The AFL-CIO, which commissioned the poll, said the union had never seen support levels that high.
As labor activity is surging across the country, polling has found that young people are saying they favor unions at overwhelmingly high levels — support that labor organizers say is “unprecedented.”
According to polling by GBAO conducted for the AFL-CIO, a whopping 88 percent of people under 30 say they approve of labor unions, while 90 percent say they approve of strikes. This is a far higher proportion of support than other groups, with 69 percent of those aged 30 to 49 supporting unions and 67 percent of those over 50 saying the same. Support for strikes is at 72 percent for both age groups.
This is an extraordinary show of support for the labor movement among young people, as the AFL-CIO noted. “Nearly 9 in 10 (88%) people under 30 view unions favorably,” the union wrote in a press release. “We’ve never seen a number that high, which is testament to the deep desire of young people to act collectively to demand respect and dignity on the job.”
Overall, the poll found that 71 percent of voters back unions. Approval cuts across party lines, with 91 percent of Democrats, 69 percent of independents and even a slim majority of Republicans, 52 percent, saying they back labor unions. Support for strikes is higher, at 75 percent overall.
The poll results were released as AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler and Secretary-Treasurer Fred Redmond delivered a State of the Unions address this week.
“The idea of a union may sound complicated, but in reality, unions are just a group of people coming together. They are about each of us becoming the most powerful version of ourselves that we possibly can,” Shuler said in her speech. “People in this country have been searching for their power for a long time now, young people especially.”
Indeed, people under 30 overwhelmingly agreed that it should be easier for people to form a union, at 70 percent, and that unions are needed now more than ever, at 77 percent. Seventy percent agreed with the statement that “society would be better with more people in a union.” Support for these statements was far lower among older voters, hovering around 50 percent.
“Every day, more and more working people are finding out that the labor movement is the solution to low wages and unsafe workplaces, to inequality and discrimination. That the labor movement is the only institution in America that has the infrastructure and reach to address and vanquish oppression in all its forms…. That life truly is better in a union,” said Redmond.
The polling comes as labor activity has reached a fever pitch. Workers at companies like Starbucks and Trader Joe’s have been unionizing locations across the U.S., while hundreds of thousands of workers have gone on strike or voted to authorize a strike this summer. Strikes by Writers Guild of America and the Screen Actors Guild contributed to July being one of the busiest months for strikes in several decades, one Washington Post analysis earlier this month found.
Meanwhile, thousands of workers may go on strike soon. Last week, 97 percent of workers at the Big Three automakers — Ford, General Motors and Stellantis — voted to strike if automakers can’t reach a deal with workers before their current contract expires on September 14. On Wednesday, flight attendants for American Airlines also voted overwhelmingly to authorize a strike, with over 99 percent approval.
My daughter is 12 and I’m already teaching her about the importance of unions, the concept of minimum wage=minimum effort, the idea that you can tell your boss to eat shit, and that a workplace is not “family”. I want her to know that employers WILL try to take advantage of her, and that she has the right to demand better.
My sister just took my nieces to a strike march today. You love to see it! Teach kids about their work rights!
That is actually a great way to teach kids these things. I was nine when my mom took me to her workplace as she was organizing strike monitors. I passively learned a lot. Admittedly between 59-69% of the workforce of my country belongs to unions so it is pretty much generally thought that unions are amazing. I have belonged to one if I was working in Finland either since I was 18 or 19. But that original experience with all the union work that goes behind the scenes is one of my foundational experiences.
I’m an adjunct professor. The only reason I have health insurance and get paid a reasonable wage is due to the hard work my union puts in. Non-unionized people in my position live on absolute poverty wages and have to work twice as hard to survive. Any young person who dislikes unions is a bootlicking moron.
I sure hope so. They are the ones getting the most fucked by the world.
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Hopefully it’s a non-voting position. I can see a lot of good reasons for the owner/executive of a company to be on a union’s board, such as:
- give perspective of the company’s financials so unions can make reasonable demands - if the company goes under, the union won’t be able to keep everyone employed
- discuss issues before it comes to a union vote - basically sidestep formalities to get results faster
But if the owner is a voting member of the board, I can see that being an issue.
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Wow, that’s uniquely terrible. Maybe the union needs a union…
I would recommend someone get in touch with the NLRB - it can be done anonymously, if needed.
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Has to be Kroger or some offshoot of them. They used to pay decently well relative to other retail stores, about a decade ago. Now they pay less than everywhere else cuz “union tho”.
It is too easy for most unions to become corrupted by self interested parties. It’s the same with any human endeavour. Relax the boundaries enough and people with less scruples than you will worm their way in.
