Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1456671
w i l l e n ta i l s o m e b l ow i n g o f f d u s t a n d some clearing of cobwebs. And I'll need, of course, a new calendar. But the recrewing of our ghost ship also affords an occasion to reflect on what these past two odd and anxious years have wrought — for our organization, for our parent union, and for the labor movement more generally. Any haunting is the story of a place that sits uneasily in its time, laden with a history unreconciled with the present. Spookiness results from our dim but well-founded suspicion that our ev- er-ephemeral present is always vanishing ere we've managed to apprehend it, and the narrative function of a ghost's sleepwalk is to bid the living to wake more fully to the truths of our pasts and our possible futures. What, then, ought we now make of how these two strange years have changed us, and where we go from here? " T h e re a re d e c a d e s w h e n n o t h i n g happens," V. I. Lenin is said to have ob- served, "and weeks when decades happen." (There's some question over the authentici- ty of the epigram, but, whether or not Lenin actually said it, he ought to have.) These past two years have at times felt like entire decades full of nothing happening as we locked ourselves down in claustrophobic sequestration, hunkering in our bunkers while the virus went about its grim work and much of ordinary human enterprise was held in abeyance. And at other times — sometimes, in fact, at the very same times — these pandemic days felt as eventful as entire tumultuous decades, with long-held norms unceremoniously discarded and con- vulsions of historical magnitude shaking us to our cores. One paradox of this pandemic is the question of whether it's a period in which nothing happened or one in which everything happened. W i t h i n t h e a re n a o f t h e U. S. l a b o r movement, the pandemic years and recent months, especially, have exhibited a frenzy of activity, perhaps even resembling a renaissance. Gallup's polling shows public support for labor unions in the U.S. has climbed higher than it has been in more than half a century. The pandemic's dis- ruptions have obviously inspired many to rethink their relationship to work, and a great many workers have clearly found that relationship wanting. By some counts, new union organizing campaigns now are double their numbers from just a year ago. Headlines have heralded high-profile unionization drives at large or noteworthy employers such as Amazon, the New York Times, and Starbucks. And the news has abounded with stories of organized work- ers taking increasingly militant stands, including large and consequential strikes at such employers as Columbia University, Kellogg's, and John Deere. Organized labor, all this buzz would suggest, is in the midst of a long-awaited comeback. And yet some key figures don't support t h i s s a n gu i n e n a r rat i ve. Ac t u a l u n i o n density — the percentage of the workforce represented by organized labor — con- tinues its decades-long decline. Recently released numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that U.S. private sector union membership shrank in 2021 to 6.1% of the workforce, the lowest proportion since the agency began tracking this statistic. For all the apparent activity and shift in senti- ment, labor's clout seems still to dwindle. At the level of public policy, the story is similarly one suspended between the poles of promise and paralysis. The Biden administration came into office vowing to be unprecedently pro-union, and it has, in- deed, followed through. Biden immediately went about instituting a change of regime at the National Labor Relations Board, and the newly pro-worker NLRB looks to MILITANT: Workers (like these from John Deere) have recently struck big employers. P H OT O : A P P H OT O S 11 S P R I N G Q 1 I S S U E G E T T I N G O R G A N I Z E D