The changing face of America’s unions - a podcast by Marketplace

About 10% of the American workforce belonged to a union in 2020. That’s way down from about a third in 1970, but unions are making gains lately — and not where you might expect. Workers in Big Tech, media and other “knowledge workers” are organizing, along with people in jobs that didn’t exist 50 years ago, like Amazon warehouse workers. On today’s show, we’ll talk with Lane Windham, associate director of the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor at Georgetown University, about this new wave of labor organizing, what it means for blue-collar work and what comes next with President Joe Biden in the White House.

Here are links to everything we talked about on the show today:

• “Unions take on Amazon and Alphabet. Big tech watch out” from the Economist


• “Labor movement targets Amazon as a foothold in the South” from the Associated Press


• “The PRO Act may protect workers even if it doesn’t pass” from Marketplace


• “The government’s lawyers saw a Google monopoly coming. Their bosses refused to sue.” from Politico


• “Xi Warns Against Tech Excess in Sign Crackdown Will Widen” from Bloomberg

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