America’s unions are gentrifying

The weather in Los Angeles on Dec 1 was unusually dull, with rain drizzling down and a chill in the air. This perhaps helped to explain the relatively low energy of the picketers on strike at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) campus. Instead of listening to rousing speeches, graduate students milled around, chatting to one another. In the centre of the crowd, organisers had set up a projector screen showing a videoconference, which almost nobody was watching. And yet the strikers are clear about what they want. “People work 60 to 80 hours a week, you know, in total,” said Mr Sammy Feldblum, a geography PhD student among the picketers. “And all we’re asking for is that we should be able to live in an apartment… reasonably close to the university. We’re not asking for anything crazy.”

The strike, which covers the entire University of California system, started on Nov 14 and has involved roughly 48,000 workers, mostly graduate students (who teach), teaching assistants and other non-tenured researchers. Tens of thousands of undergraduates have been left untaught. Last Friday, around 12,000 of the strikers agreed to go back to work, after accepting a tentative agreement in late November. But 36,000 are still out. It is the largest single labour action to take place in America in years. But it is also an indicator of how trade unions are changing in America. Unions used to be associated with brawny middle-aged men standing outside factories. These days, the most active trade unions in America represent workers who have degrees and wear white collars (literally, in the case of university lab workers). As unions have evolved, their strategies have shifted too – and they hope to reverse decades of declining union power.