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dolores huerta
On Labor Day, Champions of Working Class Vow to Defeat Trump
"The facts are clear: Democrats are the party of labor, and the Biden-Harris administration has been the most pro-labor administration in our lifetime," said a pair of supporters.
Sep 02, 2024
With the Labor Day holiday as a backdrop, U.S. union leaders on Monday reiterated their message that a Democratic administration led by Vice President Kamala Harris would offer far better policies for workers than a Republican one with former President Donald Trump at the helm.
Echoing Harris' resonant "We are not going back" campaign slogan, Communications Workers of America president Claude Cummings Jr. said that "we are not going back because we have the opportunity to elect Kamala Harris, a true champion for working people, who has a vision for the future where we all have more control over our own lives, not less."
"Last month, as our members at AT&T Southeast were preparing to go on strike, Donald Trump laughed with notorious union buster Elon Musk about firing striking workers," he continued. "Today that would be illegal, but if he's elected president, Trump will have the plan and the power to take us back to a time when it wasn't."
"Donald Trump's allies, including many people he appointed to serve in his administration, want to take us back to the days before the NLRA," he contended, referring to the landmark National Labor Relations Act signed into law by Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1935. "Their dangerous, extremist agenda, detailed in a handbook known as Project 2025, calls for increasing corporate control over workers. They want to appoint [National Labor Relations Board] members who will stop enforcing large parts of the NLRA, including the ban on company unions."
Harris, who was in Detroit Monday, said: "On Labor Day, we honor workers, unions, and the entire labor movement fighting for fair wages, good benefits, and safer working conditions for all. As president, I will always stand with workers, because when unions are strong, the middle class is strong. And when the middle class is strong, America is strong."
In her second annual "State of the Unions" address, Liz Shuler, president of the AFL-CIO, the nation's largest federation of unions, highlighted the importance of organized labor in November's election. Shuler noted that 1 in 5 voters in the battleground states of Michigan, Wisconsin and, Minnesota is a union member, and that recent polling shows Harris with a 15-point lead over Trump among union voters.
"Union workers are growing our power in this country in a way that we haven't seen in a generation. In November, that power could win the election for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz," she said, referring to the Minnesota governor who is the Democratic vice presidential nominee.
"We can run up the margins where it counts," Shuler added. "When you ask a union member who their most trusted source in the world is on politics, it's not their friends, family, or loved ones—it's their fellow union member. There is no question that the road to the White House runs through America's union halls."
While numerous unions have endorsed Harris, Trump has struggled in his efforts to court organized labor, despite strong support among rank-and-file workers. Last week, members of the International Association of Fire Fighters booed GOP vice presidential candidate and U.S. Sen. JD Vance of Ohio after he claimed that he was part of the"most pro-worker Republican ticket in history."
While support for unions in the United States is at a seven-decade high, union membership remains at an all-time low, the result of more than a century of efforts by capitalist interests and the politicians they influence to weaken organized labor. One way they've done this is by McCarthyite purges of communists and socialists, traditionally the strongest champions for working people, from union ranks.
Today, labor leaders overwhelmingly concur which of the two major parties offers workers a better deal—even as it attacks democracy by fighting to exclude pro-worker competitors to its left.
"The facts are clear: Democrats are the party of labor, and the Biden-Harris administration has been the most pro-labor administration in our lifetime," Service Employees International Union president April Verrett and Democracy Alliance president Pamela Shifman said in an opinion piece published by The Hill on Monday.
"As we look ahead, the choice we face in this election couldn't be more stark," they wrote. "One path leads to a brighter, more inclusive future for all workers—a future where economic, gender, and racial justice go hand in hand. The other path seeks to turn back the clock, dismantling the progress we've made and putting corporate interests ahead of working families."
Civil rights icon Dolores Huerta, who co-founded the United Farm Workers union with Cesar Chavez—the late grandfather of Harris' campaign manager—in 1962, on Monday published a Univisionopinion piece in which she argued that "this election marks a pivotal moment in our history."
"Each of us will have a choice to make about which direction we want our country to go," she said. "Donald Trump despises Latinos, workers, and immigrants and wants to turn back the clock to a time before many of us had full rights and freedoms, when the rich did well while the middle class was left behind. We cannot go back!"
"I choose to go forward, into the future," Huerta continued. "A future that makes room for all Latino families. A future where our middle class is strong, our freedoms are secure, and our democracy is sound. That's what Vice President Harris is fighting for. And that's why I'm all-in to elect Vice President Harris the next president of the United States... ¡Sí se puede!"
