Chances are slim that the dual strikes at Starbucks stores and Amazon warehouses around the country disrupted your holiday season. By most accounts, packages arrived on schedule, while consumers jonesing for Iced Brown Sugar Oat Milk Shaken Espressos almost certainly managed to find sugar and succor elsewhere. Still, the issues at the heart of the strikes offer a way into understanding how fundamentally broken the terms of work are in the United States.

Whether you log shifts behind a counter, work a classroom or factory floor or sit at a desk, the current battles over opportunity have not only ensnared more Americans than ever, but have undercut the social mobility that was once essential to America’s concept of itself.

In 2023, an economic opportunity poll by Gallup found that 39% of Americans believed that they were failing to get ahead despite working hard. That figure in 2002: 23%. The failure of hard work to pay off in America makes our communities wobbly, our faith weak, our lives lonely, our politics toxic and our relationship with work masochistic and unsustainable.

In lobbying for a higher quality of life, for example, one of the top grievances raised by striking Starbucks workers was unpredictable scheduling, a popular practice in which employers don’t set worker schedules more than a few days (or even hours) in advance. “Employees in lower-wage industries are increasingly at the mercy of scheduling algorithms designed to maximize efficiency and minimize labor costs,” Rebecca Plevin noted last year. “When staffing doesn’t match expected customer demand, workers might be called in at the last minute or sent home early.” Anyone with email on their phone knows how work can bleed into off-hours, but for those working second or third jobs, enrolled in training, college or certification courses, providing steady childcare or simply hoping to spend time with family or friends, a lack of predictable hours makes the basic patterns of life erratic.

Problems like these tend to compound quickly. Although some cities, like Los Angeles, have passed predictive scheduling ordinances, that hasn’t solved the problem of workers not knowing how much income they’ll bring in each month. Known as income volatility, the phenomenon of fluctuating paychecks and family incomes has become at least twice as common since 1970 and now affects roughly a third of U.S. households.

Set off in part by the rise of gig work, “perma-lancing” and jobs without a set number of hours, the unreliable nature of wages has all kinds of consequences beyond sending families scrambling to adjust when the bottom of their budget falls out. “I have to beg my manager to ensure I’m scheduled for at least 20 hours of work a week,” Arloa Fluhr, a Starbucks barista in Illinois, wrote of her decision to strike last month. “If I don’t meet those 20 hours every week, I could lose my benefits and the health insurance I rely on to care for my three children, including my 10-year-old daughter, who has type 1 diabetes.”

Beyond the financial stress, unstable wages can make it impossible to save money, make long-term plans and get access to credit. A family with unpredictable earnings might qualify for public assistance one month and then breach the income threshold and be disqualified another. “Families close to the eligibility threshold for food stamps who had more volatile incomes were less likely to utilize this benefit in the years that they qualified for it,” a 2022 report from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis found, adding that nearly 1 in 5 eligible families don’t sign up for food stamps (formally known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program).

And while many of the quality-of-life issues may sound academic or abstract, they manifest in fundamental problems of the everyday and in a degradation of experience for everyone, everywhere. Complaints of chronic employee overwork and understaffing aren’t limited to fulfillment centers, chain coffee shops or fast-food restaurants, but also are pervasive at hospitals, schools and air traffic control facilities. For obvious reasons, a staff retention problem at the Secret Service captured headlines last year. One recent workforce survey found that roughly half of all U.S. workers said their workplaces are understaffed, with 43% of workers considering leaving their jobs.

Ultimately, the shortcomings of our work standards hurt everyone, including executives focused on the bottom line. Using data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Gallup put a conservative price tag of a staggering $1 trillion on the replacement cost of employees who voluntarily leave their jobs in the United States each year. Including factors such as low morale and lost worker knowledge, lower productivity and recruitment and training expenses, it estimated that the “cost of replacing an individual employee can range from one-half to two times the employee’s annual salary.”

