The Perennial Struggle of Young Workers

On May Day, we remember the long – and ongoing – struggle for worker’s rights. But there is a part of that story that we seldom acknowledge: the role of young people in the labor movement.

Traditional labor history tends to foreground the stories of middle-aged men with soot-streaked faces and calloused hands. These workers deserve every bit of recognition, to be sure, but so do the remarkable teenagers and twenty-somethings who sweated through long shifts and fought just as fiercely for a better deal. Youth involvement in labor organizing, while often overlooked, has been no less impactful. Consider two examples.

In 1899, New York’s newsboys – many of them the children of poor immigrant families –  brought the city’s newspaper distribution to a grinding halt for two weeks in protest of a price hike by publishing giants Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst. Child labor was commonplace at the time, and the notion that a crew of plucky preteens could paralyze the city’s ink-stained empire seemed absurd, until they did exactly that. 

These working-class kids, as stubborn as they were scruffy, formed strike committees, held mass rallies, marched across the Brooklyn Bridge, and stood firm in the face of police intimidation. In the end, they didn’t win every demand, but they proved that even the youngest workers could organize and make headlines doing so.

Almost forty years later in San Antonio, 22-year-old Emma Tenayuca led nearly 12,000 pecan shellers – most of them Mexican-American women – in one of the largest strikes in Texas history. Their demands for safer working conditions and better pay were routinely dismissed both by employers and much of the organized labor establishment because of who they were: women, immigrants, and low-wage workers. 

Tenayuca’s leadership forced those in power to reckon with the overlapping injustices at play. Despite facing mass arrests and a relentless smear campaign, the shellers held strong and secured a wage increase. TIME magazine took note of Tenayuca’s unapologetic activism, describing her as “at the forefront of most of [San Antonio’s] civil commotions.”

These stories remind us that young workers have always known their worth, and they’ve fought to defend it. That fight is still far from finished. Today, young activists are once again at the heart of a growing labor revival.

Take the recent Starbucks union drive, for instance. One of its earliest and most visible voices was  Jaz Brisack – a Rhodes Scholar who took a job as a barista in Buffalo, NY, with the aim of organizing the workplace from within. In 2021, their store became the first Starbucks in the U.S. to unionize, kickstarting Starbucks Workers United, which now represents close to 11,000 workers at 500 stores across the country.

A similar story is unfolding in academia, where graduate student workers are organizing in record numbers. These are the researchers and instructors who keep universities running, often while scraping by on meager stipends. 

The largest strike in the history of American higher education occurred just two years ago, when 36,000 graduate students walked off the job across the University of California system. The gains made by these academic workers have spurred new unionization efforts nationwide, including at the University of Rochester, which began a strike of its own last week. 

This surge in organized labor activity reflects a broader generational shift. According to a 2024 Gallup poll, 77 percent of Americans ages 18 to 34 say they approve of labor unions. That enthusiasm stems from the tangible benefits unionization delivers. 

The Center for Economic and Policy Research has shown that young union members make on average $6 more per hour than their non-union peers, and they are far more likely to have employer sponsored health insurance (71 percent vs. 47 percent). It’s simple: Unions offer young workers dignity and stability in an increasingly precarious economy. 

For young workers like myself, unions also model what a more democratic future could look like. Workplaces remain some of the most hierarchical spaces in American life, where decisions flow from the top down typically with little input from everyone else. Labor organizing empowers those who do the work to have a say in how it gets done. If we truly seek a society of, by, and for the people, it has to start where people spend most of their time – on the job. 

Giving youth their due doesn’t cast a shadow over their elders, it merely recognizes that they have always been in the fight, not waiting on the sidelines. Young workers, past and present, have stepped up, not just as symbols of the future, but as active participants in its construction.

This May Day, celebrate the young workers in your life. And if you are a young worker, start organizing with your coworkers – you might be surprised at what you can build together.