a wide array of things outside of your workplace,” Williams says, “like child care, health care, education. Before there was the Affordable Care Act, it was unions who negotiated the best health care for their workers.” That same health care should be available to everyone, he says.

Source Article from https://popularresistance.org/how-millennials-are-trying-to-revive-the-labor-movement/

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