SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
labor unions
How the US Labor Movement Can Revive Itself and Help Save Democracy
History teaches us that, when unions fight to defend democracy and win, they position themselves for periods of explosive growth and increased worker power.
Jun 07, 2026
The US labor movement, like the nation at large, stands at a crossroads. The next few years might well determine whether the United States fully descends into an era of electoral autocracy, where democracy has withered and authoritarianism becomes the political norm. This period is also likely to set the future trajectory of the union movement’s power and influence, as the state of democracy and organized labor have long been deeply intertwined.
For decades, the right-wing forces set on steadily eroding our democracy have worked in tandem with a pro-corporate movement that has increasingly marginalized organized labor, creating a ballooning crisis for the working class. Yet this politically hazardous moment also represents an opportunity to overcome deep-seated institutional inertia, drawing elements of a cautious labor movement out of their defensive crouch, and helping unions devise forms of struggle that might both revive the labor movement and renew American democracy.
President Donald Trump’s second term has, in a way, broken a spell. For years, the pre-Trump status quo kept labor locked in a pattern of slow decline even as democracy was increasingly stifled and abridged by voter suppression, gerrymandering, filibusters, and the overweening power of organized money. But the decades-old dysfunctional status quo that gave rise to Trumpism is now crumbling under the weight of the most lawless, antidemocratic, rights-trampling administration this country has seen since the 19th century.
History suggests that fighting to defend and revive democracy in its moment of maximum peril can create a window of opportunity for labor. Past experience—in the United States and other nations—teaches us that, when unions fight to defend democracy and win, they position themselves for periods of explosive growth and increased worker power. It is imperative that the US labor movement grasp this lesson and seize the window of opportunity before it’s too late.
Moving Beyond Magical Thinking
It’s clear that the crisis facing US democracy is deepening. Over the past year, immigrants and the neighbors and coworkers who stood in solidarity with them endured murderous paramilitary occupations in Minneapolis, Chicago, and other cities across the country. The nation has been plunged into war in Iran without prior input from Congress. The president has even suggested the federal government should seize control of the upcoming midterm elections from the states.
This all comes on top of the Supreme Court’s relentless assault on workers’ rights and a worsening affordability crisis that has undermined the stability of working-class families, leading them to wonder whether the system is irretrievably broken.
As important as the coming elections are, unions should firmly reject the comforting delusion that they can recover through the ballot box what power they’ve lost in the workplace.
While our democracy’s crisis deepens, the national labor movement has yet to play a leading role in the resistance against ascendant authoritarianism. By seizing the opportunity to play such a role in the year ahead, labor has the opportunity to reverse its decades-long slide toward irrelevancy by taking up an indispensable role in preserving, expanding, and deepening rights-based democracy.
By fighting to reconstruct our democracy in the face of the mortal threat it now faces, labor could transform itself from a fading force—whose structure and outlook still bear the imprint of the 19th- and 20th-century struggles that birthed it—into a rejuvenated movement ambitious enough to give workers the powerful voice they deserve in the 21st century.
That transformation is only possible, though, if the labor movement moves beyond the magical thinking that if unions can just survive the Trump era then they can help restore a kind of pre-Trump normalcy afterward. The prevailing sentiment among labor’s leaders seems to be that, if they can just help their allies regain control of Congress later this year, they will be able to contain the damage Trump has wrought and coalesce behind an alternative in 2028 that can roll back Trumpism.
As important as the coming elections are, unions should firmly reject the comforting delusion that they can recover through the ballot box what power they’ve lost in the workplace. For if such electoral victories are unaccompanied by a revived, reorganized labor movement, they will leave workers and unions in a situation no different from the one they faced prior to Trump’s rise.
If the labor movement is to have a viable future, unions must not merely survive but capitalize on Trump’s disruption of longstanding norms, assumptions, and institutions, many of which no longer operate to labor’s benefit—if they ever did. That is the path to advance a bold 21st-century vision of inclusive solidarity, equality, rights, and democracy.
Turning Crisis Into Opportunity
How labor might take advantage of Trumpism’s authoritarian excesses to advance such a vision was put on display in Minnesota this winter, where local labor organizations drew on years of experience to play a central role in the resistance to Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) invasion. Unions of janitors, teachers, healthcare workers, and others helped coalesce a resistance that included workers centers, faith communities and clergy, community organizations, immigrants’ rights groups, small businesses, and caring neighbors.
Protesters turned out by the tens of thousands in subzero temperatures, religious leaders endured arrest in acts of civil disobedience, and witnesses turned their cell phones into tools to document ICE malfeasance and protect their neighbors. That resistance was built on a shared common good analysis of power and a recognition of the increasingly baneful influence of billionaires over our political system and economy. Protesters targeted not only ICE but corporations such as Target and Hilton that have either remained silent or openly abetted and profited from Trump’s authoritarian power grab.
Make no mistake: The formal end of Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis scarcely indicates a waning of this administration’s authoritarian ambitions. Unresolved issues regarding the limits of ICE’s legal authority will likely continue to elicit protest and resistance in the streets. In the meantime, new fronts are already opening as the president disregards all restraints on his power to deploy military force abroad and pushes an effort to nationalize the midterm elections at home. As labor movement leaders contemplate the conflicts that might emerge, they should consider lessons from what happened in Minnesota as well as other cities like Chicago and Los Angeles, where local unions played important roles in mobilizing resistance. They should also learn from the experiences of unions in other nations that successfully resisted authoritarian regimes.
Defeating Trump and his allies at the polls will be a Pyrrhic victory if the corporations fueling the right-wing’s anti-worker agenda maintain their influence over our government.
The stories of Brazil, South Korea, and South Africa are cases in point. In these countries, labor movements joined and helped lead the struggles against dictatorship, authoritarianism, and apartheid. In each case, when democracy won out, unions saw massive increases in membership. During Brazil’s transition to democracy in the mid-1980s, work stoppages jumped tenfold, and Brazil’s labor federation, Central Única dos Trabalhadores (CUT), founded during this period, grew to represent more than 15 million people by 1990.
When South Korea’s dictatorship fell in 1987, a period of militant worker struggle ensued as the number of strikes jumped and union membership surged. In South Africa, the labor movement played a key role in the fight against apartheid, and trade union membership grew dramatically, up from 1.4 million workers and 18% density in 1985 to 3.8 million and 51% by 1998. What’s more, these growth spurts boosted worker power and helped erect union bulwarks to help prevent backsliding into authoritarianism in subsequent years.
