AFL-CIO on SCOTUS Voting Rights Ruling: An Attack on Freedom of Working People

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In a sharply worded statement, AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler has blasted the May 9 decision of the US Supreme Court on the Voting Rights Act as “an outright attack on the fundamental freedoms of working people.”

The Court decision, nullifying Section 2 of the law, has opened the door to widespread gerrymandering of congressional and state legislative districts, reducing the fair representation of Black and Latino voters and increasing the number of anti-labor right-wing Republicans in legislative bodies. The 1965 law, signed by President Lyndon Johnson, was passed after years of struggle by the Civil Rights Movement, with the support of organized labor, to outlaw the practice of voter suppression in states of the Jim Crow South. It has been instrumental in significantly increasing the number of Black, Latino, and working class officeholders in the southern states.

By gutting Section 2 of the law, the Court has erased the means of enforcing it, since it is virtually impossible to get a politician to admit that the gerrymandering is being done to deliberately reduce Black and Latino representation.

“When politicians – backed by the Supreme Court – are able to undermine our voices, they can dismantle everything we’ve worked for and further consolidate power for the corporations, billionaires and special interests at our expense,” Shuler declared. “The National AFL-CIO refuses to accept that future. We will keep fighting for legislative reforms, including on the State and Federal levels, to create a democracy where every worker’s voice matters just as much as the wealthy and well-connected. We will mobilize on jobsites, at doors and in the streets from now until November to elect candidates who will stand up for working people and against these attacks on our freedoms.”

Labor Press, 5/12

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Hands Across the Sea

Nike, the shoe and sneaker giant has been giving workers on two continents the boot. And workers in Asia and Oregon are now kicking back.

During the pandemic a few years ago, the sportswear company decided to reduce or cancel orders and lay· off thousands of workers – mostly women – across its supply chains in  India, Pakistan, Indonesia, Cambodia, and Sri Lanka. It ignored warnings from labor rights organizations that the move, accompanied by wage theft, left the workers, who had barely been making a living, now unable to afford food or rent. The company also ignored requests to discuss some compensation for the workers who went without pay for several months.

Now, five or six years later, the women are still feeling the fallout of the companies’ actions. Meanwhile, Nike engaged in stock buyback schemes that inflated its stock price and netted its executives juicy bonuses. Swasthika Arulingam, president of the Commercial and Industrial Workers Union in Sri Lanka, pointed out that Phil Knight, Nike founder and CEO, saw his “fortune increase by $28 billion while workers struggled to survive.”

At the same time, across the sea in the state of Oregon the same company is giving the boot to public school workers. The Portland Association of Teachers says that after Oregonians voted for a wealth tax in 2012, Nike “bullied” the Oregon legislature into calling a special session that granted the company a $2 billion tax holiday over 30 years. Losing out on $66 million a year, it said, has sparked a “funding crisis” in the public school system, undermining education statewide while dividends paid to Knight’s family, an estimated $460 million a year, could fill the budget gap nine times over.

“Our schools have been struggling for years to get adequate funding,” said one teacher. “There is no shortage of money in Oregon to adequately fund our schools. We can easily and fairly raise the revenue needed by raising taxes on the ultra-rich like Phil Knight and the corporations that are hoarding it, like Nike.”

Now the Portland Association of Teachers and the Asian Floor Workers Alliance have launched a joint campaign to get Nike to agree to a binding pact that funds Oregon’s schools and pays a living wage to its workers in Asia.

Stay tuned.

Labor Start, 5/2

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CALIFORNIA HEALTH CARE WORKERS PLAN 2-DAY UC STRIKE

In what would be the biggest strike in the history of the University of California, some 80,000 nurses and other health care professionals are planning a two-day strike for Nov. 17-18 over the failure of talks on a new contract. In addition to AFSCME Local 3299 representing health care and custodial workers and CWA Local 9119 representing health care and technical workers, the California Nurses Association will join with their fellow unions in a sympathy strike. The current contract expired Oct. 31.

Negotiations have been going on for nearly two years between UC medical facilities and Local 3299, and for 16 months with Local 9119. The strike will affect medical facilities at UC Berkeley, UCLA, UC Davis, and UC Santa Cruz among others in California.

The unions are protesting what they say is the refusal of the university to agree to a contract that meets the needs of the state’s affordability crisis and the need to fill the growing number of staff vacancies.

On Labor, 11/9

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INHUMAN CONDITIONS, ICE RAIDS PLAGUE GEORGIA HYUNDAI PLANT

Immigrants forcibly arrested during an ICE raid, Payday Report

The joint venture Hyundai and LG Energy plant, currently under construction in Georgia and employing Korean immigrant workers, had a notoriously bad safety record. Two workers, including one Korean, were killed in preventable accidents a few months ago.

The company and its subcontractors get away with these conditions because immigrant workers are in a fragile position, particularly these days when they are the target of President Trump’s ICE raids. Plants like these are often located in open-shop right-to-work states hostile to unions that could protect them from unsafe conditions.

A week ago, ICE agents raided the place. But they didn’t do it to enforce the labor safety laws or to protect the people working there. They did it to arrest some 300 Korean workers for deportation, part of the reign of terror these nation-wide raids are instilling on immigrant communities.