There’s needs to be legislative framework that protects the rights of every worker, every industry, everywhere as a baseline. Then construct sensible unions for various industries from there. Otherwise they become fragile, susceptible to personal influence - who’s going to run against a 10 year incumbent union president?- it needs an iron core underlying it to protect workers rights.
Agreed. If the workers are going to be separated from the profits via the company, the workers need to be separated from the company via union. The union and workers would have an interest in the companies success, cause no one wants to look for a new job if they like what they do and are compensated fairly. The company has a stake in the workers happiness because unrest endangers the company. Too many owners and LLCs are insulated from the consequences of strikes and negotiations simply because they have the capital to sit on their hands or burn it to the ground with little repurcussion.
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Surprising. Oh well, free market and such. If only the leopard didn’t eat their face…lol
That’s not a union. That’s an auxiliary HR department.
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I’m the operations manager for a construction company that is signatory to 8 different trade unions. Just about every single union out there has an advisory board that includes employers.
Also, for those who don’t know, it costs a company a significant amount of money to join & be part of a union. I’m all for unions and am happy to see people learning more about them, but they certainly aren’t for every company. A lot of mom & pop small businesses likely couldn’t afford to join if their employees organized.
Just about every single union out there has an advisory board that includes employers.
Absolutely not true. I believe you are confusing a Labor Management Committee - which is a common space for the Union and bosses to meet and discuss issues.
Bosses are not in legitimate Unions.
Source: I serve in an elected position in a sizable Union where I also serve on a Labor Management Committee.
Secondly, Unions are for the Workers - not the bosses. To hell with “costs.” Enough sympathy for these people. If they can’t afford to pay their workers a good wage and provide them a quality work/life balance, they don’t deserve to be in business.
Ha I see we found the carpenter in the group. Our CEO & myself are both current pipefitters bud. And you are correct, I was referring to the employer advisory board on which our CEO & myself sit for our company.
Costs don’t matter as much if you’re operating in an area with sufficient union market presence. Go try starting a union outfit in Idaho and see if your “to hell with costs” ideology holds up lol.
Most small mom & pop outfits fall into that category - their competition isn’t union so unionizing immediately puts them at a huge disadvantage. Outfits like Starbucks on the other hand, they can most certainly afford the added overhead burden.
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Can’t union members vote them on or off? I am not American but how I was taught is that unions are what members make them of. This works here but unions are also not for one job place but for job classes (academics, nurses, doctors and teachers unions are separate for example). This means that employee contracts are negotiated nationally with unions for different employers. It makes the system less likely to be abused.
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B-b-b-but the small business owners!
This is a common conservative talking point to dissuade people from seeking fair pay.
Small business owners are frequently guilty of wage theft, commit frequent labor violations, and lean on their employees to work exorbitant hours the most. These businesses frequently fail within the first year, leaving their employees to find a new job anyway.
It would be better for everyone if the employees were protected from the start, and had to find new jobs sooner rather than later. If the business can’t afford benefits and a decent wage, they should step aside for someone who can
Lfmao you have literally no clue what you’re talking about bud.
You clearly have no idea how unions work and are simply regurgitating whatever incorrect idealistic bullshit you read on Facebook. You’re embarrassing yourself.
Our trade union employer dues (pipefitters, iron workers, electricians, sheet metal tinknockers, carpenters, millwright, laborers and operators) add about 15p on top of our overhead burden. That is the hard cost we pay to the unions to employ union labor, period. Thats before we bill labor at union rates for our work, which are about 30-35p higher than a similar non union tradesman.
Now we make some of that cash back on reduced workers comp rates (union labor is generally less prone to accidents on the job) but out the gate we are generally 30p more expensive than a similar non-union contractor, dollar for dollar.
Conservative talking points lol. Grow up & put down your iPhone bud, not everything boils down to a political debate. These are just the numbers from somebody who literally does this every day for a living.
I guarantee I am much more liberal than your uninformed ass lol. I agree everyone should argue for fair pay but folks most certainly need to be aware that it costs a company a lot of money to join a union. Most mom and pop companies aren’t union because they can’t afford it, especially when their competition isn’t unionized.
I am a union Steward and have been a member for 10 years.
Seems logical imo. With the bigger companies working towards profits more and more over being the “family” companies they once were the workers need more power to push back. This maybe wasn’t needed as much 50 years back but nowadays the Amazons and Teslas of our world try to squeeze their workers for everything they can.
They’re young; not stupid. Unions are a smart choice.