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Rep. Greg Casar Leads Thirst Strike at US Capitol to Demand Workplace Heat Protections
"Workplaces should not be death traps, and workers know that," said one campaigner.
Jul 25, 2023
Calling on the Biden administration to ensure workers across the United States are protected from the extreme temperatures that scientists say will become increasingly common as long as planet-heating fossil fuel extraction persists, U.S. Rep. Greg Casar joined civil society groups and labor unions in an all-day vigil and "thirst strike" on Capitol Hill on Tuesday.
Casar and other demonstrators argued that the federal government must step in as Republican leaders in states like Texas are attacking workers' rights amid extreme heatwaves.
The protest—organized by groups including Indivisible, the Sunrise Movement, the Texas AFL-CIO, and the United Farm Workers—includes United Farm Workers (UFW) co-founder Dolores Huerta and dozens of other participants who will be standing on the U.S. Capitol steps throughout the day on Tuesday.
The campaigners are giving up access to water, shade, and breaks in solidarity with workers forced to labor in temperatures that reached 100°F or higher 250 times across Casar's home state of Texas last month.
As Casar noted in a statement, the thirst strike is being held a month after Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott signed a law that eliminated local water break requirements for workers.
"I'm on thirst strike today because families across Texas and across America deserve dignity on the job. But Greg Abbott doesn't think so," said Casar. "The Biden administration must step in, override Abbott, and ensure heat protections for all Americans in all industries. Our government should work for working people, not for greedy corporations that exploit their workers and fill Abbott's campaign coffers."
The Texas measure is set to go into effect on September 1, and according to Public Citizenworker health and safety advocate Juley Fulcher, "if Gov. Abbott is allowed to implement this law, he will sign the death warrants for innocent workers across the state."
"To pass and implement a law putting workers in danger in the midst of a record-setting scorching summer should be criminal," said Fulcher. "Workers are dying across the country due to extreme heat. The [Occupational Safety and Health Administration] has the ability to act and protect their lives, and we hope the administration moves with haste."
On Monday, Casar led more than 100 Democrats in the House and Senate in writing a letter that called on the Biden administration to establish a federal standard through the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) to prevent heat-related work injuries, illnesses, and deaths.
OSHA is working toward releasing a standard, but currently the agency does not require rest breaks for workers, and the lawmakers urged the Biden administration to "mobilize all of the resources... necessary for implementing this standard as soon as possible."
The campaigners at the Capitol on Tuesday called for requirements for employers to provide workers with adequate water, breaks, cooling areas, medical services, and training to identify heat-related illnesses.
"Big corporations and their Republican lackeys are conspiring to strip away rights and protections from working families, all to pad their bottom line," said Leah Greenberg, co-executive director of Indivisible. "It's outrageous that we'd even need to talk about something as basic as a water break on a hot day, but that's what Republicans like Greg Abbott are yanking away."
The thirst strike was held as international scientists at World Weather Attribution released a new study showing that the extreme heat that people across North America and Europe have been facing this summer would have been "virtually impossible" without the fossil fuel-driven climate emergency.
Varshini Prakash, executive director of the Sunrise Movement, called establishing federal workplace heat protections a "no-brainer" for President Joe Biden.
"Workplaces should not be death traps, and workers know that," said Prakash. "President Biden must stand with the labor community and implement federal workplace heat standards. We're in a climate emergency."
Along with lawmakers and unions representing Texas workers, the families of some workers who have died as a result of heat-related illness and injuries attended the thirst strike and vigil.
"From the deaths of Asuncion Valdivia in 2004 and Maria Isabel Vasquez Jimenez in 2008, to Florencio Gueta Vargas in 2021 and Efrain Lopez Garcia, who was killed by heat in Florida earlier this month, farm worker families have lost far too many loved ones to deadly temperatures—and to deadly government inaction," said UFW President Teresa Romero. "OSHA must step up now to protect the men, women, and children who do the incredibly hard work of harvesting America's food in truly dangerous temperatures—sacrificing their health and sometimes their lives to keep our nation fed."
"OSHA must take action immediately to implement the permanent nationwide heat rules which have already been in development for years. Every day we wait puts more farm worker lives at risk," she added. "How many more workers will we let heat and callous employers kill before this nation acts?”
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