In 2009, I snagged my first job — a cashier at Target. After passing drug tests and an interview, I and my fellow employees were corralled into the breakroom for training and an orientation video.

It started innocently enough. We were welcomed to the Target family by smiling senior employees, Josh and Maria, donned in the signature red polo shirts and khakis. They pledged to make our time at the store a positive experience and emphasized our integral role in the store’s continued success.

But it didn’t take long for the tone to shift.

“We’re now competing not only with other retailers but with grocery stores, too,” Josh said.

“That’s a huge challenge,” Maria chimed, sidling up next to him. “But we believe we can win the battle with the competition because not only do we have high quality products at competitive prices, we’ve got the best guest service in the business. And because we’re the best, that makes those of us at Target a target ourselves.”

“We’re a target because we’re a threat to unions – the unions that support grocery store workers,” Josh almost spat.

The room rippled with nervous laughter at how unbelievable it was. Josh and Maria didn’t let up. The message was clear: Target, and by extension hard-workers like us, was a threat to the union’s “business” and their bottom line. It sounded ridiculous even to us, a group of teenagers and twenty-somethings just looking for a paycheck to pay the bills.

But as ridiculous as it sounded, I knew this propaganda worked. My grandfather owned a lumber furniture business and disdained unions, believing they stifled free trade and innovation – and worst of all – made him lose more of his hard-earned money. My mother inherited this distrust, but that quickly changed once she became a teacher.

“At first, the union approached me and it felt like they were bullying me, like they were expecting me to join them. I didn’t like that,” my mother told me. “But when I got in trouble for allowing students to stay after school, they came and helped me out. Unions look out for you when no one else does.”

Corporate America will try to spin it every way they can, but it is increasingly difficult to ignore the unchecked corporate corruption and erosion of individual rights. It is difficult to ignore the fact that while millions of us lost our jobs during the pandemic, the billionaires pocketed $4.6 trillion and our senators traded stock ahead of the 2020 coronavirus market crash. The monied elite are living large – off our backs.

It is no surprise, then, that labor unions have come roaring back in response. In 2023 alone, there were over 300 strikes involving approximately 450,000 workers — a stark increase from the 180 strikes and 40,000 workers just two years prior.

Even Fresno State hasn’t escaped strike fever. While the California State University Board of Trustees has approved agreements with five labor unions, negotiations with the California Faculty Association (CFA) and Teamsters Local 2010 are ongoing. (On Dec. 19, the CFA announced a systemwide strike that will take place between Jan. 22 and 26 if upcoming negotiations with the CSU “bear fruit.”) Along with a 12% salary increase for the current fiscal year, the CFA is advocating for a higher minimum for the lowest-paid faculty, more manageable workloads, more counselors and expanded paid parental leave, among other things. Earlier this month, the CFA held one-day strikes at four CSU campuses.

Their demands are reasonable, and many Americans are similarly fed up.

Following the pandemic was the Great Resignation, an economic trend in which millions of employees voluntarily resigned from their jobs en masse due to wage stagnation, high living costs, limited career opportunities, inflexible remote-work policies, and persistent job dissatisfaction. Employers have since upped wages to attract more workers, but the pace has slowed and raises are still not matching inflation.

Contemporary America mirrors a new Gilded Age with familiar traits of wealth concentration, limited regulation and economic disparities. Income inequality in the U.S. has reached unprecedented levels, surpassing all G7 nations, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. The wealth gap between the wealthiest and the most economically challenged American families more than doubled between 1989 and 2016. Research suggests that the recent lapse in antitrust enforcement has contributed to the widening gap between the rich and the poor.

President Franklin Roosevelt, who led us out of the Great Depression, recognized the link between economic conditions and personal freedom, that true liberty is compromised when individuals face crippling economic need.

“An old English judge once said: ‘Necessitous men are not free men,’” Roosevelt said in his 1933 renomination speech. “Liberty requires opportunity to make a living — a living decent according to the standard of the time, a living which gives man not only enough to live by, but something to live for.”

The concentration of control in a small group over property, money, and labor threatens political equality and impedes the pursuit of happiness, a reality as true today as it was 90 years ago.

Unfortunately, American labor laws nowadays create no shortage of obstacles for workers seeking to join unions. Organizing can be challenging as employers have ways to disrupt these efforts using tactics that skirt legality. Like trained Navy seals, union organizers must strategize and recruit colleagues discreetly to avoid retribution.

Thankfully there is a glimmer of hope on the horizon for a meaningful, long-term solution. The Right To Organize (PRO) Act, currently supported by progressives in Congress, aims to reform American labor laws by imposing more substantial penalties on employers who attempt to thwart unionization efforts.

By imposing stronger penalties on employers fighting unionization, this legislation stands as a vital step to protect workers’ rights and prevent us from running headfirst into another Great Depression due to the unchecked greed of our corporate overlords.

The long-held American gospel of pragmatism, individualism and upward mobility is a myth. You can’t “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” if you can’t afford the boots, and when the middle class can’t afford goods and services, it drags down the entire economy. Improving the lot of the workers is even better for the CEO in the long run: There’s a reason why Henry Ford paid his workers enough so they could buy the cars they made.

It’s time to empower workers again and build a fairer, more resilient economy that favors the everyday American and not the CEO on a quest for another super yacht.