By Chris Isidore | CNN
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.
Some of the deals arrived at the end of high-profile strikes, such as the United Auto Workers union strike against General Motors, Ford and Stellantis, which lasted more than six weeks, or one by 75,000 health care workers at Kaiser Permanente, who waged the largest US health care strike ever over just three days in October.
Strikes this summer by the 11,000 members of the Writers Guild and SAG-AFTRA, which represents 160,000 actors, shut down most film and television production by the major studios and streaming services. The unions won significant pay increases and job protections they were seeking. But because they didn’t have across-the-board increases in pay of more than 10%, those union’s 171,000 members are not included in those count of workers receiving double-digit pay raises.
Some deals won without a strike
Other deals happened because of the threat of a strike without the workers having to hit the picket lines. They include a deal covering 340,000 members of the Teamsters union at UPS or a series of deals reached by the Culinary union that prevented strikes at 18 different casinos along the Las Vegas Strip.
But some other new contracts reached got relatively little…
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