Corporate greed drives a range of bad behaviors including bad faith negotiations with workers’ unions. The quite profitable New York Times dragged out negotiations with its newsroom union for over two years before giving them modest raises that hardly keep up with inflation. Companies are frequently uncooperative in contract negotiations after workers have voted to form a new union. Typically, it takes over a year for a first contract to be signed and, in some cases, no contract is ever signed.
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You’ve probably heard about recent successful votes by workers to establish unions, including at an Amazon warehouse and hundreds of Starbucks stores. There was a 53% increase in the number of unionization votes in 2022 over 2021, and this trend is continuing. All told, 200,000 workers voted to unionize in 2022.
The successful votes to unionize are the good news for the workers. The bad news is that it typically takes more than a year after the successful vote to sign the first contract, and, in some cases, no contract is ever signed. In a study of 391 first-time union contracts signed in 2005 – 2022, the average time from the successful vote to unionize to the signing of the first contract was 465 days; in the last three years of this period, it was over 500 days. A separate study of 226 successful unionization votes in 2018 found that 63% had no contract one year later and that 43% had no contract two years later. In 2009, a study of over 1,000 successful unionization votes found that 52% had no contract one year later, 37% had no contract two years later, and 30% had no contract three years later. [1]
These delays in signing a contract indicate bad faith in employers’ negotiating and are troublesome for multiple reasons. First, if a contract isn’t signed within a year, the employer can challenge the validity of the union. Second, a delay in signing a contract tends to harm workers’ morale and their commitment to the union. The energy from the successful drive to vote for a union tends to dissipate and employee turnover tends to dilute the pool of workers committed to the union.
Labor laws are tilted in the favor of employers to begin with, but employers often also use illegal tactics to delay contract negotiations. Although both parties are required by law to bargain in good faith, there is no enforcement mechanism. Furthermore, there is no requirement to engage in mediation or binding arbitration if negotiations have not produced a contract.
Employers also drag their feet in negotiating new union contracts when one expires. A recent example is the New York Times (NYT), which dragged out contract negotiations for over two years after its newsroom union’s contract expired on March 30, 2021. The NYT engaged a high-powered law firm, Proskauer Rose, to guide its negotiations. It took seven months to respond to the union’s initial wage proposal and then five months to respond to the union’s counterproposal. In the meantime, the union employees worked for two years without a contract and without any increase in pay while inflation cut deeply into the value of their incomes. [2]
After 21 months of negotiation, the NYT and the union were roughly $15 million apart in their positions on aggregate annual wage costs. However, the NYT was not budging, so the workers held a one-day strike in December 2022. To put this in some perspective, the NYT had an average operating profit of $215 million in each year from 2020 to 2022. In 2022, it announced it would buy back $150 million of its own stock during the year. It has also increased the dividends it pays to shareholders by 83% from $0.82 per share in 2020 to a projected $1.50 in 2023. In 2021, compensation for the CEO was $5.75 million (a 32% increase) and $3.6 million for the publisher (a 49% increase). Clearly, the NYT is not a corporation that can’t afford to pay a few million dollars more to its employees, who are recognized around the world as top-notch.
Ultimately, after over two years of negotiating and workers going without any pay increase, the union and the NYT reached a five-year deal on May 23, 2023. The workers got a 7% bonus based on their 2020 wages instead of any retroactive wage increase for the two years they worked without a contract. They got an immediate increase of between 10.6% and 12.5% on their 2020 wages, their only raise over a three-year period, as well as future raises of 3.25% in 2024 and 3.0% in 2025. This was a long, hard-fought battle with a very profitable corporation where negotiations finally produced a contract in which the workers’ pay may not even be keeping up with inflation. [3]
The Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act in Congress would address the problem of employers delaying contract negotiations. It would require an employer to start good faith negotiations within 10 days of a vote for a union or the end of a contract. If a contract is not agreed to within 90 days, either side could request federal mediation. If mediation fails to produce a contract in 30 days, binding arbitration would take place and put a two-year contract in place. [4]
I urge you to contact your U.S. Representative and Senators to ask them to support the PRO Act to ensure that union contracts are negotiated in a reasonable timeframe. You can find contact information for your US Representative at http://www.house.gov/representatives/find/ and for your US Senators at http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm.
[1] McNicholas, C., Poydock, M., & Schmitt, J., 5/1/23, “Workers are winning union elections, but it can take years to get their first contract,” Economic Policy Institute (https://www.epi.org/publication/union-first-contract-fact-sheet/)
[2] Greenhouse, S., 12/15/22, “What’s wrong at the Times,” The American Prospect (https://prospect.org/labor/new-york-times-union-contract-strike/)
[3] Robertson, K., 5/23/23, “The Times reaches a contract deal with newsroom union,” The New York Times
[4] McNicholas, C., Poydock, M., & Schmitt, J., 5/1/23, see above
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