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working class
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.
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May Day—Why We’re Rallying in Liberty, New York
Most of us our 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 Custom Enforcement 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.
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How to Stop Tyson Foods from Destroying 3,200 Jobs in a Nebraska Town of 10,000
Dan Osborn, the independent US Senate candidate in Nebraska, needs a plan. And it's a plan that could and should be embraced in states and communities nationwide.
Apr 15, 2026
Here are some things to know about large corporations:
- Corporations in America are free to shut down facilities, whether profitable or unprofitable, with devastating effects on workers, their families, and their communities.
- Corporations are also free to use their cash to repurchase their own stock shares, driving up their price without increasing the company’s value—a pure and simple case of stock manipulation that enriches top corporate executives and Wall Street investors.
- And corporations in the US enjoy the benefits that come from receiving taxpayer-funded government contracts, while retaining the right to destroy the jobs of taxpayers, if they see fit.
Dan Osborn, the Nebraska independent senatorial candidate, knows all this. It’s a good part of the reason he’s running for office, and he needs a plan. He knows this is a travesty, a disaster, a case of the rich and powerful trashing working people. As he puts it, “This isn’t left and right anymore, this is big versus little,” and he wants to do all he can to stop Tyson from killing 3,200 jobs in Lexington, Nebraska.
Osborn has called for the enforcement of the 1921 federal Packers and Stockyards Act, which was designed to promote competitiveness in the livestock, meat, and poultry industries and prohibit deception and fraud. He claims Tyson broke the law by closing its Lexington, Nebraska, plant instead of selling the facility to a competitor. The closure was “destroying 5 percent of America’s beef processing capacity,” Osborn argued, which will drive up prices instead of maintaining a competitive market.
In just the last quarter of 2025, Tyson conducted more than $200 million in stock repurchases which did nothing to improve production and nothing at all to protect the workers.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer joined the fight by demanding that Agricultural Secretary Brooke Rollings use the authority she has under the Act to block the Lexington closure. But, on January 21, 2026, the plant shut down anyway. In fact, no plant closing has ever been stopped by this act.
If the law is not enough to protect these devastated workers and communities, where can Osborn find leverage to help them?
It is really hard to stop a plant closing in the United States of America. Of the millions of mass layoffs over the past three decades, I’m having trouble finding any that have been reversed (although my friends at the Teamsters Union say they have been successful on occasion.) There have been at least a handful of worker buyouts of facilities scheduled for shutdowns that kept them open for a time, but all I know about soon went under.
There is one point of leverage, however, that has yet to be used—federal contracts.
Large corporations love to dine at the federal trough, gobbling up as much taxpayer money as they can through federal grants and contracts. Tyson is no exception. It’s got its hands all over our tax dollars. In 2025, it received 170 federal awards for a total of $234 million. It also received, from 2018 to 2020, $727 million from the Pentagon to supply beef to the military. And those contracts have been renewed through today.
Mass layoffs are a heartless tool that ignores how critical stable employment is to families and communities.
What if Osborn promised that as senator, he would fight for a new federal regulation like this:
All corporations of 500 or more employees that receive taxpayer-funded federal contracts shall not be permitted to conduct compulsory layoffs of taxpayers. All layoffs must be voluntary based on financial incentives.
Wouldn’t that be fair and just? After all, voluntary financial incentives to leave a job are commonplace for executives. And it’s not just severance. The idea is that no one should be forced to leave. The financial incentive would need to be high enough to attract voluntary departures.
Is this proposal too radical for Nebraska?
No doubt, corporations and their political handmaidens would vigorously attack the proposal. Isn’t the key to a free society the right of business owners, large and small, to manage their own enterprises as they see fit? When the government intervenes to control hiring and firing, isn’t it stepping towards socialism, which history has shown is both a failure economically and a path towards totalitarianism? Wouldn’t such a proposal harm jobs, our economy, and democracy?
Osborn’s response could be simple: Corporations would be totally free to hire and fire at will—but not if they are taking taxpayer money. If they want our money, then they can’t force us out against our will. No compulsory layoffs!
We tested this idea and the corporate attacks in our survey of 3,000 Midwestern voters across Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. About half of those voters supported the idea, with very low percentages opposed, even after being introduced to corporate attacks against the policy.
If they want our money, then they can’t force us out against our will. No compulsory layoffs!
Where would the money come from?
That’s where stock buybacks come in. In just the last quarter of 2025, Tyson conducted more than $200 million in stock repurchases which did nothing to improve production and nothing at all to protect the workers. They chose to pad the bonuses of Tyson executives and the portfolios of large Wall Street shareholders. It might have made instead a nice start on a worker buyout fund.
The proposal may sound radical, but nothing about this is pie in the sky. The Siemens Corporation in Germany agreed to a no-compulsory layoff proposal with its union, IG Metall, after it announced the layoff of 3,000 workers. As the result of negotiated settlement with the union, the workers could take voluntary financial buyout packages. But, none of the workers were forced to leave. And instead of the scheduled shutdown of five facilities, the company agreed to put in new products to keep the plants open.
Large corporations like Siemens and Tyson have enormous flexibility. They can rearrange production in countless ways. Unless pressured by the workers through their labor unions, they serve corporate needs first and subordinate those of workers. Mass layoffs are a heartless tool that ignores how critical stable employment is to families and communities. These companies have the financial power to fulfill the needs and interests of their employees, but they choose not to. But for Tyson, and so many companies today, all that matters is shoveling as much money as possible into the pockets of their wealthy executives and Wall Street investors. The workers be damned!
At this point, the Tyson workers and Dan Osborn know that the plant is not going to be reopened. But Osborn’s campaign could commemorate those workers by becoming the first politician in the nation to offer a realistic and potentially popular solution to this recurring nightmare:
No Compulsory Layoffs at Corporations That Receive Taxpayer Money!
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