Trade Union Lessons from Early US Trotskyism and US Communism

There has been an upsurge in union organizing in 2021 and 2022. From October 2021 to March 2022, the filing of union certification election petitions with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) increased 57% from the previous year, rising from 748 to 1174 petitions. The increase in organizing activity occurred in unlikely places, such as the coffee shop giant, Starbucks, which as of the middle of December 2022, employees have emerged victorious in some 264 NLRB representation elections in coffee houses throughout the nation. Other employees achieving victory in union certification elections included those at a New York City Amazon warehouse under the auspices of the Amazon Labor Union and a small office of Google Fiber contractors in Kansas City (Missouri) under the Alphabet Workers Union. A major reason for this uptick in union organizing activity is due to the COVID-19 pandemic with front line workers who were serving customers feeling not only vulnerable, but according to Mark Pearce, who had served as an NLRB chairman and is now a Georgetown University law professor, “they were not only scared, but they were also pissed.” And according to 31-year-old Sarah Pappin, a Starbucks union organizer, “We all kick around between the same crappy retail jobs. This is the moment where we’ve all realized that it actually kind of sucks everywhere, so let’s just make a stand at one place and prove it.” Besides the launching of more union organizing campaigns, there also has been an increase in strike activity in the United States. Based on Bureau of Labor Statistics