Fighting for a fair wage is in.
The American working class has unshackled the burdensome restraints big businesses put on them and gained the courage to strike for fair working conditions.
Throughout the previous century, America has seen the retreat of powerful labor unions that protect the average worker from injustice. We’ve seen businesses across the country gleefully commit wage theft, blatantly disregarding their responsibilities as employers to give employees the wages they were promised.
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Yet there’s a glimmer of hope. Just last month, we saw UPS and the Teamsters Union successfully negotiate a new contract that would increase pay and ensure UPS drivers would no longer drive without air conditioning in the hot summer months.
UPS chose to prioritize profit over the health of its employees for years by resisting calls to install air conditioning in delivery trucks, but the Teamsters weren’t having it. UPS workers knew that a fierce strike would cripple the company and its profits. Luckily, UPS acquiesced to the Teamsters’ demands.
A few weeks later, the United Auto Workers decided to up the ante. On Sept. 15, recently elected UAW President Shawn Fain called a strike at all three major unionized auto companies: Stellantis (which bought Chrysler), Ford and General Motors.
Fain has decided to use a new strategy of striking, dubbed the “stand up strike.” Instead of aiming for maximum damage to companies by calling all UAW workers to strike, Fain got less than 13,000 workers out of 145,000 to strike. This is a clever strategy. Fain strategically picked several factories that would hinder production while saving the costs needed to maintain the strike.
It’s a refreshing to see the American working class rise up against companies that have been raking in profits no matter the cost. As we can see from the UAW strike, not only are workers eager to strike, but they are getting smarter at doing it.
And politicians are reacting to the successes of the labor unions. President Joe Biden has endorsed the UAW strike, joining the picket line on Sept. 26. Despite the potential threat the strike poses to the U.S. economy, Biden chose to back the cause of the “average Joe.” And he’s right for doing so.
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Even former President Abraham Lincoln, a generational hero for many GOP-ers, would side with Biden and labor.
Lincoln noted in his December 1861 address to Congress that “Labor is prior to and independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.”
While Lincoln originally meant this in regard to slave labor, it remains relevant in our discussion of the value of wage laborers today. We can’t allow businesses to be gluttonous when the foundation of our economy is the worker. The average productivity of workers has grown 3.7 times greater than their average pay since 1979, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
Unions have a tough road ahead. But with every successful bargaining agreement like the UPS Teamsters in August and Writer’s Guild recently, labor unions are making it clear to the American public that no government nor person can stop them from fighting for fair wages and fair working conditions.
The current enthusiasm of workers is best described by the first stanza of the famous labor anthem “Solidarity Forever:” “When the union’s inspiration through the workers’ blood shall run, there can be no power greater anywhere beneath the sun; yet what force on earth is weaker than the feeble strength of one, but the union makes us strong.”
Nathaniel Dela Peña is a 20-year-old political science and history senior from Alexandria.
