Long thread, but important: John Deere workers have reached out to me frustrated about media repeating company talking points that workers make 60-70k a year. One who’s been there over a decade showed me what they made in 2020: Under $40k. So let’s talk about wages at John Deere. pic.twitter.com/PnFXX5VMb6

— Jonah Furman (@JonahFurman) October 15, 2021

The end of a national mobilization also tends to release built-up pressures in the workplace. Workers who put up with suppressed wages or stressful working conditions during an emergency expect to see something change afterward. As Harold Meyerson recently observed, both 1919 and 1945-1946 saw massive strike waves as the world wars ended. In the 1945-1946 cycle, when more than 10 percent of American workers went on strike, events that could plausibly be called general strikes erupted in Stamford, Connecticut; Lancaster, Pennsylvania; Rochester, New York; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; and Oakland, California.

The release valve that may be opening now resumes an expansion of labor activity before the pandemic. The generation before the 2008 crisis had been marked by long-term stagnation of wages and decline in labor’s share of national income. Recoveries from recessions in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s took longer than in earlier years, and large numbers of workers got stranded in permanent underemployment or inactivity. These trends culminated in the Great Recession and its agonizing, protracted recovery. But unemployment finally fell below 4 percent in 2018, and that year and the next, a noticeable uptick in strike activity occurred — most notably in a massive teachers’ strike wave — when labor markets had finally recovered from the devastation that followed the 2008 financial crisis, but teachers’ wages had not.

In terms of strike activity, the current private sector wave picks up where the teachers left off, after an interlude of relative inaction during the height of the pandemic. In 2020, moreover, teachers formed the first major group of workers to refuse to accept whatever terms the employer dictated for reopening the workplace. It is difficult to imagine teachers speaking out against returning to work in unsafe conditions as much as they did without the national wave of militant teachers’ strikes in the two preceding years. This resistance has now spread across the economy, in both organized and individual forms.

Today, workers’ economic resistance — whether through organized strikes or in the refusal of dangerous, underpaid, and unappealing jobs — is shaping the political agenda. Many of the policies in the Democrats’ $3.5 trillion budget proposal would pursue the same ends as workers’ actions but in the realm of social policy. Proposed subsidies for home health care and child care, the child tax credit, Medicaid expansion, and investments in housing and green energy would all indirectly support workers’ power. Either by increasing demand for labor further or by alleviating some of the grotesque social pressures that have forced employees to accept whatever terms employers offered them, the federal government would strengthen workers’ bargaining position. When Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., warns against becoming an “entitlement society,” what he is opposing is the shift in labor market power that such policy measures help secure.

The heightened interplay between industrial and political disputes marks a break with recent history. Through much of the last generation, even militant industrial action often bore little explicitly political significance. A major strike like the one at UPS in 1997 or Verizon in 2016 won gains for workers, but such events remained economic affairs. Politicians might feel compelled to comment on them — as former President Bill Clinton did about the UPS strike — but such disputes didn’t raise or settle any larger political question about the balance of power between the classes. (After providing a carefully neutral comment urging UPS and the Teamsters to settle, Clinton headed straight to Martha’s Vineyard.)

In the last several years, a number of mainstream Democrats have come to accept what had previously been a left-wing argument: that the increase of social inequality and the decline in working-class economic security is the ultimate cause of the destabilization of American democracy and must be taken head on. The stated position of the Biden administration is that “the decline of union density has … weakened our democracy.”

When organized labor is stronger, widespread dissatisfaction takes a more coordinated form. With higher levels of union membership, organized workers’ militancy generates concentrated pressure on targeted firms and triggers dissension among employers. Some bosses start to squirm and seek to calm labor down by agreeing to progressive social reforms, while others insist on holding the line. Those caught in the middle, like salaried employees at Deere, may largely sympathize with the strikers while being forced to work through the strike despite a serious skills gap.

The lower level of workers’ organization today — the smaller size of the organized workforce compared to an angry but scattered mass — makes it more difficult to divide employers politically in this way. On the picket lines and on Capitol Hill, the political capacity of a shrunken labor movement is being tested. The more concrete gains workers win now in either arena, the more others among the unorganized millions will see the benefits of unity.

President Joe Biden styles himself as labor’s champion, aspiring to be “the most pro-union president you’ve ever seen.” Days before he launched his presidential campaign (using a Pittsburgh union hall for his stage), Biden appeared on the picket line of one the major strikes of 2019, at the Stop & Shop grocery chain in New England. Recently, confronted with businesses having a hard time hiring staff, the president said, “Pay them more.”

But when asked to take sides, he’s stuck to official neutrality, his press secretary citing unspecified “legal reasons.” On Friday, when asked about the John Deere strike, he stated, obviously, “They have a right to strike. They have a right to demand higher wages … I’m not getting into the negotiation.”

And the administration has allowed key pro-worker provisions in the American Rescue Plan Act to expire, such as subsidies for COBRA, which are particularly crucial for striking workers whose employers cut off health insurance. The Allegheny Technologies Inc. workers, part of the United Steelworkers union, who struck for five months this year had the benefit of federally subsidized COBRA; the UAW members currently striking John Deere, whose employer plans to cut them off their plans by October 27, will not. They would, however, be eligible for other subsidies, including heavily subsidized Obamacare plans, though that would entail changing plans and potentially medical networks.

Ultimately, the issue in dispute across these strikes is whether American workers can be muscled back into the punishing labor market conditions of the pandemic and the several decades that preceded Covid-19 that made the pandemic so brutal within the insecure and unequal American workplace. Will nonunion workers settle for low wages and dangerous conditions? Will union workers continue to ratify two-tier contracts with incremental givebacks to employers? When the U.S. worker “goes back” to work, what kind of economy will they be going back to?

This is precisely the same issue as the one roiling Capitol Hill right now: whether Congress’s role is to return us to a pre-pandemic status quo or to intervene on the side of a battered working class.