UPS, SAG-AFTRA, Starbucks: Union battles show who has clout

By Victor Ocasiovictor.ocasio@newsday.com @Victor_OcasioUpdated August 31, 2023

Labor battles have made headlines nationwide this year, with high-profile strikes and contentious contract negotiations taking center stage.

From highly publicized ongoing strikes within the film and television industry by members of both the Writers Guild of America, which represents TV and film writers, and the actors’ union, SAG-AFTRA, to the recent contract victory of Teamster-represented UPS workers, the past year has been rife with labor confrontations.

Add to that list multiple strike authorizations-turned-ratified contracts for Long Island nurses, most recently at St. Catherine of Siena Hospital in Smithtown; the ongoing unionization fight at Starbucks, and the recent strike authorization vote by 150,000 UAW auto workers at General Motors, Ford and Stellantis, and it’s clear why observers say the labor movement is having a moment.

“There is something real going on,” said Harry Katz, a professor of collective bargaining and conflict resolution at Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations.

Through July of this year, there have been 219 strikes involving 325,000 workers, according to Cornell’s Labor Action Tracker. Last year in the same period, there were 223 strikes involving 76,000 workers.

Those numbers compare to 130 strikes involving just 28,000 workers in the first seven months of 2021.

“In the last year and a half to two years, there have been more strikes and labor actions than we’ve had in the several years prior,” Katz said.

Along with those high-profile labor actions have come high levels of support of unions broadly.

Sixty-seven percent of Americans approve of labor unions, according to the latest polling data from Gallup.

“The current landscape excites me,” said Ryan Stanton, executive director of the Long Island Federation of Labor AFL-CIO, which represents workers in more than 160 union locals and speaks on behalf of the Island's more than 250,000 union members.

“The union movement is clear-eyed that businesses have to be in business for workers to go to work, but that doesn’t have to be at the expense of good wages and benefits, and I think more workers than ever are coming to that conclusion,” he said.

But while public approval is high and some unions have won big concessions from some employers, the share of union members among the nation's workforce continues to shrink.

The nation’s unionization rate – the share of both public and private sector workers who belong to a union – was 10.1% in 2022, down from 20.1% in 1983, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Just 6% of private sector workers belong to unions, BLS data shows.

“While there are some strikes that get attention, it remains really, really hard to get a first contract and to get sizable wage increases in the contract,” said Gregory DeFreitas, Hofstra economics professor and director of the university’s Center for the Study of Labor and Democracy.

Plus, some unions have more clout than others.

While the Teamsters’ UPS workers secured a robust contract with relatively few concessions after threatening a massive nationwide strike, newer unions at employers like Starbucks and Amazon have struggled to land a first contract.

“UPS faced the threat that 340,000 workers were going to go out and shut them down,” Katz said. “That’s not the threat that the union at the Amazon warehouse in Staten Island or the Starbucks workers can present.”

In those cases, only individual locations are unionized, and high worker turnover can make it harder to organize. Plus, particularly in the case of Starbucks, the company can simply bring in managers from nearby stores to maintain operations if union members walk off the job.

“I think for us, the pandemic set us apart from a lot of other businesses,” said David Rodriguez, 52, of Shirley, a longtime driver and shop steward at UPS.

“When people were locked up and afraid, we were still out there delivering the necessities, delivering toilet paper, medicine, anything that they would have gotten at the store, we were still out there delivering,” he said. “The general public saw that.”

That positive perception, combined with the country’s reliance on UPS, which ships an average of 24 million packages daily, about a quarter of all U.S. parcel volume, meant the union walked into negotiations with clear leverage, Rodriguez said. “You can’t say that for every industry.”

Existing labor law and enforcement levels present a major challenge to successful union pushes, labor leaders said.

The National Labor Relations Act, passed in 1935, grants American workers the right to join or form unions. But Stanton said it doesn’t go far enough to incentivize employers to negotiate in good faith when unions are formed.

More than half of newly formed unions are unsuccessful in securing a contract within their first year, according to an analysis by the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal-leaning Washington, D.C., think tank.

Production of television series and movies has ground to a halt because of strikes by both the WGA and SAG-AFTRA.

At the heart of the matter, for both unions, are two issues: the uncertain impact artificial intelligence technology will have on writers and actors, and the way streaming platforms like Netflix, Hulu and Disney+ have changed the distribution of content and the resulting residual payments that creators rely on for their livelihoods.

“The necessity of the strike really comes from the fact that the money that’s being generated is not being disseminated to the writers the way it used to be,” said Stevan Mena, 52, a Mount Sinai-based writer and film producer.

Mena, who has worked in film production for 20 years, said while it’s clear to him that writers are in need of greater compensation and job security in the face of developments like A.I., the streaming distribution model hasn't turned out to be as profitable for production studios as initially sold to investors.

That has made for an untenable situation and created the stalemate between striking film workers and studios, Mena said. During the strike, now in its fifth month, Mena has relied on his other line of work, website information layout, for income.

