What to Do When Your Union Contract Is Voted Down
The answer to union contracts being voted down is not for organizers to lower workers’ expectations. It’s to seize that vote as an opportunity to organize those expectations into collective power.
Workers who are making company executives sweat by voting down bad union contracts should be saluted. But those same workers need to be serious about translating anger at concessionary bargaining into a fighting force that can win something better. (Bill Pugliano / Getty Images)
Like stumbling across a yeti or flying saucer, I was experiencing the seemingly impossible: a conversation between HR executives was warming the depths of my heart and giving me hope for the future.
It was December 2022, and I was attending a convening of company executives and labor leaders hosted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management. A line of corporate bigwigs from long-unionized Fortune 500 companies were heatedly voicing their exasperation over the new bargaining climate in the country.
Apparently, all of these companies were suffering from the same affliction: tentative agreements were being voted down by union members. In some cases, contracts went down by large margins several times before finally passing.
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