Nearly 900,000 Americans sitting down to Thanksgiving dinner this week will have unions – and the double-digit pay increases they won – to thank.

That’s how many unionized workers have won immediate pay hikes of 10% or more in just the last year, according to an analysis by CNN.

And the pace of increases of that size have been picking up. More than 700,000 of those workers won pay hikes over the course of the last six months, and of that group, nearly 300,000 saw deals reached in just the last six weeks.

“I would say this is the best run of wage increases won by labor since the period right after the end of World War II,” said Art Wheaton, director of labor studies at Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations in Buffalo.

  • lntl
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    7 months ago

    When I worked at Amazon, i learned that unions are bad for workers.

    I remember that if we get/keep unions out of the way then more of the money we make can go to us instead of the union.

    • Wiwiweb@sh.itjust.works
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      7 months ago

      Are you telling us this as an example of the kind of things they will tell you at Amazon, or is this something you believe too?

    • Sanyanov@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      Unfortunately, it very much doesn’t work like that.

      The goal of any company, Amazon included, is to pay you as little as possible while extracting as much work from you as possible.

      Without a union, they will pay you absolute minimum they can to have you stay at that job, regardless of other expenses - in fact, corporations keep renewing records in profits without workers getting anything from it.

      With a union, strikes and legal actions increase your power over the company and allow you to get a bigger slice of the pie (and poor poor Bezos will have to give out a little of his for that).

      • lntl
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        7 months ago

        I want to believe you, but Amazon gave us lunch during their class on unions and lunch is one of my favorites. Besides youre coming off like a know-it-all and aren’t buying me lunch