In Brazil, labor rallied to defeat President Jair Bolsonaro at the polls in 2022, then opposed his post-defeat coup attempt and supported his successful prosecution. Similarly, South Korean unions played a vital role in defeating an attempted coup in 2024 by threatening a general strike.
As these examples suggest, and as scholars have long noted, labor movements—no matter their national context—tend to expand not in linear fashion but by quantum leaps. The British labor historian Eric J. Hobsbawm described these episodes as “discontinuous” and “explosive” bursts that occur when circumstances force “qualitative innovations in the movement.”
Resisting authoritarians has required such innovations in countries across the globe, which have in turn helped unions to grow. When worker-led movements aligned with pro-democracy forces and succeeded in undermining authoritarian regimes, their victories allowed workers to witness and feel their collective power. Confrontations with authoritarianism in the streets translated into militancy, collective action, and increased organization in the workplace.
The US labor movement’s history also bears out that pattern. While people in the United States have never witnessed a battle with authoritarianism quite like the ones that erupted in South Africa, Brazil, and South Korea, an analogous incubation of explosive growth took place during periods when the US labor movement aligned itself with struggles to defend democracy against what were perceived as existential threats.
The Civil War, waged to defeat the Confederacy and preserve the Union in the 1860s, triggered what W.E.B. Du Bois called a vast “general strike” in which the enslaved transferred their labor “from the Confederate planter to the Northern invader” even as that war fueled the expansion of the national trade unions that would later form the American Federation of Labor (AFL).
The effort to make the world “safe for democracy,” as President Woodrow Wilson pledged during World War I, likewise provided the setting for experimentation with industrial unionism that paved the way for the later formation of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). And the forging of a US “arsenal of democracy” against fascism during World War II helped lead to the high-water mark of US unionism in the 1950s.
Pivoting Toward Action
The kind of quantum leaps in union growth that have occurred when the US labor movement has linked its fortunes to the future of democracy can happen again. In the growing resistance to Trumpism, we are already seeing glimmers of how this could happen in our time. Unions and allied labor and community organizations provided the backbone of the resistance in Minnesota; employees in the largest and most influential technology labs are confronting bosses who are selling their technology to the government for domestic surveillance and global war; higher education unions are challenging attacks on free speech on university campuses.
Flashes of resistance like these are multiplying. Yet such sparks will not fuel a major breakthrough unless unions at every level—from locals to internationals—embrace the fight against Trump’s authoritarian, billionaire-serving regime and defend democracy by challenging the corporations and Silicon Valley technofascists that are shaping and profiting from Trump’s policies.
Such opposition must go beyond an electoral strategy for 2026 and 2028. Defeating Trump and his allies at the polls will be a Pyrrhic victory if the corporations fueling the right-wing’s anti-worker agenda maintain their influence over our government. Should Democrats regain control of Congress and the White House, the same corporations that have aligned with Trump will be working to sabotage pro-labor policies while doubling down on their AI-obsessed, job-threatening, antidemocratic campaign of economic destruction.
There is no doubt that democracy and workers’ rights are facing down an existential threat. Yet that very threat and the sense of urgency it has spawned have created an opportunity we could not have engineered on our own.
As the experience of other nations and the failure of our own post-Civil War Reconstruction remind us, elites and economic structures that benefit from authoritarian power don’t vanish when antidemocratic regimes crumble; they regroup. We cannot allow such a regrouping to occur post-Trump, for as we have seen over the past 50 years of labor decline under Democratic and Republican administrations alike, a return to the pre-Trump status quo offers no hope for workers or labor.
Naming and challenging the economic actors aligned with Trump is therefore critical if we are to weaken their post-Trump grip on power.
Although their critics have often suggested that US unions have tied their fortunes too closely to politics, in truth, US labor has been reluctant to take up the kind of big political issues that have historically helped push workers into the streets and built workers’ movements in other democracies. We should not be surprised if many national unions hesitate to act decisively. Nor should we expect their leaders to be at the forefront, for despite critics’ endless talk of labor bosses, the movement has never functioned effectively as a top-down, command-and-control institution.
Rather, the national union movement has tended to respond opportunistically to openings that it lacked the institutional will or unity of purpose to create. In the present crisis, local unions in cities around the country—through the common good alliances they’re building to fight ICE, support beleaguered federal workers, and demand billionaires begin paying their fair share—are beginning to create the kind of openings that could conceivably pull the larger movement into the fight.
Evidence on the ground in places like Minnesota already suggests that well-conceived actions by forward-leaning coalitions of the willing can open windows of opportunity and create permission structures capable of drawing more cautious mainstream organizations into the fight. The Minnesota AFL-CIO did not initiate the remarkable “Day of Truth & Freedom,” which triggered a virtual economic shutdown of Minneapolis on January 23, as tens of thousands of residents stayed away from work, school,and shopping. Yet the organizing and alignment-building that preceded that event won the state federation’s support in the days before the action, generating a much larger impact than its initial organizers had expected.
Forward-thinking unions and their allies can replicate this effect in other settings by constructing campaigns that unmask the corporations colluding with the Trump administration’s authoritarian push. Focusing on key sectors and geographies, and engaging in calculated acts of disruption and nonviolent resistance, can not only erect defenses against the administration’s aggression but set the stage for a post-Trump organizing surge.
As longtime veterans of the labor movement, we see three elements as crucial to this strategy. The first is defining our targets expansively and attacking the financial roots of their power. We need a shared analysis of who has power in our communities and nationally, including the key Big Tech titans who openly advocate rolling back democracy and expanding an all-seeing surveillance state.
Having identified these present-day “malefactors of great wealth,” as they were called in the Progressive Era, we need to demand that worker pension funds (state and local government workers’ pension assets alone top $6 trillion) cease investing in these corporations and their anti-worker, antidemocratic agenda. We also need to articulate a platform and visionary policy agenda that focuses on breaking up and limiting their economic and political power. We must find ways to tax their hoarded wealth, reinvesting the revenues in our struggling austerity-starved communities.
A second element involves moving the labor movement into a fighting posture. The past half-century has taken a debilitating toll on the movement’s willingness and capacity to engage in collective action. In 1955, the year the AFL-CIO was formed, the equivalent of 12.1% of union members engaged in a major work stoppage. That level of union militancy vanished long ago in the United States. During the past 25 years, the annual average of participants in major work stoppages has been equal to only 1% of US union members. (The high point of militancy in that period came during the 2018 #RedForEd teacher walkout upheaval, when the equivalent of 3.3% of union members went on strike, a mere fraction of 1950s-level militancy.)
