Is this the "American dream"?
In the United States, 44%
of Americans are low-wage earners,
often working multiple jobs.
In fact, wages haven't increased
significantly since the '70s,
while productivity has continued to rise.
And the federal minimum
wage hasn't changed since 2009.
Meanwhile, some 4,000 miles away
from Washington, DC, Sweden
boasts of high wages for most
workers, high levels of productivity
for businesses and general high
levels of equality in society.
Many of the Nordic countries don't
even have a minimum wage officially.
Wait. What?
Sweden, they have very, very high levels of
union density.
Union membership in the United
States peaked in 1954
at 28.3% of the total workforce.
But that number stands at only
10.8% today.
That sharp decline in the power
of U.S. trade unions has made it
harder for American workers to
negotiate for better pay.
The U.S. labor movement built its
strength through decades of bitter,
often bloody struggles that helped
give Americans protections in the workplace.
Protections such as the 40-hour
work week, the minimum wage
and an end to child labor.
Unions were also a significant part
of broader struggles for economic
and racial justice.
Hey guys, it's Dena.
And today we're going to see if the
U.S. can learn anything from the labor
unions in France, Argentina
and Sweden.
We can't really talk about powerful
labor unions without talking about
France.
France legalized unions in 1884.
Throughout the tumultuous 20th
century, French unions remained
the main institution protecting
social welfare.
Today, French unions represent only
a small fraction of French workers,
just 10.8%.
That actually matches the small
percentage of U.S.
workers in unions.
So how are these French union
workers, who tend to belong to the
public sector, punching above their weight?
Well, the vast majority
of French workers benefit from the
collective bargaining agreements
negotiated by unions, even
if they're not official members of a
particular union.
French unions also organize against
cuts to public services and social
welfare programs.
This might be why public support for
strikes remains strong.
At the end of 2019, France
experienced its longest strike
in half a century.
The strike was in protest to
proposed changes to the country's
vaunted pension system
that would have ended early retirement
privileges for some workers.
The proposed changes were the latest
in a series of so-called "reforms"
pushed by French President Emmanuel Macron.
I want France to be a startup
nation, meaning both
a nation that works
with and for
the startups, but also
a nation that thinks
and moves like a startup.
Even after several weeks of
disrupted holiday travel for
hundreds of thousands of people in France.
61% of those polled said that the
strikes were justified.
The strikes managed to block the
pension changes before COVID-19
led Macron to postpone them entirely.
So if French workers are able
to resist reforms by going on
strike, why don't Americans?
Well in France, the right to strike
has been enshrined in the
Constitution since 1946.
In the United States, the
right to strike was established by
the National Labor Relations Act in 1935.
But that law also
imposed limitations on when strikes
are legal. In the U.S., public
sector workers' right to strike is
not protected at the federal level.
By contrast, in France, public
sector workers can strike, and they
often exert this power to resist
budget cuts to public spending that
would impact all French citizens.
But it's not only France where
unions are at the forefront of
social movements.
The power of unions in Argentina
took off during the 1940s
with the ascendancy of
Col. Juan Domingo Perón.
First as secretary of labor under a
military dictatorship, and then as
president, Perón implemented
labor-friendly policies to build
support among unions.
These workers formed his political base.
The reforms included regulating
working conditions, introducing paid
vacations and unionizing previously
unorganized workers.
This support strengthened unions in
negotiations, but it had a major catch.
For unions to receive support,
they had to replace any communist
leaders they might have had.
Between 1945 and 1954,
the number of unionized workers in
Argentina more than quadrupled.
Then in 1976,
a U.S.-backed military junta seized
power. And it was particularly
hostile to unions.
They passed a security law that
explicitly banned strikes.
Argentina's unions organized several
general strikes anyway, helping to
weaken the power of the
dictatorship, which ultimately ended
in 1983.
The political culture has endured
into the 21st century, and Argentine
workers continue to take their union
rights very seriously.
Back in 2005, four
McDonald's delivery workers were
fired by their employer, a
third-party delivery company, for
wanting to join a union.
In response, their coworkers
occupied a McDonald's location
in the heart of Buenos Aires.
Eventually, their employer was
ordered to reinstate the fired
workers and recognize their union.
Unions have also helped Argentine
workers push back against big
corporations during the COVID-19 pandemic.
In spring 2020, McDonald's
announced they would be cutting
worker salaries in Argentina by 50%,
since they would be working fewer hours.
