The successful union vote at Amazon’s JFK8 warehouse in Staten Island, despite the company illegally threatening employees with loss of benefits and withholding wages if they voted to unionize, was big news.
What isn't getting nearly as much coverage is other union drives, particularly in the tech industry. The most high-profile of these unionization efforts is at Apple Stores in Atlanta and New York.
Just two months ago, Google fiber workers in Missouri voted to unionize, making them the first of an extremely anti-union company. Activision Blizzard, the makers of Call of Duty, saw a successful union vote, despite attempts to crush it by the corporation.
Workers at REI’s Manhattan flagship store voted for a union in March. Workers at a Target store in Virginia unionized just a few weeks ago, with more stores about to vote in the coming months.
Workers are motivated to unionize in ways that labor organizers haven't experienced in generations.

“Workers are reaching out to our union in unprecedented numbers,” says Alan Hanson, organizing director for United Food and Commercial Workers Local 400 in the Washington, D.C., area. ​“And they’re coming to us in a way I’ve never seen.

“The checklist that staff organizers have — get a list, identify leaders, make sure the organizing committee is diverse and represents all departments and classifications — these workers are coming to us and they have already done all of that. I haven’t had four successful worker-generated organizing campaigns in my entire career and we just had four in four months.”

At one of those shops, Union Kitchen, a D.C.-based grocery store, workers went on a three-day strike before their union was even certified, a level of militancy that seemed all but extinct but has now begun reappearing in nascent organizing campaigns. After the strike and before the election, four Union Kitchen activists were fired, Hanson says — a scorched earth union-busting tactic that is usually the death knell for a certification vote — but workers voted overwhelmingly for their union anyway.

“People getting fired during a union organizing campaign isn’t having the same impact it had in the past,” Hanson says. ​“Most of these workers are moving from one shitty job to another anyway, so they figure that they might as well organize to make them better while they are there.”

Undergraduates at Grinnell College, and Dartmouth dining workers have also unionized this year.
Polls show that even 46% of Republicans are in favor of increased unionization at their work, with Democrats twice as much in favor.
According to the NLRB, union elections were up 57% in the first half of 2022.

What is consistently the most successful union drive happening today is the Starbucks Workers Union, which just organized it's 100th store. It has an amazing 88% success rate in union votes, even winning in the most anti-union cities in the country.
Caliber Public Schools, a group of charter schools in Northern California, voted to unionize this year. What is interesting about this, is how it relates to the Starbucks union effort - specifically the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW).

Fast-forward to 2004, when Starbucks baristas had no hope of winning a vote to unionize—the company had too many cards to play and too many expensive lawyers to play them. Meanwhile, unions built on high-wage manufacturing were focused on saving those jobs, not organizing coffee shops. Enter the Wobblies, whose organizing had slowed but never stopped. They seized the opening, quickly switching from a focus on individual shop votes to a national campaign that threatened the company’s most valuable asset: not any particular operation, but the brand itself. It was a strategy made for tough times, when workers walking out or even dynamiting a store wouldn’t matter much to the chain’s bottom line.

The IWW kept at its Starbucks campaign for 10 years, despite the challenges and without help from the mainstream organized labor movement...In December 2021, Starbucks employees in two of the three elections at Buffalo, N.Y., locations voted to join a Service Employees International Union (SEIU) affiliate called Starbucks Workers United.

The IWW’s tactics continue to pay off: In February of this year, workers at the Alamo Drafthouse’s flagship location in Austin, Tex., submitted a request for recognition of Drafthouse United, with a proposed IWW affiliation.
In November of 2021, the Pacific Northwest fast food chain Burgerville ratified a contract with the workers at five locations represented by the Burgerville Workers Union 51 bargaining sessions and three and a half years after the IWW organized the first shop. Theirs is America’s only fast-food union contract. So far.

I shudder to think what the next economic recession which is right around the corner, will do to the unionization efforts. But then I remember that the most successful unionization drives in this nation's history happened between 1934 and 1939.