If it’s difficult to imagine a revival of organized labor without a revival of worker militancy, it’s even harder to envision an effective opposition to authoritarianism without it. Political scientist Erica Chenoweth, of Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, has theorized that, to succeed, a civil resistance movement requires 3.5% of a population to actively join it. If we are to reach that threshold, then labor will need to massively overperform. Labor can play this role only if it begins to rebuild its badly atrophied capacity for collective action. Unions can begin to recover that capacity by aligning contract dates and strikes; crafting common good bargaining demands that enlist public support for those struggles; and planning national “no work, no school, no shopping” efforts like the one Minnesotans pulled off January 23, and as the May Day Strong campaign recently promoted.
Finally, we need community-labor organizing committees, like those that emerged in Minnesota, to lead large-scale drives in crucial sectors while linking these efforts to the goal of breaking up the big companies that are increasingly dominating our economy and politics alike. As we confront the most aggressive consolidation of capital and economic power this nation has ever seen, our goal cannot be only to unionize the behemoths that are reorganizing our society; we must demand their vast monopoly power be diminished and made accountable to the public good.
There is no doubt that democracy and workers’ rights are facing down an existential threat. Yet that very threat and the sense of urgency it has spawned have created an opportunity we could not have engineered on our own. It has roused growing numbers to the defense of democracy, glaringly exposed the dangers of unchecked corporate power, and catalyzed actions within pockets of the labor movement that have a potential to spread and become transformative.
In the years ahead, if more unions begin to follow the example set by organizers in Minnesota to seize this moment by embracing social movement unionism, they will not only play an indispensable role in defeating Trumpist authoritarianism.
They could also help trigger a 21st-century revival of the US labor movement.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Working People Need Power, Not Promises
If we want the Democrats, or the Republicans, or any political party to enact a political agenda that effectively addresses the real concerns of working Americans, we must build a movement that enhances and applies the power of working Americans.
Jun 03, 2026
Democrats are eager to recapture the House, and perhaps even the Senate, in this November’s elections. They are banking in part on the customary midterm pendulum swing and in part on backlash against President Donald Trump’s unhinged, cult-like governing style (despite the ineffectiveness of this strategy throughout several election cycles). They also hope to reclaim their reputation as the party of the working class.
As a lifelong labor activist, I am gratified whenever people in electoral politics say they want to uplift the American worker. But I admit some skepticism—particularly since both major parties spent a generation or more embracing the neoliberal consensus that the government should surrender to giant multinational corporations and their wealthy executives and investors. Working people are not stupid; they know most prominent Democrats and all pre-MAGA Republicans advanced an agenda that eviscerated worker interests at home and sent tens of millions of jobs abroad. (Many unions, especially those in manufacturing, opposed the North American Free Trade Agreement when George H.W. Bush negotiated it and when William J. Clinton signed it.) Public frustration and outrage have shaken politicians’ commitment to neoliberalism (rhetorically, at least), but will it be replaced by a program that advances the real interests of the people who rely on their own labor to make ends meet?
Now that he is back in office, Trump has abandoned any pretense of being pro-worker. He has stripped a million federal employees of the right to bargain collectively, gutted overtime rules and other workplace protections, crippled the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), and deprived millions of working people of health and food benefits. He is proud and loud about protecting artificial intelligence from effective regulation just as employers start using it to mow down thousands—and ultimately millions—of jobs. Will the Democrats offer a real alternative for working people?
Some Democrats seem to be focused on the performative—searching for candidates who project non-elite “authenticity.” You know, candidates who know how to operate power tools and who drink beer from plastic cups. Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s great to run candidates who actually work for a living, but that’s not a comprehensive strategy. Working people want—and demand—actual change in how our leaders govern, not just how they look on TV (or TikTok). If the Democrats fail to articulate and deliver a legitimately pro-worker agenda, working people will continue to look elsewhere—perhaps voting for “none of the above.” (Note that, although the 2024 presidential election was proclaimed to be about the survival of our nation and its sacred values, more eligible voters stayed home than voted for either Trump or former Vice President Kamala Harris.)
Congress has failed to adopt legislation to enable workers to build their own power because workers do not have enough power to force Congress to do so.
Just as slick candidate packaging is not enough, the same is true of hollow “messaging.” Working people—like most voters—are tired of promises that bloom just before Election Day and wither right after. To represent workers effectively, elected officials will have to take political risks and challenge the power of the corporate elite, fighting for measures that tackle unaffordable healthcare, the housing crisis, and the vast (and growing) inequalities of wealth and income.
This seems so obvious it raises the question of why elected officials have ignored working voters’ real interests for so long. Here’s the key: Politicians will only stand up to corporate interests and press for meaningful pro-worker change if working people have enough leverage to force them to do so. For the past several decades our elected leaders chose a neoliberal path because the giant multinational companies and the ultra wealthy had the power to demand it—and working people did not have the countervailing power to resist it and to advance their own interests. It is no coincidence that the pro-corporate political consensus arose at precisely the same time that union membership plummeted in the United States. Although public approval of unions is as high as it has been in decades, the percentage of working people who are actually represented by unions is near an all-time low: about 10% of all workers and less than 6% in the private sector.
As the great United Auto Workers union leader Walter Reuther said, no one gives you anything you’re not strong enough to take for yourself. Working people need to build, or rebuild, the power to insist that politicians act in their interests, not just those of the corporate elite. Here’s a concrete example at the heart of building worker power: One of the reasons unions are so small now is that federal labor law has failed to protect workers’ right to organize and to engage in collective bargaining. There are plenty of great ideas for reforming US labor law. The Employee Free Choice Act, first introduced in 2006, would have streamlined the way the NLRB governs union organizing efforts. Opposition from pro-business senators (including some Democrats), together with the threat of a GOP filibuster, doomed it—even when Barack Obama was in the White House and the Democrats controlled both chambers. The Protect the Right to Organize Act, or “PRO Act,” would have addressed a whole range of structural and substantive problems with US labor law. It did not make it to full floor votes even when the Democrats controlled both the House and the Senate in 2021.
Why did Congress fail to adopt either of these essential bills, even when Democrats were in power? Because elected leaders—including Democrats—did not feel political pressure or fear political fallout. It’s like a Zen koan: Congress has failed to adopt legislation to enable workers to build their own power because workers do not have enough power to force Congress to do so.
Bottom line: If we want the Democrats, or the Republicans, or any political party to enact a political agenda that effectively addresses the real concerns of working Americans, we must build a movement that enhances and applies the power of working Americans. Unless and until we create a larger, stronger labor movement, politicians will not feel enough pressure to do the right thing for working people. Leverage is how politics work, and we should act accordingly. We should roll up our sleeves and get busy organizing in the workplace so we can assert real influence in the halls of government.