In my country, near the start of smmer, a lot of teachers started a strike, which meant kids extended vacation
A lot of children liked the strike
Also fucks a lot of companies running on skeleton crews losing an extra few weeks of their staff bc “we need to look after the kids”
BUT WE’RE LIKE A (abusive) FAMILY!
This is interesting, but I’m not sure how much weight I’d give to a poll commissioned by the AFL-CIO (an organization that benefits immensely if the poll is pro-union) and run by a polling organization styling itself as the “Democratic pollster of the year.” Truthout has also failed fact checks on MBFC and has been noted to “publish misleading reports”, so I wonder how much rigor they put into vetting this poll.
This is not to say that unions are bad or supporting unions is bad. But if we’re going to call out biased sources and questionable approaches, we should do regardless of whether we like the conclusions.
Sources:
https://twitter.com/GBAOStrategies (for GBAO taglines)
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/truth-out/ truthout record (failed fact checks, bias, misleading reports)
It’s patently absurd to denigrate a poll because it was commissioned by someone with a vested interest in the results. That’s got to be at least 95% of all polls.
Questioning GBAO’s credentials is a fundamentally reasonable move, though. Let’s see what we can find out.
- GBAO makes a lot of money from DNC campaigns. That implies their focus is on political matters, if there was any doubt. I’m not sure what else it implies. It certainly means they are routinely hired to help campaigns win, such as in this example, but that tells us nothing about how they go about it.
- GBAO is 81% accurate when it comes to predicting political races. As you can see in the infographic on the linked source, that makes them above-average in accuracy, but a far cry from the most accurate around. That implies their analysis of their own results is probably good but not great.
All in all I’m not seeing anything particularly sus here. They have above-average accuracy in calling races and are very popular among DNC PACs, both of which are routine statements for political pollsters.
It is absolutely reasonable to question the accuracy of the poll here, as it was commissioned for a particular purpose. It doesn’t mean the poll is inaccurate, necessarily. But looking at other. similar polls suggests that their sampling group was heavily skewed toward people who were already inclined to support unions.
The most reasonable take here would be “among those who are already inclined to respond to a DNC adjacent pollster, union support is high.” Which I think we already knew.
Edit: From the org itself - GBAO conducted a survey of 1,200 registered voters and oversamples of voters under 30, AAPI
voters, and union members.If something is very popular amongst one specific group, there’s generally a reason for that. As a group bias towards certain topics.
Example. Taking away rights to abortion is popular amongst republicans. Does it mean their views/ predictions/ polls are accurate? No. Because generally a biased party trying to collect poll data will target the promotion of said polls to a demographic that is likely to agree with what they’re polling.
Studies and polls with vested interests are ALWAYS denigrated. Because they’re ALWAYS biased.
I STG if someone links me another mediabiasfactcheck 🫠
I am well aware of both the biases of the sources I read and the biases of the ones you read too
Calling out potential conflicts of interest and the risk of biased data is always important, whether we agree with the conclusions or not. Those who take offense to that fall into the “agenda before facts” category that a certain buffoon of an ex president so enjoyed occupying.
Edit: I’d be interested in hearing what you think “my” sources are. Might surprise you to find out that I strive to read stories from multiple perspectives, especially where the stories themselves are subject to spin.
Could you say what these conflicts of interest are? A poll conducted by a polling group, commissioned by a union federation to gauge people’s interests in unions. I don’t see a conflict there, and it’s not like the AFL is trying to hide the origins of their data
- Truthout failed to disclose that the data was skewed toward existing union members, presenting the data as general support versus support among a dataset skewed toward existing union members.
If I claimed “50% of Kbin users want to hang out with Melpomene” but my dataset is heavily skewed toward people who already expressed interest, that would be dishonest.
- The AFL-CIO did not disclose the dataset used, instead presenting the data as generally applicable. They presented the data as a poll of “registered voters” versus "registered voters, AAPI members, and union members with oversamples of under 30, AAPI voters, and union members: which necessarily skews the results to be pro union.
If I claimed “Green party candidate polling at record numbers” but my dataset oversampled climate activists and registered Green party voters, then the applicability of my poll to the general population would be suspect.
- Of the three, the GBAO seems to be honest about their poll as the sampling method was disclosed. Not their fault that the AFL-CIO and Truthout misrepresented the data.
And yet you still post something you know could be misleading and inaccurate. Says more about you than the people trying to point these things out.
Even in shithole red state Oklahoma, we grow up learning that unions are good and Pinkertons are awful. It’s literally taught in schools.
Unionization is good, but some unions are terrible. The Dept of Vets Affairs union comes to mind, there.
