Kickstarter's historic vote doesn't mean unions are coming back. Here's what the future of labor looks like instead.

Hollis Johnson

Kickstarter employees working at the company's Greenpoint, Brooklyn office.

• Kickstarter became the first tech company to unionize Tuesday.
• While historic, unions will continue to decline in the US, labor leaders say. The Supreme Court recently ruled to limit unions' power.
• Instead, non-worker unions that represent workers across an entire industry - like farmers and home healthcare workers - are ushering in a new way to organize.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Employees of the crowdfunding company Kickstarter voted to unionize on Tuesday. While part-time workers at Google and Instacart have organized in the past, Kickstarter's vote marked the first time white-collar, full-time employees formed a union at a major tech company.

After years of union decline, frustrated workers across the country have been ushering in a new labor movement. Last year marked the highest year for labor strikes since the 1980s. Teachers, nurses, and auto workers were among the workers who led walkouts.

Still, just 10.5% of wage workers belong to unions, half the rate it was in 1983, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Kickstarter's vote might be historic, but it doesn't necessarily mean unions membership will spread across the tech industry.

Going forward, effective organizing is going to be more about industries or categories.

The future of work won't include unions.

Data suggests unions companies with strong union membership have higher average wages, leading interest groups and right-wing politicians to make targeted attacks on the practice. The Supreme Court rules in 2018 that non-union members can enjoy benefits as their organized peers without paying dues, a major blow to public sector union funding.

Aside from targeted moves to kill unions, there are limits to which workers can qualify for union membership. In the US, individual companies establish their own unions. Kickstarter's union, for instance, represents workers for just the company instead of tech workers more broadly.

Yet many laborers for today's tech companies aren't technically employed by the firm. Many "gig economy" startups use independent contractors - like Uber drivers and Postmates couriers - that don't qualify for union membership under the National Labor Relations Board. Many workers for major tech companies, like Facebook's content moderators and Google's temp workforce, work for separate staffing firms.

Nelson Lichtenstein, a labor historian, said the rise of "fissuring" - or major companies outsourcing their work to contract workers - will impair unions from getting stuff done for all workers. "A new generation of young and energetic organizers have been hired onto union staffs, but it still remains incredibly difficult to organize new workers or win a decent first contract," Lichtenstein wrote for the left-leaning commentary magazine Dissent in 2019.

The rise of non-union worker organizations is already on the way.

Unions may no longer work - but that doesn't mean labor organizations are going anywhere.

Instead of unions, some say workers for different companies should band together for higher pay. Lichtenstein and other labor leaders like David Rolf, the founder of the Fight for $15 movement, say organizing across industries rather than within companies will better protect workers. When I saw Rolf speak at the Fulcrum Future of Work Conference late last year, he emphasized the need to change outdated union models to adapt to the work has changed for blue- and white-collar Americans.

"There will be no time machine invented that will give us our great-grandfather's unions of the '30s, or our grandfather's unions of the '50s, or our parents' unions of the '70s," he said.

One solution that doesn't need union support: Getting the government to set minimum wages. Wage boards, for instance, are local or state laws that set minimum wages for workers in specific fields, like janitors and and warehouse workers.

There are already pockets of workers organizing without the union approach model. Tomato farmers in Florida banded together to pressure McDonald's and Taco Bell to improve working conditions. Home healthcare workers are pressuring governments to pass a "domestic worker bill of rights" to standardize labor conditions for the entire industry.

Organized labor is only getting stronger, but don't look to unions to tell you that.

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