Keep ReadingShow Less
'Hands Off Our Pensions': Belgian Workers Take to the Streets in General Strike Against Austerity Measures
It's the latest of several national strikes over the past year and a half against policies that one union leader said will heighten "inequality" and "poverty."
May 13, 2026
Much of Belgium ground to a halt on Tuesday as tens of thousands of workers flooded the streets of Brussels as part of a general strike against government austerity measures.
Schools closed, public transit operated with reduced service, and flights out of major airports were grounded as workers walked off the job. Instead, they marched through the capital clad in red and green, the colors of Belgium's major labor unions, with some carrying signs that read, "Hands off our pensions" and "We will not pay the price of their wars."
According to Morning Star, as many as 100,000 people took part in the strike, which was called by the nation's three biggest trade unions in protest of measures by Prime Minister Bart De Wever's government that the unions say slash pensions, reduce wages, and attack collective bargaining.
The marchers called on the government to roll back plans to raise Belgium's retirement age to 67 and have called for an end to what the unions have dubbed a “pension penalty” that would cut benefits for those who retire early.
Amid rising costs caused by the US-Israeli war against Iran, the unions are also outraged by a proposed temporary cap on wage indexation, which requires wages to rise in tandem with inflation.
It's part of a broader trend of the government loosening labor rules for employers, which unions say has led to longer, more irregular hours and diminished employees' work-life balance.
"People will have less money left over and will still have to work more flexibly and longer," said Ann Vermorgen, the chair of the Confederation of Christian Trade Unions. "Even the Planning Bureau says that the reform will promote inequality and that poverty will emerge.”
Tuesday's general strike was just the latest over the past year and a half, as the unions have refused to let up on their push to reverse De Wever's agenda.
Gert Truyens, the chair of the General Confederation of Liberal Trade Unions of Belgium (ACLVB), said that with the pension penalty and the other labor proposals, the government was displaying “total disregard” for social dialogue by “unilaterally imposing things without discussing them with the trade unions and employers.”
Keep ReadingShow Less
Bargaining to Save Our Jobs from Artificial Intelligence
There is broad and deep recognition that AI technology will reshape the future of work, and unions have decided to roll up their sleeves (and dust off their picket signs) to bargain how AI will be implemented, to do what, and to what effect.
May 07, 2026
For many pundits and policymakers, there is little doubt that Artificial Intelligence will devour the jobs of millions of people, including professionals formerly presumed immune to technological replacement. The only question is how many jobs will be lost, how quickly. In fact, there is nothing inevitable about AI—not its development, its deployment, or its impact. Massive job losses are not inherent in the algorithm, preordained by the laws of nature and physics. Rather than remaining struck by awe, we can reassert human agency over this technology. We can not only save jobs, but perhaps even make them better.
AI is not an abstract force that operates solely at the macroeconomic level. AI systems and agents are developed and implemented in ways specific to each sector, each workplace, each type of job. Although employers might focus myopically on cutting their wage bill, their employees know firsthand how the work actually gets done. They know what disclosures to request about how the technology would be used. They know how AI might affect the content and flow of their work, what training would be most helpful, and which implementations would be most likely to devalue their labor versus those most likely to enhance it. Thus, the most effective way to ensure that AI makes work life better and not worse is to empower workers to bargain about it.
By “workers” I mean people who rely on their own labor to earn a living—which is to say, most of us, whether we write reports, treat patients, teach kids, manufacture products, or stock warehouses. AI is not something that’s going to happen only to other people; it will affect all of us.
Workers need the authority and the power to bargain about the implementation of AI in the workplace, not just the effects. “Effects bargaining” is the traditional approach: After a technology has wiped out jobs, people negotiate a little severance pay to tide them over, and maybe some training for completely different jobs, if any such jobs exist. By contrast, our goal should be to make sure workers can negotiate for technology that makes their jobs better, more productive, more valuable. To avoid the car crash in the first place, if you will, and not just to apportion damages afterward.
AI will not destroy or devalue our jobs by itself, unless we let it.
One can imagine some objections to this approach. Some people might insist that AI is in irresistible force, that large-scale job destruction is inevitable, and that our task is to figure out other things for people to do to earn a living—or, if that’s not possible, to pay them a small stipend so they don’t starve. This defeatism is a short step away from the more nihilistic vision of the pure doomers, who think it might already be too late to save humanity from machine-led destruction. I love science fiction myself—but it is fiction, not history.
Another objection might be that placing restraints of any kind on AI companies in the United States will keep the industry from winning the global race for dominance. This is the Trump administration’s view. This logic is inverted. Nations should be governed for the benefit of their people, not just their Big Tech companies. Both the Republican and Democratic parties proclaim themselves to be the champions of the American worker. If so, the real triumph for the nation would be to ensure that technology enhances work and makes working people’s lives better, not to create havoc and economic devastation across the labor market.
Some might object that it is unrealistic to think that working people have the interest or ability to intervene effectively, to exercise their right to bargain about AI technology. But that is exactly what has been happening in the entertainment industry. One of the central issues in the 2023 strike by the Writers Guild of America against the Hollywood studios and producers was the use of AI in writers’ workplaces. The Guild represents the professionals who create scripts for TV and streaming series and for feature films. In late 2022 Open AI revealed that ChatGPT could write—coherently and at some length. Although the union did not conclude that robots had suddenly become capable of crafting award-winning scripts, Guild members recognized that their employers could use AI to do just enough to degrade and devalue their work.
During contract talks in 2023 the Guild proposed—and won, after a five-month strike—language that puts meaningful guardrails on the use of AI. These guardrails reflect the process writers and studios actually use to create characters and stories and full-length projects. They ensure that AI cannot be used to deprive writers of the opportunity to do the full range of writing work, and they deprive employers of the economic incentive to replace professional writers with algorithms. Guild members knew how to defend their careers, and they fought for meaningful protections.
The Guild members’ willingness to take on the AI issue, rather than passively accept that the technology would hollow out their careers, resonated with working people everywhere. The actors’ union (SAG AFTRA) also struck and won contract protections on AI, and the following year the other entertainment industry unions did the same. The entire labor movement has made workplace AI a top priority. There is broad and deep recognition that AI technology will reshape the future of work, and unions have decided to roll up their sleeves (and dust off their picket signs) to bargain how AI will be implemented, to do what, to what effect.
AI systems do not develop themselves; AI companies do. AI does not implement itself in the workplace; employers do. AI will not destroy or devalue our jobs by itself, unless we let it. Working people can and must protect their livelihoods by bargaining over AI implementation. Nothing less than the future of work is at stake.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Why I'm Answering the May Day Call to Action By Running for Congress
The workers of Uptown and The Bronx have been making the demand for a better life for over a century but Washington has ignored their demands for too long. I'm running to make sure it finally has an answer.
