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workers rights
A Compact for American Workers to Share This Labor Day
Most of the long-overdue planks on this Domestic Compact for America are supported by both liberal and conservative families who live, work, and raise their children here.
Sep 01, 2025
Running on the following Domestic Compact for America is a winning election strategy for candidates at the local, state, and national levels.
Most of these long-overdue programs are supported by both liberal and conservative families who live, work, and raise their children, facing unaddressed necessities of life and livelihoods.
Labor Day celebrations should be about more than department store sales and clambakes. America’s labor unions, at both the national and local levels, should circulate this agenda widely on Labor Day, because it is also a Compact for American Workers.
This agenda is being sent to Liz Shuler, president of the AFL-CIO (see the letter sent to her on August 27, 2024), and to the presidents of other major unions, including those representing postal workers, flight attendants, electrical workers, autoworkers, steelworkers, service workers, nurses, textile workers, and agricultural workers.
You might ask yourself: How many of these protections and benefits is US President Donald Trump opposing? These are good yardsticks by which to compare his deceptive rhetoric with his misdeeds.
The basic question is, whose side are you on? The key elements of the Compact are:
- Raising the federal minimum wage from $7.25 per hour to at least $15 per hour, benefiting 25 million workers.
- Raising all the Social Security benefits, frozen for over 45 years, paying for it by increasing the Social Security tax on the wealthy, benefiting over 60 million elderly. This was supported by about 200 House Democrats in 2022 but was blocked by the Democratic Speaker from going to the floor. Rep. John Larson (D-Conn.), the bill’s champion, can provide further explanation.
- Restoring taxes on the very under-taxed super rich and corporations (85% approval).
- Establishing a children’s tax credit, cutting child poverty in half, with over 60 million children benefiting. Very popular with parents regardless of their political party affiliations.
- Instituting Medicare for All, safer, more efficient, and much less stressful than our current approach to healthcare.
- Cracking down on corporate crooks stealing consumer dollars, wages, and worker pensions.
- Adopting social safety nets long available in Western Europe and Canada.
- Passing labor law reforms put forth decades ago. (See my column on Taft Hartley at Nader.org)
- Investing in crumbling public services and infrastructures.
- Paying for the above by restoring taxes on the very under-taxed super rich and large corporations and by ending huge corporate welfare giveaways and debloating the runaway, unaudited military budget.
Why has the Democratic Party declined to lead with such an agenda, which has been proposed for years by various citizen groups? (See winningamerica.net.)
One reason is special interest campaign money. Another is that the Democratic Party contracts out many of its campaigns to corporate-conflicted consulting firms that have long pushed weak messaging that leads voters to keep wondering what the party stands for. These consulting firms know the answer—have the party do what is necessary to outraise the GOP in campaign contributions from corporate PACs, the super wealthy, and Wall Street titans.
When the labor union chiefs just write campaign checks to the Democratic Party without demanding an authentic, publicly visible agenda for workers, the pressure is off the party’s leadership to cease being a corporate party or to recruit younger leaders to provide needed energy from the Democratic National Committee down to the grassroots. Without this energy, there is no serious effort to mobilize informed voters who demand these changes and overdue redirections. (See Roots Action, founded by Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon.)
Here is to a more vibrant, respectful LABOR DAY.
For more information about what workers can do to advance their interests, see my book Civic Self-Respect—Chapter 2: “I, the Worker.”
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Immigrant or US-Born, We’re All in the Same Boat
Politicians divide us, but all workers share the same struggles. Only together can we demand dignity and safety at work.
Sep 01, 2025
Every morning, my dad laces up his work boots knowing there’s a chance he won’t come home. A skilled carpenter, he has worked in Los Angeles’ construction industry since our family moved to the US when I was 3. Through years of backbreaking labor, his boss praised his skill, reliability, and loyalty. He not only built this city but also a life for our family in LA. Now, that life is in jeopardy—because like so many undocumented workers, when my dad needed protection from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, he was treated like he didn’t matter.
After 15 years of loyalty, my dad asked for a few days off at the height of the LA ICE raids out of concern for his safety. In response, his boss gave him an ultimatum: Show up to work and risk being taken by ICE or stay home. His employer threatened to replace him with someone “willing to do the job.”
His concern was not unfounded. Since then, ICE has raided my dad’s job site twice as part of the surge in raids across LA and the country. Our family lives in fear of the third time.
Behind these attacks is deliberate policy. The construction industry has become an easy target for the administration’s mass abduction efforts—according to a Stateline analysis this industry employs the most immigrant laborers. And Stephen Miller, a senior White House aide and the architect behind much of ICE’s siege on our cities, explicitly ordered ICE to conduct raids against working families, demanding at least 3,000 people be disappeared a day.
And the administration isn’t stopping there. With the Big Ugly Bill now signed into law, immigration enforcement will receive an unprecedented $170 billion surge to ramp up these mass abductions. This money is being taken directly from our taxpayer wallets and cut from the things we all rely on, like healthcare and education. Whether you migrated here or were born here, we are all being attacked by deadly policies meant to keep us in a cycle of suffering.
While my dad is irreplaceable to my family, it has never been more clear to me that his life, and the lives of all working people, are viewed as disposable in this country. Workers like my dad power this country. But for far too long, politicians have benefited from keeping working people divided, selling the lie that immigrants and US-born workers are on different sides—when in truth, we’ve always been in the same boat.
If you’re a vulnerable worker like my dad and don’t come to work because ICE is there, they’ll replace you. If you’re a US-born worker demanding better pay, they’ll fire you and exploit an undocumented person instead to do the job for even less than they paid you. All workers lose, while massive companies walk away making a buck no matter what.
