The US Supreme Court has just stripped back the power of organised labour still further, but millennials don’t care. In an era of inequality and frustration they are joining unions in unprecedented numbers

Last year Dae Dae Motley-Gibson was struggling. The 23-year-old was juggling an exhausting work schedule at her job in a kitchen at Newark airport, alongside parenting duties and a family medical crisis. She needed support. She found it in a union.

Young people like Motley-Gibson are starting their work lives at a time when activism has been mostly absent from low-wage industries. In the airline workforce, unions have long represented flight attendants and other professionals. But the labour movement hasn’t penetrated the precarious airport-catering sectors, staffed mostly by low-wage immigrants and people of colour.

Things began to stir at the Newark airport kitchen when the service workers’ union, Unite Here, recruited Motley-Gibson to help organise her colleagues to demand better working conditions. Last month she helped arrange a rally on behalf of 2,700 fellow catering workers at United Airlines kitchens around the country, calling for fair contracts and the right to form a union.

The campaign has bridged social and racial divides. “This is the most that we’ve all come together,” said Motley-Gibson, a first-time organiser. “Each department, each race, each age group … [Companies] want us to be against [each other]; now we talk to each other.”



Motley-Gibson isn’t the only young American talking about unions for the first time. Last year, bucking a long trend of decline, union membership in the US grew by 262,000 members. Three in four new recruits were, like Motley-Gibson, under 35. That’s a major upheaval considering the wilting of unions’ political clout over the past two decades. From about 20% of the workforce in 1983 (the earliest year for strictly comparable data), union membership declined to just under 11% last year. On Wednesday, the supreme court dealt another major blow to unions by ruling that non-union members in the public sector no longer have to pay for union representation in collective bargaining negotiations.

The hard hats and smokestacks of yesteryear are making room for tablets and tweets as the labour movement gets a millennial upgrade. One in four new hires was unionised last year, of nearly 860,000. An era of inequality, insecure work and Donald Trump has begun to galvanise frustration among a generation often dismissed as self-absorbed. Now hyper-networked millennials are rediscovering the potential of organised labour to seed economic empowerment at work.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Children support their parents’ cause as UC Service’s workers begin a three-day strike in Orange County. Photograph: Mindy Schauer/Getty Images

Young workers have realised that “a generation of corporate-driven policy choices have decimated the rights and economic security of working people”, according to Liz Schuler, secretary-treasurer of the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), the largest federation of US labour unions. “The millennial and Gen Z generations are more civic minded and acutely in tune with the power of collective action … a union card helps them leverage their power.”

Even the ivory tower is embracing worker solidarity. Graduate students at Columbia University recently staged a week-long strike for official recognition of their new union of teaching and research assistants, historically not treated as regular employees. Though the administration has resisted contract negotiations, organisers are building momentum on campus, while a nationwide movement to organise student workers is growing.

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“Income inequality and disparities are at one of the peaks since the recession,” said Ian Bradley-Perrin, a Columbia graduate worker. “It could be a moment when people are looking for solutions. And the solution [that] has been in existence for a long time, that maybe people haven’t given credit to, is unionisation. Cultural perceptions of unionisation and unions have changed.”

Entrepreneurial and creative opportunities have expanded for some in an era of instant global communication and commerce. But millennials dreaming of careers in traditional white-collar professions such as finance and publishing are facing the hamster wheel of temp gigs and unpaid internships.

Unions offer a ballast as they navigate an uncertain economy: a boost in wages, especially for women and workers of colour, as well as insurance benefits; steady schedules; and an advocacy network to challenge exploitation, sexual abuse or discrimination in a post-#MeToo era. About two-thirds of professionals responding to a recent AFL-CIO survey said they “would support a proposal for a union at their current job” if they had an opportunity to join one.

Despite usually having spent more time in formal education than their parents did, young workers cannot bank on the financial and social security their parents’ generation enjoyed. About 11% of young US college graduates are unemployed or lacking full-time work, and gender and racial income disparities are growing for millennials.

The re-energisation of labour parallels other youth-powered activism. Young community activists have bolstered worker-driven protest movements from Occupy to the Fight for $15 to #MeToo, linking issues of living wages, labour protections and social justice. And younger “gig” industries have spawned organising campaigns and legal battles to expand labour protections in sectors such as ridesharing apps, retail and computer programming.

Some fresh blood is long overdue for a union movement grown anaemic since the 1970s, strafed by globalisation, automation and rightwing rollbacks on union protections. “Right to work” laws have helped deplete union coffers in many states by restricting their ability to collect fees from all workers at unionised firms, while Wednesday’s supreme court ruling imposed similar barriers on public sector unions.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Teachers from across the state of North Carolina march and protest outside the State Capitol building in Raleigh in May 2018. Photograph: Logan Cyrus/AFP/Getty Images

At the media website Curbed NY, editor Amy Plitt’s beat is high-class real estate. As a young journalist, Plitt had never seriously considered unionising. “It didn’t seem like something you could do,” said Plitt.

But office murmurings about workplace concerns eventually crystallised into a union drive, and within months a collective bargaining committee was established representing each outlet of Curbed NY’s parent network, Vox Media. In January, the management officially recognised the union as part of Writers Guild East, which represents several other digital news outfits. Last week (6 June) staff at the New Yorker joined the growing list of media workers forming unions.

Now embarking on her first contract talks, Plitt said she was attracted to “the possibility of joining together with colleagues and really having a voice at the table”.

“The more people in this industry come together and do this, and demand certain rights and different priorities … I think it’s only going to make the industry stronger,” she said.

And as long as the old story of bad bosses and angry workers persists in the “new economy”, the union promise will age well: a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work.