May 01, 2026
Uptown wakes up before the rest of New York even opens its eyes. Walk Broadway from 125th to 168th, up through Dyckman, as I have, and you'll see it: The bodega coffee grabbed on the run, the crosstown bus packed before dawn, people clocking into work while downtown is still asleep. These are the people who built our city. Not the CEOs, real estate developers, or the politicians who show up every two to four years with fliers and false promises. The movement fighting for their dignity has always lived here—on these buses and these street corners.
Every May 1, we honor them. May Day, or International Workers' Day, was created from needless state violence. In 1884, American workers went on strike to win an eight-hour workday. As the deadline approached, a protest in Chicago turned deadly, with police firing into the crowd and arresting seven workers who, after a sham trial, were executed. The bosses thought that would be the end of it. They were wrong. Workers fought for and won the right to an eight-hour workday.
Here in Harlem, Washington Heights, and Kingsbridge, May Day isn’t an abstract history lesson, it’s a mirror. This is a day to honor the transit workers, nurses, teachers, laborers, and caregivers who have always refused to accept less than they deserve and risked everything to fight for a better future for the next generation. They show us what's possible when working people come together, across generations, race, gender, and culture, and demand a dignified life.
May Day reminds us of something simple and profound: Uptown is a union town. It always has been.
I want to build power for the people on that crosstown bus before dawn who never get thanked for keeping our city running and are told to be grateful for what little they have.
New York, and Uptown especially, has become a stronghold of union power. It was in Harlem, during the Harlem Renaissance, that A. Philip Randolph founded the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters—the first Black-led labor union in American history. It was in Washington Heights and Spanish Harlem where Dominican and Puerto Rican immigrant women transformed the garment industry, becoming so essential to the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union that by the 1950s, the union published its paper, Justicia, entirely in Spanish. And it was in the Bronx that Ella Baker and Marvel Cooke exposed the Bronx Slave Market, where domestic workers, most of them Black women, were paid as little as 15 cents an hour and subjected to workplace harassment and abuse. Their conditions were so appalling that it sparked city-wide organizing to protect domestic workers. This is my community’s inheritance.
That tradition is still alive in our streets today. In January 2026, 70 years after 1199 Service Employees International Union's historic 46-day strike at Uptown hospitals, hundreds of unionized NY State Nurses Association (NYSNA) nurses walked off the job at NewYork-Presbyterian on 168th Street and at hospitals across our community. They stood on their picket lines from dawn to dusk, through a brutally cold January, fighting starvation wages and conditions so unsafe that patients were being put at risk. After 41 days of striking and organizing, they won. That's the Uptown way.
From the factory floor to the hospital room to the living room, Uptown is still at the center of the labor movement. I think about this legacy when people ask me why I'm running for Congress. The honest answer is: I'm not sure I had a choice.
When you grow up as the daughter of Dominican immigrants and watch your parents work multiple jobs and come home exhausted, see your neighbors get pushed out, watch politicians blame the vulnerable instead of the corporations robbing them blind, all while sending their tax dollars to drop bombs on babies, you organize and fight back. And eventually, the question stops being why run and starts being how could I not?
Congress was not built for us. It was built to manage us. It was built to keep our labor, our rent checks, and our votes flowing to people who have never had to choose between rent and groceries, all while allowing the people who are the foundation of our city to fall through the cracks. But here's what the establishment never understood about Uptown and The Bronx: We don't wait for permission.
That's the legacy I am fighting to protect in Congress. I am a proud card-carrying United Auto Workers member. I've picketed alongside NYSNA nurses on 168th Street and Mount Sinai Morningside. I've fought with Student Workers of Columbia to protect their peers from harassment by the university and Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
In Congress, I will fight to pass the PRO Act so every worker can organize without fear. I will push to fund public housing, cancel medical debt, and end the forever wars that drain our communities to pad the pockets of defense contractors. I want to build power for the people on that crosstown bus before dawn who never get thanked for keeping our city running and are told to be grateful for what little they have. They built New York and deserve everything it has to offer.
May Day is a call to action. The workers of Uptown and The Bronx have been making the demand for a better life for over a century but Washington has ignored their demands for too long. I'm running to make sure it finally has an answer.
Keep ReadingShow Less
The Lesson From the LA Teachers' Win: There Is Money to Pay Educators If We Demand It
For too long, the narrative has been that we cannot afford to support teachers. We’ve just shown we cannot afford not to.
Apr 25, 2026
Before stepping into the classroom, I spent 12 years as an investigator with the California State Bar, examining cases of attorney misconduct. I chose to teach because I saw a meaningful way to serve my community, and I understood there would be sacrifice. Still, it took 10 years before my salary caught up to what I earned in my final year as an investigator.
In California, becoming an educator is neither easy nor inexpensive. In fact, it is one of the most challenging states to obtain a teaching license. Despite this, teachers remain among the most underpaid professionals relative to their level of education. According to the US Census Bureau, teacher earnings have not only lagged behind comparable fields, but have experienced a steady annual decline.
The debate is not whether schools have enough money, it is about what we choose to spend it on. Today, many educators cannot afford to live where they teach. Teaching, while never lucrative, used to offer a stable path to a middle class life. Educators could buy a home, live in the communities where they worked, and maintain the financial stability expected of other professions with similar levels of education. Sadly, even the most modest of those expectations are rapidly disappearing. I only own a home because I purchased it prior to switching my career.
Most educators did not choose this career for the money, but there is a clear difference between modest compensation and exploitation. Nearly 1 in 5 teachers in Los Angeles are housing insecure. And nearly 60% of educators across the country take on second jobs outside of teaching to make ends meet. It is unacceptable that the people responsible for educating our children are struggling to hold their head above water.
These victories for Los Angeles educators are not perks. They are the foundation of a functioning school system, and a respected career.
Teachers are also expected to subsidize their classrooms out of their own pockets. These stories are often framed as heartwarming and altruistic, but they reflect systemic failure and a lack of meaningful investment in public education. Few other professions require employees to pay out of pocket while already being underpaid.
The consequences of this underinvestment are becoming impossible to ignore. As the cost of living rises, fewer educators can afford to remain in the classroom. A teacher shortage has already hit Southern California, and the impact is profound. Nationally, teaching shortages have led to larger class sizes, burnout, and financial strain on the education system.
