It's hard to make a living in America. The Great Resignation is a good thing for everyone.

"Good Morning America, welcome to the labor movement." That was tweeted on Oct. 14 by Labor Notes' Jonah Furman.

And while it may not be heavily covered in the mainstream media, America's labor movement appears to be at an inflection point. People across the United States are organizing, and with only about 66% of people actively looking for work – the Great Resignation shows no major signs of letting up.

Here's why that's a good thing for everyone. 

Right now, thousands of people are striking, including union members at John Deere, Kaiser Permanente and Kellogg. Grad student workers at Harvard and teachers in Ohio just ended strikes. Even workers at Wirecutter, the product review site of The New York Times, are threatening to walk out on Black Friday. 

On Oct. 25, 2,000 Amazon workers at four factories on Staten Island, New York, showed they have enough support to hold union elections. At the beginning of the pandemic we saw strikes by essential workers at Amazon's warehouse, Instacart and Whole Foods.

And on Oct. 16, just six days before the deadly shooting on the set of Alec Baldwin's film, the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees union narrowly avoided a mass walkout of 60,000 people after reaching a deal for what was supposed to be safer working conditions. 

In the midst of these strikes and union-led negotiations, we are also in a tight labor market, and employers are decrying a worker shortage problem with more than 4 million people out of the workforce.  

But there is no "worker shortage" issue. Instead, more Americans are standing up and saying they want the same benefits and standards of living as their counterparts in other industrialized countries. 

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Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich, now a professor at the  University of California, Berkeley, recently Tweeted, "There is no 'labor shortage.' There's a childcare shortage, a living-wage shortage, a hazard pay shortage, a paid sick leave shortage, and a healthcare shortage. Until these shortages are remedied, Americans won't return to work anytime soon." 

Perhaps in response to these increased hardships, we've seen a resurgence of labor activism, both organized and unorganized, and from across the political spectrum. 

And that's good. 

An American problem

For starters, we know that weakened labor movements lead to significant socioeconomic disparities, lower wages and job insecurity. The systemic and purposeful dismantling of the U.S. labor movement is an important part of why income inequality is high in the United States compared with other members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). 

I experienced that contrast firsthand living abroad, when non-American friends asked me why people in the United States didn't strike and protest more. When I was younger, I didn't have a good answer because I didn't know any different.  

I've lived in six countries among the USA, Europe and Latin America. In France, I saw people take to the streets to demand a 35-hour work week. In Mexico, I've seen teachers, students and oil and gas industry workers blockade highways and commandeer buses. In Italy, I watched trade unions shut down transport, schools and hospitals to demand job security in the face of government reforms. In other countries, striking and demonstrating are a regular part of life, and a key strategy to leverage collective bargaining power. But in the United States, strikes and labor movements are much less common, and much weaker, than in other developed countries.

Why have worker movements been so depressed for decades? And what might this revival mean for families in this country today? 

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A movement revived

On a phone call, Labor Notes' Jonah Furman told me that he's known to be a pessimist, but that this time around he was more hopeful. He went on to say that we are at (what looks like) the tail end of something like "four decades or more years of labor movement and union decline in the USA."

Furman explained that even for companies that allowed unions, worker efforts to organize have been historically undermined by giving concessionary or "two-tier" contracts. In those kinds of deals, current workers get something they are bargaining for but future workers miss out on that same benefit.

The issue of labor rights transcends politics, race and religion. Everyone wants to be valued, treated with respect and supported in their career. That doesn't mean we have to move to collective labor farms and swap partners.

It does mean, however, that hardworking people in the world's largest economy deserve jobs that invest in their children, provide them health care, job security, retirement and other basic benefits that their counterparts in other industrialized countries enjoy. 

It's hard to make it in America, and people are tired of being overworked and underpaid. Let's hope something sustainable and inclusive comes out of this renewed labor movement.

Carli Pierson is an attorney and a Paste BN Opinion writer. Follow her on Twitter: @CarliPierson