The rise of American labour innovation and activism — what does it mean for the UK?
The use and abuse of working-class political anger has been one of the defining characteristics of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. Less publicised, but just as important, is an altogether different tale of how deep-rooted economic frustrations are shaking up American politics.
The “fight for $15” — the campaign for a big rise in minimum wages across US cities and states — has become the most politically effective movement in a generation. Its high-voltage tactics have been winning victories from coast to coast including, as of this month, New York state and California.
These represent the biggest increases in minimum wages since Harry Truman nearly doubled the federal wage floor in 1950. A labour movement long accustomed to a diet of failure is enjoying a rare taste of success.
The context is key. The long-term stagnation of earnings and a federal minimum wage frozen at $7.25 — roughly the same value it held in real terms half a century earlier — have taken their toll. A sympathetic but gridlocked Obama administration has been unable to secure change in the federal wage floor. For campaigners, city halls, not Capitol Hill, are the venues that count.
But the extraordinary success of the campaign can also be put down to its own blend of boldness, simplicity and pragmatism. Bold, in that $15 is by any standard a big number and has become an energising emblem. Simple, in that it is a specific demand; in this regard the campaign is everything that the ill-defined “Occupy” movement was not. Pragmatic, in that away from the $15 headlines flexible local deals have been struck over the implementation timetable (extending to 2023 in places).
In policy terms $15, even in high-wage cities, is a big gamble. It catapults minimum earnings into uncharted terrain and understandably unsettles many economists. Yet it is a move in a game where the odds are stacked against those at the sharp end of the jobs market. Low-waged American workers may feel that incrementalism and reasonableness have not been their friend.
A new generation of labour leaders — not least David Rolf the iconoclastic union activist, founding figure in the campaign for $15 and author of a new book chronicling its rise — see these gains as just one element of a nascent 21st-century American labour movement.
If mass industrial trade unionism was a key vehicle through which workers in the 20th century gained access to the great American middle-class what is today’s equivalent for those toiling in the low-wage service economy? Mr Rolf pulls no punches about what is at stake. The traditional union model is locked in a “death-spiral”: innovate or die.
Rather than offering a single blueprint he issues a call for a plethora of pro-worker initiatives aimed at benefiting those far beyond the depleted ranks of union members. “Experimentation in the service of a more equitable economy,” as he puts it.
This so-called “alt-unionism” can be found in the fast growing freelancers’ union, the joint campaign with tech leaders to create a portable system of social security accounts for independent contractors, or the app-activism of those organising to secure a better deal for online workers. Equally, it is there in the successful campaign to get mega-employers such as Walmart to raise pay.
Whether this rise in labour innovation and activism is simply American exceptionalism or augurs something for the UK is tricky to discern. Our context is very different: the national minimum wage has been a success and is rising fast; cities do not control their own wage floors; and, despite recent welfare retrenchment, there is more extensive support for the working poor.
Yet parallels can be drawn. The UK trade union movement has almost halved in size since the late 1970s and its default mindset is still more defend-and-save than innovate-and-build. The lack of creative response to the post-crisis surge in self-employment, or the emergence of the gig-economy workforce, is telling.
It is far too early to judge whether the fight for $15 will turn out to be the first chapter of a new era of post-industrial US labour activism or the final spasm of a passing 20th-century model. But the mere fact this question can reasonably be posed marks a shift.
The US election takes place amid a public mood that favours action on low pay and at a time when a younger generation of labour leaders has emerged with fresh ideas and ambition. That is new. As in the UK, a tide of economic anxiety and public anger is there to be channelled — whether for good or ill.
This piece first appeared in the FT.