Education is expected to operate in scarcity while other sectors experience enormous growth. The education technology market alone is projected to grow by $170.8 billion by 2029. In the Los Angeles Unified School District alone, more than $1.6 billion has been spent on edtech. Framing this as a funding problem misses the point; it is a question of priorities. We are told we can’t make investments in educators, while billions continue to flow toward technology and outside contracts instead of the classrooms they are meant to serve.
And yet, during recent labor negotiations in Los Angeles, we were told a familiar refrain: There is no money.
This was the backdrop of three educational unions, representing more than 70,000 workers, on the brink of striking across Los Angeles. At the center of the dispute for United Teachers Los Angeles was a straightforward demand: a salary structure that reflects economic reality. As negotiations stretched over 14 months, frustration grew not only among educators but across school communities, culminating in escalating public pressure, organizing efforts at school sites, and an overwhelming strike authorization vote that made clear teachers were prepared to act if necessary.
Only when the possibility of a strike became real did the district return to the table with urgency. We ultimately won the majority of our demands, including overhauling the outdated pay system that kept incoming educators at artificially low salaries, raising the starting salary from $68,966 to $77,000 for teachers, and securing an average salary increase of 13.86% across the board. This is evidence that the “no money” claim is negotiable, not factual.
Just as significantly, for the first time in California, educators in Los Angeles have secured four weeks of paid parental leave. This is a historic breakthrough that now sets a precedent for teachers across the state of California, as well as the entire country. Additionally, we won a major expansion of student support, including more than 450 additional social workers, to address the growing mental health crisis among our youth.
These victories for Los Angeles educators are not perks. They are the foundation of a functioning school system, and a respected career.
When teachers are paid a living wage, they stay. When they can afford to live in the communities they serve, schools are more stable. And when students have access to trained mental health professionals, they are better able to learn. Investment is what makes public schools strong. Without it, everything else collapses.
For too long, the narrative has been that we cannot afford to support teachers. We’ve just shown we cannot afford not to. The lesson from Los Angeles is simple: School funding is not fixed by scarcity, but by priorities. And when educators and school workers organize, those priorities can change—for the better.
Keep ReadingShow Less
To Stop Trump, the Pro-Democracy Movement Must Center Workers
Marches alone won't beat authoritarianism; the movement has to fight where working people already fight.
Apr 19, 2026
Last month, 8 million people marched in the largest single-day protests in US history for "No Kings 3." More than 3,000 rallies were held across the country in a “record-breaking” display of opposition that an estimated 1 in 50 people participated in.
To translate that march into a movement, the fight to have your voice be counted is one working people have to take up every single day. The warehouse worker getting a Sunday night text saying they need to be in tomorrow even though she requested that day off for her daughter's physical therapy. The tenant whose rent jumps $200 with no explanation.
For working people, those fights start at work, in their neighborhoods, and at the polls. To have a successful pro-democracy movement in the United States, we must recognize working people's struggles as central to stopping authoritarianism, not separate from it.
I'm the founding executive director of Organized Power In Numbers (OPIN). Before that, I helped lead the campaign to win Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals and organized car wash workers in Los Angeles. Lofty speeches about democratic norms don't move working people. Winning does. Fighting for power at work, increasing the minimum wage, lowering utility bills, and providing free healthcare are the same as fighting for democracy.
Our hope for defending democracy is in a movement of the multiracial working class that wins material gains and builds solidarity across race, industry, and immigration status.
Signing a union card is often where working people who have been systematically disenfranchised first experience democratic power. They vote on contracts, elect leaders, and make collective decisions. Winning stable schedules, workplace protections against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids, or living wages teaches people that power doesn't only belong to employers and landlords. It can belong to them.
In LA, I helped organize car wash workers, mostly undocumented. No overtime, no breaks, and bosses stole wages constantly. At one shop, the owner refused to let workers use the bathroom, telling them to urinate in a drainage grate instead.
After years of organizing, hundreds of car wash workers won a union contract with bathroom breaks and better wages. They built a network where workers understood their rights. When one shop faced retaliation, workers from other sites showed up.
However, not all workplace organizing automatically builds that larger sense of power. Some unions negotiate good contracts and go quiet when ICE raids their members' neighborhoods, when states close polling places, or when Black women lose 319,000 jobs in the public and private sectors. Focusing only on workplace interests without connecting to the bigger fight against authoritarianism leaves those union members isolated and feeling powerless.
When President Donald Trump tells workers they’re poorer because immigrants took their jobs and no bold labor movement responds, the resentment goes toward scapegoats instead of the billionaires responsible. That’s how authoritarianism grows.
To win against fascism, candidates, campaigns, and movements will have to connect with and run on the agendas that matter to working people.
At OPIN, we've reached more than 27 million poor and working-class people in the Sunbelt over the last six years. Through thousands of organizing conversations, the common thread was that housing costs, groceries, and utility bills keep them up at night. We organize our campaigns around what workers need: clear pathways to dignified jobs and stronger communities, not lectures about civic duty.
That’s not just good organizing strategy. History shows that authoritarianism is stopped when labor and democracy are bound together. Our hope for defending democracy is in a movement of the multiracial working class that wins material gains and builds solidarity across race, industry, and immigration status.
Countering the power of bosses and landlords builds a base of people who won’t accept it from the White House either.
That’s the force that can beat fascism. And it’s the same force that showed up on March 28 for No Kings 3.
Now we need those movements to merge, for more of us to move, to take risks collectively, for all of our well-being.
Labor can’t advance while ignoring the assault on democracy. And the pro-democracy movement can’t ask working people to defend abstract principles while they’re still fighting for a voice of their own. We need higher wages, stable schedules, and a voice on the job alongside the solidarity and political power to beat authoritarianism.
That’s why labor and community organizations are planning for a day of action on May 1 around taxing the rich, protesting ICE and illegal wars, and expanding democracy, all together. It's the only way to win.
Keep ReadingShow Less
May Day—Why We’re Rallying in Liberty, New York
Most of us are workers, and Trump 2.0 is the most anti-worker administration in living memory.
Apr 19, 2026
Nestled in the Catskill Mountains of Sullivan County, New York, Liberty is a village of some 10,000 inhabitants, two hours west of New York City. Last year PepsiCo shuttered its Frito-Lay snack factory, laying off nearly 300 workers. “I don’t know how our town survives this,” a Town Board member remarked. “It’s a bad situation.” The biggest employer now, after the school district, is a chicken farm on the outskirts with a largely immigrant workforce that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) sporadically targets.