The context for the Amazon warehouse strikes highlights the absurdity of this dynamic. According to internal company documents made public in 2022, Amazon suffers from a 150% worker-attrition rate annually, roughly double the industry average. In simpler terms, only one out of every three workers hired by Amazon in 2021 managed to stay with the company for more than three months. This level of workforce bleed cost the e-commerce giant a mind-boggling $8 billion in profits. In addition to showing that twice as many workers were leaving voluntarily as would be expected, the documents also highlighted worries that the company might run out of potential hires in certain markets because it had cycled through so much of the workforce.

This brings us back to the strikes. Depending on where you live, the appearance of worker-led protests and work stoppages may seem like constant fixtures of the landscape. They’re not. Despite union visibility and record-high popularity in the U.S., membership in unions currently hovers at an all-time low. With more meaningful protections against wage theft or basic benefits like paid sick leave, guaranteed time off and affordable healthcare elusive, businesses largely maintain the power to dictate the terms of work culture in the United States. And as we’re all seeing, they’re doing a terrible job.

Adam Chandler is the author of “Drive-Thru Dreams” and the forthcoming “99% Perspiration: A New Working History of the American Way of Life,” from which this article is adapted.

California business groups have sued to stop the state from implementing a new law that prohibits companies from ordering workers to attend meetings on unionization and other matters.

The law, Senate Bill 399, went into effect Jan. 1 and makes it illegal to penalize an employee who refuses to attend a meeting at which their employer discusses its “opinion about religious or political matters,” including whether to join a union.

Unions have long held that these so-called “captive audience meetings” serve to intimidate employees and hinder organizing efforts. The legislation, authored by State Sen. Aisha Wahab (D-Hayward), is among a set of new workplace laws going into effect in California in 2025.

In a federal lawsuit filed on New Year’s Eve in the Eastern District of California, the California Chamber of Commerce and the California Restaurant Assn. contend that the law violates companies’ rights to free speech and equal protection under the 1st and 14th amendments.

The law violates these protections by “discriminating against employers’ viewpoints on political matters, regulating the content of employers’ communications with their employees, and by chilling and prohibiting employer speech,” the lawsuit said. Employers “have the right to communicate with their employees about the employers’ viewpoints on politics, unionization, and other labor issues.”

The suit asks the courts to block the law from going into effect.

“Throughout legislative deliberations, we repeatedly underscored the fact that SB 399 was a huge overreach,” chamber President Jennifer Barrera said in an emailed statement. “SB 399 is clearly viewpoint-based discrimination, which runs afoul of the First Amendment.”

Jot Condie, president of the California Restaurant Assn., said the law “creates restrictions that are unworkable.”

The lawsuit was no surprise, said Lorena Gonzalez, a former state assembly member and current head of the California Labor Federation. She said business groups had threatened to bring a legal challenge during the legislative process, and in response the American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations had prepared a legal memorandum arguing that the law limits employer conduct, not speech.

She said employers typically hold captive audience meetings after workers have signed union cards indicating their support for a union, and are “one of the most coercive tools employers use to scare workers out of their right to unionize.”

“This isn’t a free speech issue. An employer can still talk crap about unions — they can talk about politics and about religion. They just can’t retaliate against workers who don’t want to sit through their opinions,” Gonzalez said. “Workers also have a 1st Amendment right as well, to be free of being held captive and forced to listen to things that have nothing to do with the actual work.”

California joins at least 10 other states including Alaska, Hawaii, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Vermont, and Washington that have implemented similar bans. Business groups successfully challenged a Wisconsin law in 2010 but similar challenges to Oregon’s law have been dismissed.

A November ruling by the National Labor Relations Board also banned mandatory captive audience meetings. The 3-1 decision reversed the board’s decades-old standard in place since 1948 that allowed for these mandatory meetings.

“Ensuring that workers can make a truly free choice about whether they want union representation is one of the fundamental goals of the National Labor Relations Act,” Democratic chair of the board, Lauren McFerran, said in a statement about the decision.

The ruling stemmed from a complaint over Amazon’s conduct ahead of a 2022 union election at a Staten Island facility, where it held a series of mandatory anti-union meetings. Amazon has said it plans to appeal the decision.