The fast food workers' union pushed
back and negotiated full pay for
all hours worked, as well as
partial pay for workers' lost hours.
Unions have also extended solidarity
to other social movements in Argentina.
For example, unions and feminist
organizations came together to
organize the first National Women's
Strike in October 2016.
These campaigns at the intersection
of unions and the feminist movement
eventually led to Argentina
legalizing abortion at the end of 2020.
But neither French nor
Argentine union numbers come close
to this Scandinavian country's:
Sweden, which has one of the highest
rates of unionized employees in the
world at 67%.
Approximately 90% of the employees
in Sweden are covered by collective
bargaining agreements, even if
they're not in a union themselves.
We spoke to David Madland, whose new
book outlines the reforms needed to
revitalize unions in the U.S.
and which countries can serve as models.
In Sweden, they have very, very high
levels of union density and very
high levels of collective bargaining coverage.
That has led to high wages for most
workers, very high
levels of equality
in society and high levels
of productivity for their employers.
Under the Swedish model, labor
and business maintain a working relationship.
As long as collective bargaining
agreements remain in place, unions
commit themselves to refrain from
going on strike.
This might be why we're not seeing
the same strike footage in Sweden
that we saw in France and Argentina.
We also spoke to Martin Linder, the
president of Unionen, which is
Sweden's union for white-collar workers.
In my experience, with that
kind of unions, the employers
rather bargain with us
as that kind of union, and in that
way, set the conditions in
collective agreements instead
of politicians doing
that by law and political regulation.
In fact, Sweden doesn't even
have a minimum wage.
But despite that, real wages in
Sweden increased almost 60%
between 1995 and 2016,
compared to just
11.5% in the U.S.
over the same period.
Over the last few decades, Sweden's
labor system has created a stable
environment for both workers and
businesses, featuring lower rates
of unemployment and inflation, as
well as fewer strikes.
Well, if you go way back in
the past, it was a very
conflict-oriented labor market
in Sweden. But for the
last 30 or 40 years,
I would like to say, we have seen a
development that has been not so
much conflict-oriented, more pragmatic.
And from the union side, I would
like to say that we in general
have a pragmatic,
results-driven relationship with business.
So if Swedish unions negotiate
higher wages for all workers,
regardless of whether or not they're
actually in a union, why hasn't
this led to a lower level of union membership?
Well, many workers join Swedish
unions because they provide benefits
like unemployment insurance for
workers via something called the
Ghent system.
[In] the Ghent system in Sweden,
unions help provide unemployment
insurance, and so most
people get their unemployment
insurance through the union.
It is a very good, effective
system and the benefits are really
quite good.
You're not going to be forced to
live into poverty if you suddenly
become unemployed.
It's also very closely connected
with the reemployment system
and the training system.
And the stability offered by this
system has become incredibly vital
in the wake of COVID-19.
You can see that in this
pandemic and this uncertainty,
the trade unions in Sweden has
offered something that people has
wanted to be a part of.
France, Argentina and Sweden
have very different labor systems,
but they all have one thing in
common that's missing in the United
States: sectoral bargaining.
Sectoral bargaining is this
way of negotiating collective
bargaining agreements that cover
all workers in an industry
or a region, whether or
not they're unionized or not.
While the majority of American
unions negotiate for workers at the
workplace level, some unions have
gotten close to sectoral bargaining
in the past.
In the industries where the unions
had very, very high density,
like auto or steel
in the 1950s and '60s,
they developed something like
sectoral bargaining, where most
all workers in the industry were
covered by very similar agreements.
And in some ways this was very
much the system that helped build the
U.S. middle class into the envy of the
rest of the world.
And politicians are beginning to
recognize this problem.
Most Democratic presidential
candidates during the 2020
election had proposals for
sectoral bargaining.
People from Bernie Sanders on
the left to [Michael] Bloomberg on the sort of
right, that this was pretty universal.
President Biden had a plan to
create a commission to study
sectorial bargaining as well.
In the meantime, a major slate of
labor reforms is working its way
through Congress.
The Protecting the Right to Organize
Act, or PRO Act,
doesn't include sectoral bargaining.
But the reforms it does include
would make it easier for workers to
form unions.
The PRO Act bans certain employer
activities meant to hinder workers' organizing.
We have such a broken labor law
that doesn't allow even the very
basics, and the PRO
Act takes major, major steps
towards getting the basics right
about U.S. labor law.
We can and should do more than the
PRO Act, but the PRO Act is the
fundamental first step.