Workers Demand Their Share As Corporate Profits Soar
Ever since the United States stood up from the ruins of economic recession, quite several industries, including the automobile and airlines industries have been enjoying an unabated spell of profit. The airlines industry in the United States has always enjoyed a healthy reputation in the world for its prosperity, and for the number of bust cycles that it has gone through. It is now poised to enter into the 10th year of profit-making at a trot. The four leading airlines companies of the country along with the three most famous and the biggest automobile makers have collectively brought in a combined profit of over $25 billion in the year 2018.
Now, a huge number of trained and skilled workers who are in the automobile and airlines industries, preparing food in the hotels and restaurants, cleaning rooms and stocking grocery store in the hospitality industry are employees under the umbrella of trade unions and are bound by contracts. All these people are now determined to get what they deserve –a bigger portion of the profit that their employers enjoy.
For instance, the pact between United Auto Workers and the three biggest names in the automobile industry in Detroit is set to expire in September. It will determine the wages as well as the benefits, which almost 158,000 employees will enjoy in the years ahead.
Again, over 37000 pilots of the three largest US airlines United, American and Delta are looking to get higher pay and better retirement packages.
Following 35 years of plummeting rates of participation of unions all over the United States, employees of JetBlue, Uber, Lyft, and Amazon who are not under the umbrella of unions, are finally making demands that they get a higher pay scale, healthy shares of the profit enjoyed by the company, after being bogged down by more stringent labor market and rising cost of living. This is just the tip of the iceberg. The picture is same elsewhere in other industries.