Labor's Comeback — Starbucks, Amazon, and the New Organizing

The Scale of the Revival

The 2022-2025 labor revival is the most sustained organizing push in the US in two generations. The major fronts:

• Starbucks Workers United: over 450 store certifications by mid- 2024, an estimated 11,000+ workers.
• Amazon Labor Union: JFK8 Staten Island win in 2022, merger with Teamsters in 2024.
• UAW Stand-Up Strike against Ford, GM, and Stellantis in 2023, producing 25% wage gains.
• UAW Volkswagen Chattanooga win in 2024 — the first successful non-Big-Three southern auto organizing.
• Various smaller organizing wins at REI, Trader Joe's, Apple, Microsoft (some game-studio workers).

The aggregate density numbers have barely moved. Union density nationally has stayed under 11% in recent years. But the rate of new organizing wins, the political visibility of labor issues, and the wage gains in unionized sectors have all increased substantially.

What's Different

Several features distinguish this push from the failed organizing waves of the 1990s and 2000s.

Strategic targeting: rather than trying to organize entire chains at once, the new organizing focuses on specific stores or facilities and builds momentum. Starbucks Workers United's store-by-store strategy is the clearest example. The approach preserves union resources and demonstrates winnable campaigns to subsequent organizers.

Social media leverage: the new organizing uses Twitter, TikTok, Discord, and other platforms to bypass employer-controlled communication channels. Workers learn about organizing efforts and share experiences in ways that were not possible in prior eras. The employer's traditional advantage of controlling the in-workplace information environment has been substantially eroded.

Political-economy framing: the new organizing connects to broader narratives about inequality, corporate power, and political-economy concentration. Shawn Fain's repeated framing of the UAW negotiation as "the billionaire class against the working class" was substantially different from the more cooperative-bargaining tone of the 1980s and 1990s UAW.

Coalition building: the new organizing links to climate, racial justice, immigrant rights, and student debt movements rather than treating labor as a separate cause. The crossover with movements that attract younger demographics has expanded the available organizer pool.

Younger organizers: a generation that did not internalize the 1980s-1990s defensive crouch and is willing to take risks earlier cohorts would not have. The willingness to confront employers publicly, file ULPs aggressively, and use direct action where permitted has shifted the strategic landscape.

The UAW Negotiation in Detail

Shawn Fain's leadership of the UAW from 2023 produced one of the most successful US labor negotiations in decades. Key elements:

• The "stand-up strike" tactic: selective walkouts at specific plants and parts depots rather than full strikes against all three companies. Preserved strike-fund resources while maintaining leverage.
• Live YouTube briefings explaining the union's position and the companies' counteroffers in real time. Transparency that prior negotiations had not produced.
• The 25% wage gain over four-and-a-half years, with the largest increases for the lowest-paid workers (temporary workers gained substantially more than that on conversion to permanent status).
• Restoration of cost-of-living adjustments eliminated in 2007.
• Elimination of two-tier wage systems for new hires.
• Reopener provisions if EV transition shifts plant locations.

The contract is not a complete victory — the union did not win the return of pensions for new hires, did not win full healthcare for retirees, and did not win the four-day workweek that some had pushed for. But within the framework of what is achievable in current US labor law, the contract is the strongest outcome the UAW has produced in forty years.

The Starbucks Reality

The Starbucks story is more complicated than the certification counts suggest. As of mid-2024, no organized Starbucks store has a ratified collective bargaining agreement. The company has refused to bargain in what the NLRB has repeatedly ruled is bad faith. The litigation continues, but the gap between certifying a union and getting a contract is enormous under current US labor law.

The 2024 framework agreement between Starbucks and Starbucks Workers United, which committed both sides to negotiate in good faith and to use the agreement as a basis for individual store contracts, is the first meaningful progress in three years. Whether it produces actual ratified contracts within reasonable timeframes remains to be seen.

The Amazon Story

The April 2022 ALU victory at JFK8 was followed by a series of defeats — LDJ5 across the street voted against the union in May 2022, several other facilities either rejected or had elections delayed, and internal disputes within ALU produced leadership challenges. The 2024 merger with the Teamsters provides the international resources for continued litigation and organizing, but JFK8 itself has not yet produced a contract more than two years after certification.

Amazon's anti-union strategy has been one of the most resourced in recent US labor history. The company spent over $14 million on anti-union consultants in 2022 alone. The strategy of constant captive-audience meetings, surveillance of organizing activity, and litigation to delay contract bargaining is a template that other employers can follow if they are willing to accept the costs.

Whether the Gains Hold Without Legal Reform

The PRO Act (Protecting the Right to Organize Act) would address several of the structural obstacles the new organizing has run into:

• Card-check recognition (eliminating the secret-ballot delay).
• Prohibition of captive-audience meetings.
• Criminal penalties for employer interference.
• Card-check for gig and contractor workers.
• Override of state right-to-work laws.

The PRO Act has passed the House multiple times but not the Senate. Without it, the structural framework that makes US organizing hard remains in place. The 2022-2025 wins are substantial but operate within constraints that limit how much density can recover. Whether the political coalition for the PRO Act can carry the Senate in any foreseeable Congress is the open institutional question.

Reading List

• Steven Greenhouse, Beaten Down, Worked Up (2019)
• Jane McAlevey, A Collective Bargain (2020)
• Kim Kelly, Fight Like Hell (2022)
• Eric Blanc, We Are the Union (2025)
• EPI's ongoing labor-density and union-wage tracking reports