Strike at Boeing was part of a new era of labor activism long in decline at US work places

Aircraft assembly workers at Boeing factories near Seattle and elsewhere voted to end a seven-week strike overnight.

Leaders of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers district in Seattle said 59% of members who cast ballots agreed to approve the company’s fourth formal offer and the third put to a vote.

Organized labor has made itself heard over the past couple of years, and the number of actions taken by unions has soared. There were 470 work stoppages (466 strikes and four lockouts) involving approximately 539,000 workers last year, according to Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations. The nearly 500 work stoppages resulted in approximately 24,874,522 strike days.

While the number of work stoppages increased by only 9% between 2022 and 2023, the number of workers involved in those work stoppages skyrocketed 141% to well over a half million workers, according to Cornell.

Unions including the UAW, the Teamsters and, most recently, the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, say they made the sacrifices asked of them by their companies during the pandemic and previous periods of distress for different economic sectors. Workers have stood firm on demands of late, however, saying that now is the time for companies, which have been consistently posting billions of dollars in profits every year, to catch up and pay workers what they are owed.

Here’s a look at some recent standoffs between corporate America and workers.

Late last year the United Auto Workers union overwhelmingly ratified new contracts with Ford and Stellantis, along with a similar deal with General Motors, that would raise pay across the industry and force automakers to absorb higher costs.

The agreements, which run through April 2028, ended contentious talks that began in the summer of 2022 and led to six-week-long strikes at all three automakers.

The new contract agreements were widely seen as a victory for the UAW. The companies agreed to dramatically raise pay for top-scale assembly plant workers, with increases and cost-of-living adjustments that would translate into 33% wage gains.

Top assembly plant workers were to receive immediate 11% raises and would earn roughly $42 an hour when the contracts expire in April of 2028.

Under the agreements, the automakers also ended many of the multiple tiers of wages they had used to pay different workers. They also agreed in principle to bring new electric-vehicle battery plants into the national union contract.

UPS workers that are members of the Teamsters union approved a tentative contract with the package delivery company last year. The run-up to the approval was acrimonious, with labor negotiations that threatened to disrupt package deliveries for millions of businesses and households nationwide.

After negotiations broke down in early July 2023, Atlanta-based UPS reached a contract agreement with the Teamsters just days before an Aug. 1 deadline.

At the time the agreement was struck, full- and part-time union workers were set to get $2.75 more per hour in 2023, and $7.50 more in total by the end of the five-year contract. Starting hourly pay for part-time employees also got bumped up to $21, but some workers said that fell short of their expectations.

UPS said at the time that by the end of the new contract, the average UPS full-time driver would make about $170,000 annually in pay and benefits. It was not clear how much of that figure benefits accounted for.

As part of the deal, the delivery company also agreed to make Martin Luther King Jr. Day a full holiday, end forced overtime on drivers’ days off and stop using driver-facing cameras in cabs, among a host of other issues. It eliminated a two-tier wage system for drivers and agreements on safety issues were also reached, including equipping more trucks with air conditioning.

In September video game performers reached agreements with 80 individual games that have signed interim or tiered budget agreements with the performers’ union and accepted the artificial intelligence provisions they have been seeking.

The performers had been striking for over a month.

Members of the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists began striking in July after negotiations with game industry giants that began more than a year and a half ago came to a halt over AI protections.

The interim agreement secures wage improvements, protections around “exploitative uses” of artificial intelligence and safety precautions that account for the strain of physical performances, as well as vocal stress. The tiered budget agreement aims to make working with union talent more feasible for independent game developers or smaller-budget projects while also providing performers the protections under the interim agreement.