Nearly 900,000 Americans sitting down to Thanksgiving dinner this week will have unions – and the double-digit pay increases they won – to thank.
That’s how many unionized workers have won immediate pay hikes of 10% or more in just the last year, according to an analysis by CNN.
And the pace of increases of that size have been picking up. More than 700,000 of those workers won pay hikes over the course of the last six months, and of that group, nearly 300,000 saw deals reached in just the last six weeks.
“I would say this is the best run of wage increases won by labor since the period right after the end of World War II,” said Art Wheaton, director of labor studies at Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations in Buffalo.
This thread talks about the new young Democrat mayor of Terre Haute, Indiana where I live. I do not like him at all for other reasons, which I go over in the thread, but I think unions are definitely a big part of why he got elected. Despite Terre Haute being a big union town, it went to Trump both times and the mayor was a Republican for years.
I think a lot of union members are just fed up with Republicans and their anti-labor stances and we’ll see more of that in 2024.
Indiana is deep red, so that mayorship win really is a big deal. I sure do hope you’re right about 2024.