CD (Portland) — Saddled with student debt and, in many cases, spending the early years of their professional lives working during the Covid pandemic, members of Generation Z–often defined as those born between 1997 and 2012–are proving to be the most pro-worker generation in the contemporary United States.

Although union membership in the United States has, as of 2021, fallen to about half the rate seen in the early 1980s, when the Bureau of Labor Statistics began tracking unionized workplaces, public approval of labor unions among Americans has gone up steadily in the last several years.

There is a distinct generational aspect to this higher approval. According to a poll released last October by the Center for American Progress, 64.3% of Gen Z approves of unions, while 60% of Millennials support them. The mean approval rating among Baby Boomers and Generation X hovers around 58%.

Aurelia Glass, author of the report about the poll, declared that “Gen Z is the most pro-union generation alive in America today.”

The reporting comes more than a year into a nationwide unionization push at Starbucks, led by workers including Jaz Brisack (who is in her mid-20s and who the US National Labor Relations Board found last week had been illegally forced out of her job by the coffee chain) and Michelle Eisen, who is in her late 30s. Other young labor leaders who became prominent during the pandemic include Christian Smalls, who was fired from his job at an Amazon warehouse in 2020 and went on to form the Amazon Labor Union, leading his former coworkers to vote in favor of forming the retail giant’s first union.

This unionization push—which includes workers from across generational divides—comes as corporate profits and executive compensation have skyrocketed, with the wage gap between CEOs and workers jumping to 670-to-1 in 2021.

It is generally believed by analysts that the declining economic prospects faced by Gen Z compared to previous US generations at their age is a key underlying factor in their embrace of collective bargaining rights. “Some analyses show that in the United States, Gen Z have about 86% less buying power than Baby Boomers did at the same age,” reported BBC last October.

The student loan crisis is also believed to be a major contributor, with Gen Z members holding an average US$20,900 in student debt of as June 2022, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis—13% more than Millennials.

“Living with record levels of student debt, they’re also a generation that’s more educated, in some cases having earned multiple credentials,” Jennifer Sherer, senior state policy coordinator for the Economic Policy Institute, told Marketplace, “and [are] then finding themselves making lower wages than prior generations or not seeing opportunities to advance in their careers.”

Since the early 1980s, when union membership stood at 20.1%, worker wages have grown by only 17.5% while productivity skyrocketed by more than 61%. Home ownership has also declined, with the rate among Millennials about 8% lower in 2020 than it was for Generation X and Baby Boomers when they were in the same age group. Student debt and higher living costs have been identified as a factor in this aspect of the economic decline as well.

Originally published at Common Dreams. Republished by cc by-sa 3.0. Edits for style and content.

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