On May 1—International Workers’ Day—Sullivan County residents will rally in Liberty, joining nationwide actions as part of the May Day Strong coalition. Why will we be on the streets? It’s simple. Most of us are workers—some unionized, most not; some well paid, most not; some small businesspeople or “independent contractors” and others employees; some retired, some still at it even in our 70s. Whatever our situation, it’s clear that Trump 2.0 is the most anti-worker and pro-oligarch administration in living memory.
Consider this:
- It issued an executive order terminating union collective bargaining agreements for 1 million federal employees.
- It implemented hiring freezes and encouraged resignations, along with mass firings of probationary employees.
- It reinstated Schedule F, which reclassifies civil servants in policy roles, stripping them of job protections and making it easier to fire them for political reasons.
- It fired National Labor Relations Board officials, replacing them with pro-regime hacks who will back employers in contract disputes.
- It promotes state-level so-called "Right to Work" laws and supports a national "Right to Work" law. Together with the Supreme Court’s 2018 Janus decision, these measures undermine unions’ organizing and finances.
- It gutted OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration), endangering workers, especially in high-risk industries like logging and lumber, farming, meatpacking, warehouses, and commercial fishing.
- In the name of rolling back regulation, it rescinded safety rules in construction, mining, chemical, and other sectors, which will increase injuries and fatalities and the disease burden of nearby communities.
- It radically reduced workplace safety and wage violation enforcement. The bosses can now get away with almost anything.
- President Donald Trump’s Department of Labor (DOL) proposed removing minimum wage and overtime protections for an estimated 3.7 million home-care workers.
- It issued rules to make it easier for companies to classify workers as independent contractors rather than employees, stripping them of benefits and minimum wage guarantees.
- It rescinded a 2024 rule that protected migrant farm workers from retaliation for reporting safety violations.
- Its threats and mass deportations have created volatility in labor-intensive sectors, such as construction, agriculture, hospitality, and eldercare, which disrupts supply chains, produces labor shortages, and leads to worse outcomes for US-born workers.
- The administration revoked Executive Order 11246, which prohibited federal contractors from discriminating based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.
- It has undermined the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, potentially impacting 2.8 million workers.
- It threatened to veto the PRO (Protecting the Right to Organize) Act, which would allow employers to interfere with union elections.
- It slashed federal grant programs that fight child labor and slave labor abroad.
- It requested $1.5 trillion for the Defense Department—a 42% increase—while holding Social Security flat and cutting Medicare and Medicaid personnel.
- It eliminated Community Service Block Grants, the Low-Income Heating Assistance Program, and Senior Employment Services, which provide older people with food assistance, home heating, and job opportunities.
- It proposed a rule that would encourage the addition of dodgy high-risk “alternative” assets—such as private equity, private credit, and crypto—to employer-run 401(k) retirement plans and that would protect management against worker lawsuits.
- The Trump 2.0 administration jacked up the cost of living with unprecedented tariffs and massive deficit spending to fund its tax cuts for the rich, as well as unpopular wars, huge cuts to cheap renewable energy programs, and giveaways to the AI and crypto sectors that sent petroleum and electricity prices soaring.
Over one-third of Sullivan County residents now have “utility debt” to New York State Electric and Gas, an electric company owned by a Spanish multinational corporation that is raking in profits from our skyrocketing bills. This utility debt is often on top of housing debt, medical debt, education debt, credit card debt, automobile debt, and small business debt.
Many people in our region are struggling and economically increasingly precarious. Much of the rest of our country is in similar straits, especially but not only in rural areas. Blood collection centers are moving into middle-class neighborhoods, as even relatively well-off Americans now resort to selling their plasma to make ends meet.
May Day is as American as apple pie, despite what anti-labor talking heads might tell you.
The Trump 2.0 administration is so anti-worker that its Labor Secretary, Lori Chavez-DeRemer, faces formal complaints of creating a “hostile work environment” at the DOL, making subordinates run personal errands and do chores like cleaning out closets in her home, and retaliating against staffers for cooperating with an investigation, including claims of sexual harassment of DOL employees by her husband.
May Day is as American as apple pie, despite what anti-labor talking heads might tell you. It dates to the 1880s, when US workers—many of them immigrants—struggled for an eight-hour workday; a five-day workweek; and an end to dangerous, grueling working conditions. May Day also honors the memory of the labor organizers who died at the hands of the Chicago Police in 1886 and the four who were framed up and sentenced to death by hanging in the aftermath of that violence.
We remember—and we see what’s going on today. Enough is enough. May Day will be a nationwide day of collective action. We’ll be rallying in Liberty.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Raising Misbehavin' Girls
I’m sending my daughter into the world armed with a legacy of misbehaving. I hope she meets your girls on the way. Because the more misbehaving girls we raise, the closer we get to a world where women get what we deserve.
Mar 31, 2026
Fifty years ago, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich popularized the phrase, “Well-behaved women rarely make history.” It became a feminist call to action. Even women who didn’t claim feminism invoked it before challenging a rule, a system, or a societal norm—a permission slip to be loud, difficult, and disruptive.
But lately, I wonder if something has shifted—if girls are not just discouraged from making history, but conditioned against it. What happens to the women and girls who still live the phrase?
Look around.
Jasmine Crockett faces backlash for refusing to shrink herself. Female athletes at Howard University were criticized for protesting. Joy Ann Reid, once a prominent voice on MSNBC, was pushed out of the very spaces that benefited from her boldness. Leqaa Kordia became a flash point, punished for her pro-Palestine speech at Columbia. Renee Nicole Good murdered for talking back to Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
The women in my life taught me that there are repercussions to being “misbehaving”—but that the courage to continue is worth it.
Different circumstances. Different stakes. But a similar message: Misbehave, and there will be consequences.
I come from a lineage of women who refused to be well-behaved.
Long before it was popular to challenge Confederate symbols, my grandmother protested John McDonogh Day in New Orleans public schools. While others celebrated a man tied to oppression, my granny and her friends resisted—even when it meant detention. She modeled that courage for my mother.
As a school board member, my mother openly challenged the charter takeover after Hurricane Katrina. It cost her reelection. Well-funded lobbying groups backed her opponents, and she lost. But she did not bend.
Later, in my own career, I spoke out against unfair disciplinary policies—three-strikes rules and bans on hooded sweatshirts that disproportionately targeted Black students. I did so publicly. I was not promoted. Instead, my mental and emotional health were questioned.
The women in my life taught me that there are repercussions to being “misbehaving”—but that the courage to continue is worth it.
That is why the Women's National Basketball Association (WNBA) collective bargaining fight meant so much to me. The players weren’t asking for excess—just the standard their male counterparts had long received. Even so, they were met with resistance; fans and commentators questioned their gratitude.
