Candace Lund has never been busier. During the past two years, the executive officer and contract negotiator for the Communications Workers of America Local 37002, otherwise known as the Minnesota Newspaper Guild, has helped back small new labor unions at OutFront Minnesota, MinnPost, the Minnesota Council of Nonprofits, the American Civil Liberties Union and Beacon Interfaith Housing Collaborative, among other newcomers.
That’s not to say new memberships have created a financial windfall in member dues.
Despite the increase in new union sites, overall membership in Local 37002 has remained fairly steady at roughly 500 members, given belt-tightening elsewhere in the communications industry.
“There’s 18 work days this month and in nine of them I’ve had bargaining negotiations,” Lund said in late August, in the midst of working with at least seven new groups on their first labor contracts, some of them involving as few as four newly unionized employees. “It will be like that in September, too. I’m actually at capacity and starting to say no to people.”
LABOR MEMBERSHIP IN MINNESOTA UP SLIGHTLY DURING PANDEMIC
During the pandemic, labor organizations experienced an uptick in interest, even as workers left their industries or were shut out by business lockdowns and recession.
Not every effort has been successful — an attempt to unionize Surly Brewing failed by a single vote in October — but Minnesota’s overall union membership rate increased from 13.7 percent of the workforce in 2019 to 15.8 percent in 2020. The state jumped from having the 12th- to the 10th-highest union density in the nation.
“The pandemic just woke up a lot of people to ‘I don’t like my job, and I’m going to make it better or just leave’ … (or) ‘I don’t want to go back to that,'” said Lund, who represents bargaining units at the Star Tribune, Pioneer Press and other media outlets. “There is something in the air, in a few different industries. We’re getting a lot of calls from small social justice nonprofits.”
Among those nonprofit groups was CTUL, a South Minneapolis-based worker-advocacy organization that unionized in June with voluntary recognition from management. Organizers said the pandemic both hurt and helped the effort, slowing communication while underscoring the importance of having a worker safety net.
“As the crises of this year and last year have built up, it’s put a starker relief on where we are at, and how capitalism is destroying our planet in so many ways,” said Sheff Sheffield, a fundraising organizer with CTUL. “I think that’s added some activism energy to a lot of workplaces. But at CTUL we were thinking of unionizing for a long time before the pandemic.”
Overall, the pandemic has proved to be a mixed bag for labor. Nationally, the percentage of unionized workers increased. At the same time, against a backdrop of COVID-related business lockdowns, recession and staff layoffs and departures, there were fewer people working, especially in the private sector, causing a net decline in actual membership.
In 2020, the national percentage of wage and salary workers who were union members reached 10.8 percent, up half of a percentage point from 2019, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. At the same time, the actual numbers of unionized workers fell to 14.3 million last year, down by 321,000 members from 2019, a 2.2 percent decrease. Union membership decreased by 428,000 workers in the private sector and showed little change in the public sector. Male workers accounted for the vast majority of the decline.
Those numbers are a far cry from where things stood in 1983, the first year the Bureau of Labor Statistics began keeping comparable data. Back then, the union membership rate was 20.1 percent and there were 17.7 million union workers. What makes those numbers stand out is that the population of working-age Americans (age 15 to 64) has grown 40 percent in that time, increasing from 147 million potential workers in 1983 to more than 207 million potential workers just before the start of the pandemic.
In other words, if 20 percent of the civilian labor force were unionized today, there would be more than 32 million unionized workers, or more than double the actual tally.
INDUSTRY-SPECIFIC CHANGES
During the pandemic, some gains and losses have been industry-specific or even site-specific. While restaurants were forced to pivot to takeout and delivery for weeks at a time, the construction industry was buoyed by strong stock market performance and low interest rates, which have opened the door for more projects.
“There’s a lot of work,” said Liz Xiong, spokesperson for St. Paul-based LIUNA, the Laborers International Union of North America-Minnesota and North Dakota, where seasonal membership has held steady. “All across the state, if anybody wants to be working in union construction, they’re working.”
While labor efforts at Surly Brewing and Spyhouse Coffee failed to draw enough votes to form a union over opposition from management, Fair State Brewing in northeast Minneapolis recognized a worker-driven unionization effort last September without fanfare.
In January, professional and clerical workers at Augsburg voted by mail-in ballot to join the Office and Professional Employees International Union Local 12, with 84 percent of votes cast supporting the effort.
EFFORTS DURING THE PANDEMIC
Perhaps ironically, some say the pandemic helped illustrate to some everyday employees the potential benefits of a union.
“We saw a lot of decisions being made during the pandemic without consulting the workers,” said Mike Bloomberg, an Augsburg staff librarian.
Bloomberg said he was three months into the yearlong union drive when COVID hit.
“Organizing work is a lot of talking one-on-one with people, and when you can’t show up at their office and say hi, that makes it harder,” said Bloomberg, who took to the phone and Zoom to pitch the labor movement to workers in the athletics department he had never met. “The hardest part was getting hold of everybody, especially people we didn’t have an organic connection to. There were some we just had to make cold calls.”
The Augsburg union is now in the midst of “slow and frustrating” contract bargaining talks, Bloomberg said, but they recently scored a victory of sorts. When Augsburg mandated vaccines for faculty, staff and students, the union asked management for 16 hours of additional sick time for every member who shows a vaccination card. Their plan was intended to cover recovery time and the time involved in taking a child for a vaccination shot. It got approved.
PUBLIC SECTOR UNIONS PROVE RESILIENT
Union membership in the public sector — where job losses were relatively limited even during the pandemic — has proved especially resilient. That’s kept things steady for Leah VanDassor, president of the St. Paul Federation of Educators, which represents more than 3,500 licensed school staff, including educational assistants, nurses and school and community service providers.
“Even during the pandemic, we did not experience a decline in membership,” VanDassor said.
Chris Shields, a spokesman for the Minnesota AFL-CIO, which represents 300,000 workers statewide, said his organization serves as an umbrella for more than 1,000 unions throughout the state. He doesn’t track month-to-month membership within each member union.
However, “the most recent data we have is a shift up in both density and raw numbers from 2019 to 2020,” Shields said in an email. As the pandemic closed businesses in 2020, “what we did notice was that aside from the hospitality and entertainment sectors, people with union jobs were far less likely to lose their jobs.”
