December 1, 2023 marks the first anniversary of the Power At Work Blog. We arrived at exactly the right time. This has been a historic year for workers, worker power, collective action, and unions. Dramatic increases in organizing and greater success in union representation elections. Historic gains through collective bargaining in industry after industry. A president (and other public officials) visiting picket lines. We have done our best to give you a front row seat to all of it.
We’re not taking credit, of course. Workers and their unions did it. They made history by channeling their anger into action, showing immense courage, and executing shrewd strategies and tactics. The economy helped. Progressive economic policies put money in workers’ pockets and a great deal of power in workers’ hands. Our very first post discussed the latest data showing tight labor markets and we have commented on and analyzed economic developments affecting workers numerous times ever since. Our Northeastern University colleague Alicia Modestino has led a changing, but always distinguished, cast of expert labor economists on our “Workers by the Numbers” blogcasts on the first Friday of each month. Together, they analyze the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics jobs, unemployment, and wages report, and ask and answer whether the data in those reports are good for workers and what they mean for worker power.
Workers’ success over the last year is certainly not just a matter of economics. American culture now strongly supports workers organizing and demanding their fair share. Perhaps most important, the American public is simply sick and tired of excessive wealth and grotesquely high executive salaries made possible by others’ hard work. Americans want workers to fight back and they support unions by large margins, especially younger Americans. Workers have been emboldened to act by their neighbors’ encouragement.
Our first “blogcast” analyzed the national freight rail negotiations immediately after Congress enacted controversial legislation imposing wages and working conditions on the freight rail carriers and the unions that had not been able to collectively bargain an agreement. We have produced and published more than 40 more blogcasts over the course of our first year. Every blogcast is also available as a podcast both on the Power At Work Blog and a long list of commercial providers like Spotify, Apple Music, and Google Podcasts (just search “Power At Work”). By far our most popular blogcasts were a series of Labor Day interviews with AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler, American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten, Laborers International Union of North America President Brent Booker, and National Labor Relations Board General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo. But we also attracted a great deal of attention with our blogcast in January 2023 with Johnnie Kallas, who runs the Cornell ILR Labor Action Tracker, an essential resource for understanding the strike wave that occurred during our first year. Other blogcasts, including an interview with longtime union lawyer Dan Ratner in which he told the riveting story of the “Battle of Bronxville,” have also had sizable audiences.
While we have proudly hosted 6 national union presidents in our blogcasts so far, you didn’t have to be a top labor leader for us to invite you onto the Power At Work Blog. Among others, we have talked with farmworker advocates in New York, whistleblowers and their lawyers, UAW-member museum workers, three state labor commissioners, AFSCME volunteer member organizers, technologists producing tools for organizing, child care advocates, national union political directors, advocates for union veterans and transgender workers, and our favorite frontline autoworkers and TikTok buddies, Don Looney and Glenn Kage, Jr. We have also invited some of the nation’s top labor experts to participate in our new “Power Hour” series of blogcasts (here, here, and just this week here). And we have turned the tables on diverse panels of labor journalists (here, here, and here) by interviewing them in real time about the biggest and most important worker power and union stories.
Along with these Power At Work blogcasts, the heart and soul of this blog has been our diverse collection of written posts. Serendipitously, our home institution, Northeastern University, has been something of a microcosm of workers’ and unions’ successes in 2023. Northeastern’s graduate workers organized by winning a representation election with an eye-popping 94% of the vote. Northeastern’s dining hall workers won a historic contract last winter. Janitorial workers across New England, including those cleaning Northeastern’s buildings, recently ratified a similarly robust contract. The Power At Work Blog was in the right place at the right time and we covered it all. We also extended our coverage to the larger organizing wave that is sweeping over other college and university campuses (we’re not finished with that topic --- subscribe to the Power At Work Blog so we can let you know about a forthcoming blogcast on organizing in higher education and other new content).
We have also debated and analyzed labor developments and trends that affect workers well beyond college and university campuses. Many posts have been practical and empirical. We asked whether workers and unions would be able to lock in the organizing successes of 2022 with collective bargaining agreements in 2023, and then tracked progress (or lack thereof) at several collective bargaining tables during the first quarter of the year and again at mid-year (watch for a forthcoming end-of-year wrap-up). We asked and answered, why are there so many strikes? We invited top scholars to help us understand how and why the types of private-sector occupations represented by unions has changed. We recruited notable guest authors to describe and analyze different aspects of immigrant and migrant workers’ labor rights (here, here, and here). We discussed the role of unions and collective bargaining as the climate changes and the temperatures rise. We assessed how new prevailing wage and overtime regulations from the U.S. Department of Labor would affect worker power.
Other posts have posed more philosophical or theoretical questions. What is the difference between worker power and worker choice? What does it mean to be “middle class” and what is the labor movement’s role in building the middle class? Will worker activism survive an increase in unemployment? Sometimes we didn’t ask; we simply declared. Organizing is optimistic. TikTokers should not undermine the Hollywood writers and actors strikes. Generation Z faces an uncertain future at work.
Combining our blogcasts, our podcasts, videos of some of my appearances on television, and written posts, the Power At Work Blog has published nearly 200 pieces of original content during the course of its first year. But it’s not all about us. Central to our mission is lifting up others’ outstanding work that advances a worker-centered discourse. That’s why, in 2023 so far, we have published 43 issues of The Weekly Download, a collection of about two dozen articles, opinion pieces, studies, other research products, videos, blog posts, and other content about worker power, collective action, and unions. The eager members of our audience subscribe to the Power At Work Blog so The Weekly Download will arrive in their inboxes each week (go to the bottom of the front page of this blog to join them by subscribing). You should subscribe as well. The Weekly Download is a valuable resource for keeping updated on the latest labor news.
The Power At Work Blog is a labor of love for the large group of people who produce it every week. The Burnes Center for Social Change and its indefatigable director Beth Noveck have made it all possible with generous support, encouragement, and essential political cover. Our two Northeastern student “co-ops” Lexi Anderson and Asia Simms built and operated this machine from scratch. Nothing would have been possible without them. Dane Gambrell has been essential, as well, as an author, producer, manager, newsletter author, and thought partner. Anirudh Dinesh and Stephan Schmidt have kept the lights on, the 1s and 2s flowing, and our temperatures low with their brilliant technical support. Thomas Walsh has been the editor of The Weekly Download and may graduate Northeastern knowing more about more labor news stories than any alumnus of any institution ever. Bonnie McGilpin has patiently led our promotional efforts and provided valuable and creative advice throughout with reliable and good-humored support from Olivia Leon and Sam DeJohn. The Power At Work Blog is also a proud member of the Labor Radio-Podcast Network. We have published our first collaboration with the network and look forward to sharing more of these partners’ content soon. We thank them for their support.
I am grateful to all these colleagues, and to our generous and dedicated audience, for providing a space over the last year in which I can express my thoughts, commentary, analysis, and ideas about the efforts of working people across America to build the power they need to improve their lives and their country. We look forward to the next year of the Power At Work Blog. We hope you do, too.