Now, as we stare down the barrel of a bill that will usher in the largest transfer of wealth to the ultra rich, working families face a choice: Do we come together to build unified labor power or do we let greedy billionaires and politicians divide us?
The path forward is clear. It’s time for workers to band together. We must break the cycle that has long used immigrants like my dad as a cudgel to keep us divided and see that by joining forces, we can unite our demands and grow our power. From demanding no ICE on construction sites to demanding safer working conditions for all employees, it has always been working people who hold the power, not them.
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3 Simple Things a Republican Congress Could Do to Help Workers (But Probably Won’t)
If Republicans in Congress were willing to listen to the voices of their constituents, they could act immediately to help millions of workers in tangible ways.
Sep 01, 2025
When US President Donald Trump prevailed on election night, headlines touted the emergence of the GOP as the party of the working class. Just as Trump has been quick to market himself as putting “America workers first,” a small but increasing number of Republicans in Congress have also taken up the cause, championing their pro-worker credentials and even expressing tentative support for initiatives to promote unions and workers’ rights—conversations that would have been unheard of a decade ago.
This shift in messaging is hardly surprising—recent polling shows increasing support for unions and pro-worker initiatives across the political spectrum, even in polling sponsored by Republican-leaning organizations. But while President Trump has publicly touted his support for proposals like “no tax on tips” (a misleading talking point for a proposal that may hurt more workers than it helps), the White House has simultaneously launched an all-out assault on workers’ rights—effectively shuttering the National Labor Relations Board, stripping collective bargaining rights from 1 million federal workers, and proposing to scale back minimum wage, overtime, and health and safety protections for millions of workers.
It’s clear that President Trump has no real interest in helping working people. But it’s equally noteworthy that “pro-worker” congressional Republicans are doing very little to counter these attacks, and have no real agenda of their own to help workers succeed.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Workers have told elected officials—again and again—what government can do to help them. When working people are given the opportunity to vote directly on pro-worker policies through state and local ballot initiatives, strong majorities of voters—across party lines—support these policies. If Republicans in Congress were willing to listen to the voices of their constituents, they could act immediately to help millions of workers in tangible ways.
(1) A $15 minimum wage by 2026. Even someone who is working full time, year-round at the current minimum wage of $7.25 will live in poverty. While Democrats have introduced the leading proposal to raise the minimum wage to $17 per hour, Missouri Republican Sen. Josh Hawley has introduced a different bill that would raise the wage to $15 by 2026—still a huge improvement that would benefit nearly 40 million American workers.
Raising the minimum wage is immensely popular, with 34 states having already increased their minimum wages above the federal level. Ten states already have minimum wages of $15 or more, and by the end of 2026 Florida and Nebraska will join this group—through ballot initiatives that passed with overwhelming public support. If the Republican senators and representatives from Florida and Nebraska would follow their constituents’ lead and join Sen. Hawley to support a raise, there would be a majority vote to pass a $15 minimum wage in both houses of Congress.
(2) Paid sick days. As of March 2023, nearly 28 million US workers did not have a guarantee of even a single day of paid sick leave. The Healthy Families Act (HFA) would let private sector workers earn up to seven paid sick days per year, benefiting 34 million workers and ensuring that they do not have to make impossible choices between their jobs and caring for themselves or a sick family member.
In the absence of federal protections, many states have taken the initiative to help workers. As of December 2024, 18 states have enacted laws that require private employers to provide paid sick leave. The three most recent state laws passed last November in Nebraska, Alaska, and Missouri by wide voter margins (though the Missouri initiative was subsequently repealed by the legislature and the governor). Even excluding the Missouri delegation, a total of 48 GOP representatives and four senators come from states that have already passed a paid sick days guarantee similar to the HFA—thus, paid sick days should easily have enough votes to win majority support in both houses of Congress.
(3) Restoring the Federal Right to Organize. As of July, 2025 almost 3 million people were employed by the federal government. Federal workers comprise a significant portion of the workforce in many states across the country. These public servants have faced mass firings and unprecedented attacks in the new Trump administration, including an executive order purporting to strip nearly 1 million federal workers of their right to form and join a union.
Whether in federal, state, or local government, both public servants and the people they serve benefit from collective bargaining. The process is a valuable tool to resolve conflicts early, reduce litigation, improve morale, and help attract and retain a qualified workforce, all of which helps the government function better. Thirty-four states and the District of Columbia recognize this and provide some collective bargaining rights for their public sector workers. When politicians attempt to revoke these rights, voters can use ballot initiatives to protect them—as in 2011 when Ohio voters overwhelmingly rejected an effort to strip rights from their public servants.
The Protect America’s Workforce Act (PAWA), recently introduced in the House of Representatives, would reverse the Trump executive order and protect federal workers’ right to form and join a union. This popular legislation has 222 cosponsors, including seven Republicans. Two Senate Republicans—Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska—have already voted for an unsuccessful amendment on the Budget resolution to protect collective bargaining rights for federal workers. If the two GOP senators from Ohio would follow their constituents’ lead in supporting public sector collective bargaining rights, PAWA could pass both houses of Congress and restore these important protections to more than 1 million American workers.
More than seven months into this Congress’ work, the fact that none of these commonsense proposals are even under discussion by our nation’s elected leaders sends a strong message about this Congress’ priorities. And it is manifestly clear that Republicans in Congress stand with President Trump, and not with working Americans.
These three simple proposals are overwhelmingly popular with people across the political spectrum and would collectively benefit millions of American workers. A Republican-controlled Congress that was willing to work across party lines could move these proposals to the president’s desk in a matter of days. (While the filibuster might prove a stumbling block in the Senate, there are opportunities every Congress to consider legislation under rules that provide a simple majority vote if proponents are properly motivated.) It’s time for congressional leaders to step up this Labor Day and put helping working families front and center on their agendas.
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