“People have gotten used to watching movies and television basically for free and watching them without commercials,” he said. “Streaming has undefined parameters for how revenue is made and distributed. I don’t know how this gets resolved in the writers' and actors’ favor.”

Actor Courtney Sanello of Atlantic Beach said the SAG-AFTRA strike has revealed public misconceptions about actors.

“We provide entertainment and we provide the opportunity for the general public to jump into another world and forget their problems, and people take that for granted across the board,” said Sanello, who is working on directing and producing her own independent film.

To get by during the strike, which began July 14, Sanello works as an audiobook narrator.

In addition to the issue of pay — particularly from residuals of shows after release — actors feel that A.I. presents a major threat.

“Another huge part of why SAG-AFTRA is on strike is the incredible insensitivity studios have had to the use of A.I.-generated images,” Sanello said.

Pointing to stories of background actors being asked to have full body scans done of them for potential use as virtual A.I.-generated images in other productions without their consent and without compensation, she said the future of the industry is threatened by the new technologies.

“Some people have been saying 'Don’t go do work on this comic book project because even as a background actor, they want to scan your body,'” Sanello said.

For the unionized workers at Starbucks, the path to full recognition of their organizing efforts and demands has been met with strong opposition from their corporate employers.

Since two Starbucks locations in Buffalo became the first to unionize at the end of 2021, workers at more than 350 stores in over 40 states have voted to join Workers United, according to More Perfect Union, a labor organizing non-profit.

But that's only about 4% of the chain's 9,000 locations. None of the unionized stores have reached a contract with the Seattle-based coffee giant, and union leaders said few have even been able to meet with corporate representatives to start the process.

Siobhan Stergis, 29, a shift supervisor and barista at the Massapequa Starbucks, one of five Island locations to join the union, said when she transferred to the store roughly a year ago, management seemed to largely ignore that the staff there was unionized.

Stergis, of East Meadow, who has worked at around 18 Starbucks locations on the Island and New York City since joining the company in 2020, said that attitude is emblematic of how the company has handled the union push overall and has contributed to what she calls the company’s unwillingness to negotiate.

“They are going to play the long game to try and wait it out,” Stergis said.

Starbucks is committed to negotiating contracts at stores “where union representatives have approached contract bargaining with professionalism and have allowed both parties to discuss proposals,” a spokesman said. In numerous instances, representatives of Workers United have failed to respond when the company has proposed times for bargaining sessions, he asserted.

Despite the obstacles to reaching the first contract, Stergis remains hopeful and said the union has already improved conditions for workers at non-union shops, even if those benefits haven't come to the union workers.

Stergis pointed to higher wages for more senior employees, expanded work uniform options, and the return of a master coffee maker training program, all asks made by organized workers earlier in the national union push.

“It seems to be working already," she said.

Nurses at St. Catherine of Siena in Smithtown ratified a new contract last month that gives them an average wage increase of 23% over three years.

The New York State Nurses Association, which has about 400 members at the hospital, reached a deal four days after members voted to authorize a strike. Their contract had expired July 31.

“We had come to a standstill in negotiations,” said Tiara Hunter of Port Jefferson Station, a nurse supervisor of radiology at St. Catherine. “We needed to show Catholic Health ... how serious we were about getting a fair contract.”

Hunter said several factors, including the immense workload during the height of the pandemic, competition for nurses from other area hospitals, and retention issues, all went into the union’s decision to pressure their employers for higher wages and minimum staffing standards.

“When the pandemic hit in 2020 there were a lot of nurses on the brink of retirement, there were nurses who had young children or elderly parents at home, and they didn’t want to work on the front line,” she said.

Staffing issues grew, and without wage increases, competing with other hospitals to hire nurses was harder.

“We knew we were the lowest paid,” Hunter said, comparing wages at her hospital to those at St. Joseph and St. Charles, also owned by Catholic Health. St. Charles nurses also authorized a strike this summer before quickly securing a contract with an average 20.5% wage increase.

In combination with the trauma of the pandemic that many of her colleagues endured since their last contract in 2020, Hunter said those conditions created the perfect storm for nurses to fight for more.

“I have not seen the room as full as I saw it during this negotiation this year,” she said.

But unions can't always protect workers.

George Balduf, 71, of Lindenhurst lost his job in late July along with 22,000 other Teamster members nationwide when trucking company Yellow Corp. filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and shut down. Balduf, who worked for Yellow in Plainview for 31 years, said the company had a track record of mismanagement and believes his job only lasted as long as it did because of the union's willingness to work with the company, granting big concessions on pension payouts and other issues over the years.

“In all honestly the union kept our jobs,” he said. “They could have closed them down 15 years ago.”

Even after losing his job, Balduf remains an avid supporter of the labor movement and worries about its future.

“It’s horrible what America is coming to,” he said. “At one time this great country was built on the backbone of great union people. If it doesn’t turn around, I don’t see how young kids can buy a house today or anything.”