Tevita Uhatafe proudly wore a Texas union cap and shirt as he marched toward New York City’s Times Square in a rally on Labor Day. Lest people forget where he...
Whether young workers’ enthusiasm will reverse the past downward trend in union membership remains to be seen.
“There’s this really spontaneous eruption of folks,” said Rick Levy, president of the Texas AFL-CIO. Much of the burst is being fueled by people in their 20s and 30s, he added. Uhatafe has developed a national reputation for showing up to support people fighting for better job conditions around the country.
National support among workers ages 18-24, in particular, has skyrocketed: 72% now approve of unions, according to a recent White House report. Since then, Russell and some of her co-workers have joined Young Active Labor Leaders, an organization under the Texas AFL-CIO that aims to galvanize young people and regularly provides strike aid around the state.
Angi DeFelippo, the Young Active Labor Leader’s Dallas-Fort Worth-based chair, got into union work before the pandemic. She was employed at a duty-free shop in the George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston when a co-worker approached her about helping to organize a union.DeFelippo’s grandparents were members of the United Auto Workers, something that primed her to view unions in a positive light, she said. Without them, she is unsure whether she would have been so open.
Michael Z. Green, a professor at Texas A&M University School of Law who specializes in labor law, partly attributes the decline to an erosion of legal protections for unions. Additionally, between the state’s business friendly atmosphere, which Green said is largely opposed to union activity because it can disrupt business operations, and “right-to-work” laws that weaken the function and expansion of unions, organizing activity in Texas is especially limited, said Green.
Younger Texans who want to form unions will have to learn to grapple with the challenges, Pearson said.
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