For months, the women of the league misbehaved. They rejected lowball offers. They challenged the status quo. They held the line—and even threatened to strike—because they refused to be mistreated.
And it worked. A historic agreement will bring higher salaries, revenue recognition, and support for injured and pregnant players.
Central to that fight were WNBA Players Association leaders Nneka Ogwumike and Napheesa Collier—women who understood that progress requires pressure. Ogwumike has credited her family for instilling discipline and purpose. Collier’s parents modeled misbehavior early, creating opportunities when she was shut out. Years later, she took it further—co-founding Unrivaled, a rival league that pressured the WNBA.
Those foundations don’t just produce great athletes; they produce fighters. And when misbehaving women connect, things change.
During those negotiations, I found myself explaining courage to my 3-year-old daughter. She is too young to understand contracts or labor rights—but not that her voice matters. And I will continue to nurture that—even when it’s inconvenient. When she says, “Mom, stop, you’re hurting me” while I’m combing her hair. When she insists, “I can do it myself,” even if it means wasted strawberries and a mess I’ll have to clean up. Because the alternative is a girl who does not believe in her own agency, her own power.
In my work with girls, I’ve learned that many of us are not raised this way. Caregivers—often out of love, fear, or inherited trauma—teach girls that silence and compliance will lead to an easier life. And that belief is understandable. Who doesn’t want ease and safety for their children?
But as Viola Davis shared in a recent conversation with Amy Poehler, being a “good girl” didn’t protect her. It taught her to shrink, to tolerate hurt. That’s the lie we don’t talk about enough: that if girls (and women) are agreeable enough, soft enough, accommodating enough—they will be safe.
If history has taught us anything, it’s that progress has never come from compliance. It has always come from those willing to disrupt, to demand, and to refuse. To misbehave.
So, to the adults raising and influencing young girls, here’s what I’ve learned as an educator, advocate, and mother:
- Let them say no (within reason). They don’t have to hug anyone. They don’t have to stay friends with people who mistreat them.
- Give specific compliments. Replace “good girl” with “That was brave,” “That was thoughtful,” “You worked hard on that.”
- Respect their opinions. Let them explain why they’re upset, what they prefer, what they think.
- Let them experiment—with their style and their interests. It helps them find their voice.
- And model it. Praise yourself. Name the women—past and present—who you admire for their refusal to conform.
This isn’t just for parents. Anyone who has girls in their lives has the power to shape their beliefs.
I’m sending my daughter into the world armed with a legacy of misbehaving. I hope she meets your girls on the way. Because the more misbehaving girls we raise, the closer we get to a world where women get what we deserve.
Well-behaved women rarely make history. And they damn sure don’t get things done.
I’m raising the next generation of misbehaving girls. Who’s with me? Whose #RaisinMisbehavinGirls
Keep ReadingShow Less
An Injury to Immigrant Workers Is an Injury to All Workers
The Trump administration claims that its assault on immigrants will protect American workers. But its masked, armed federal agents are creating hostile environments for all workers, not just immigrants.
Feb 08, 2026
In late 2025, federal immigration authorities detained a non-union janitor who’d accused contractors for Minnesota’s Ramsey County of wage theft.
The worker is now in deportation proceedings. But his courage helped win policy changes in Ramsey County, and his fierce advocacy in a similar wage theft case in nearby Hennepin County also paid off: More than 70 subcontracted workers for Hennepin County received nearly $400,000 in back pay in December 2025.
When someone who fights for workers is detained, “it sends a chill,” Greg Nammacher, president of SEIU Local 26, told me. “When the workers who are stepping up to try and reveal violations are silenced, the standard comes down for the whole industry.”
The Trump administration claims that its assault on immigrants will protect American workers. But its masked, armed federal agents are creating hostile environments for all workers, not just immigrants.
“They treated us like animals. And it’s not some immigrants who are affected—it’s everybody.”
In Minneapolis, federal agents abducted an educator trying to ensure safe dismissal at a high school. In Southern California, they chased a day laborer at a Home Depot onto a freeway, where he was hit and killed by a vehicle. In Chicago, they detained a childcare worker as children watched.
Agents have even directly harassed striking workers.
On December 16, Juanita Robinson was out on the picket line in Chicago when armed federal agents—including border chief Gregory Bovino—approached and demanded identification. The group “interrogated and laughed at our members while they were on the picket line,” according to a press statement from Teamsters Local 705.
“It was scary when they pulled up on us,” said Robinson, who was born in Chicago but calls her immigrant coworkers family. “We’re out there trying to make ends meet, and y’all abusing us,” she said of the agents. “They treated us like animals. And it’s not some immigrants who are affected—it’s everybody.”
The scholarly research backs Robinson up.
By studying “Secure Communities,” a federal program that resulted in the deportation of nearly half a million people from 2008 to 2014, scholars found that upticks in immigration enforcement are associated with increased minimum wage violations and more dangerous workplaces for all workers.
“If I complain to the Wage and Hour Division that I’m not getting paid minimum wage, it might mean that my wages get restored,” said Matt Johnson, a professor at Duke’s Sanford School of Public Policy. “But it also might affect my coworkers, who were facing similar violations. So when one worker becomes more reluctant to complain,” he told me, it ultimately affects “the rest of the labor market.”
Research also shows that immigration crackdowns actually reduce jobs for US-born workers. Chloe East, an economics professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, says that’s because immigrants and US-born workers “complement” each other rather than compete directly.
For example, in order for a restaurant “to hire waiters, waitresses, hosts, and hostesses, which are jobs typically taken by US-born people, they also have to be able to hire cooks and dishwashers, jobs more often taken by immigrants,” she explained. When they “can’t find anybody to do the dishwashing, they may have to reduce their hiring overall.”
The effect ripples out. “When many people are all of a sudden removed from a local area because of detention or deportation, or afraid to leave their homes to get haircuts and eat at restaurants,” she explained, that hurts the economy “for everybody, including US-born workers.”
The GOP’s so-called ”Big Beautiful Bill” gave the Trump administration an unprecedented $170 billion over and above existing funding to carry out abuses like these. That enormous sum comes directly at the expense of programs that were cut, like Medicaid and SNAP, and could end up hurting all workers and their communities.
They’re trying to “break the unity that we have to have to be able to actually get raises and health insurance and retirement,” Nummacher told me. “Working people have never been able to win these things without being organized.”
Keep ReadingShow Less
See More Stories
Most Popular
To inform. To inspire. To ignite change for the common good.
News & Opinion
Trending
About
Common Dreams, Inc. Founded 1997. Registered 501(c3) Non-Profit
Privacy Policy