Many of  the immigrants rounded up around the country have been here and have lived clean lives for many years. Many have American spouses and American children. They are seeing their families ripped apart as they are arbitrarily arrested with little or no due process and shipped off to countries that are strange to them.

The Korean workers at the Hyundai plant were here legally. They were working in the United States on ESTA visas. ETSA allows foreign workers who are performing instruction or teaching workshops to work in the United States.

Under the terms of ESTA, foreign workers are not allowed to perform manual labor. However, most of the 300 Korean workers arrested at the plant were performing dangerous, hard manual labor.

On March 24th, Sunbok You, a 67-year-old construction worker, was killed when a forklift dragged him and his body was severed in half. On May 21st, 27-year-old Allen Kowalski, an employee of a subcontractor, was killed when a load fell off a forklift.

During previous Democratic administrations, workplace safety officials in federal courts routinely argued that “human trafficking” existed when an immigrant worker’s legal status was tied to an employer that was asking them to violate labor laws. Due to workers’ dependence on their employer for their immigration status and in violation of labor laws, workplace safety advocates have argued that such practices constitute “human trafficking.”  The company argues that it is not responsible since it does not directly employ the workers. They are employed by subcontractors but many see this as a way of simply getting around the labor laws.

Hyundai has also faced scrutiny for its use of child labor. In 2022, Reuters reported that four separate Hyundai supplier plants in Alabama were using underage immigrant children to do dangerous factory work.  In 2024, the Department of Labor sued Hyundai and one of its subcontracted staffing agencies after a 13-year-old girl was found to be working 50-60 hours a week at the plant instead of attending middle school.

The Georgia AFL-CIO has condemned both the terrible working conditions at the plant and the ICE raids. “When multiple workers have died during the construction of this very plant, the only federal action that could possibly be justified is to strengthen enforcement of occupational safety and health protections and other labor rights—a far cry from ICE raids,” said Georgia AFL-CIO President Yvonne Brooks.  “Hundreds of people abducted in the raids are now at the Folkston ICE Processing Center (FIPC) located in Charlton County. FIPC has a well-documented history of inhumane conditions and violations found by federal inspectors.”

Payday Report, 9/7

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TRUMP SAYS HE’S A FRIEND OF WORKING PEOPLE – HA! HA! WHAT A JOKE

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has moved to strip thousands of federal health agency employees of their collective bargaining rights, according to a union that called the effort illegal.

HHS officials confirmed Aug 23 that the department is ending its recognition of unions for a number of employees, and is reclaiming office space and equipment that had been used for union activities.
It’s the latest move by the Trump administration to put an end to collective bargaining with unions that represent federal employees.

Previously affected agencies include the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Environmental Protection Agency.
In May, an appeals court said the administration could move forward with President Donald Trump’s executive order aimed at ending collective bargaining rights for hundreds of thousands of federal employees while a lawsuit plays out.

Denver Pust wire services, 8/23

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COURT ALLOWS TRUMP TO END UNION BARGAINING FOR FEDERAL WORKERS

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A federal appeals court Aug. 1 lifted a judge’s order blocking President Trump from stripping hundreds of thousands of federal workers of the ability to engage in union bargaining with U.S. agencies.

A three-judge panel of the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals put on hold pending a further appeal an injunction issued by a lower court judge that had been obtained by six unions including the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE).

Trump’s order exempted more than a dozen federal agencies from obligations to bargain with unions. They include the Departments of Justice, State, Defense, Treasury, and Health and Human Services.

U.S. District Judge James Donato in San Francisco in June had issued the injunction blocking 21 agencies from implementing Trump’s March executive order exempting many federal agencies from obligations to bargain with unions.

Donato concluded Trump’s order retaliated against unions deemed critical of the president and that had sued over his efforts to overhaul the government, including the mass firings of agency employees, violating their right to free speech under the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment.

But the 9th Circuit panel said Trump’s order on its face “does not express any retaliatory animus,” and it agreed with the Trump administration that the president “would have taken the same action even in the absence of the protected conduct.”

Eliminating collective bargaining would allow agencies to alter working conditions and fire or discipline workers more easily, and it could prevent unions from challenging Trump administration initiatives in court.

Labor Start, 8/1

 

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BOEING JET WORKERS STRIKE 

In the St. Louis area, 3,200 Boeing fighter jet workers, members of the International Association of Machinists (IAM), are out on strike after voting down a union contract that would have included a 20% raise over 4 years.

Last fall, Boeing ended a 53-day strike in Washington State by offering workers a 38% wage increase over a 5-year period, but St . Louis area union members said they want to hold out for more.

“IAM District 837 members build the aircraft and defense systems that keep our country safe,” said IAM Midwest Territory General Vice President Sam Cicinelli. “They deserve nothing less than a contract that keeps their families secure and recognizes their unmatched expertise.”

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MEDICAL RESIDENTS NOW A NEW FRONT IN UNION ORGANIZING

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Resident physicians at LA General in Los Angeles, California, rally outside the hospital on April 3, 2025, for a fair contract. DEANDRE JACKSON

Resident physicians are doctors who have graduated from medical school and are now on hospital staffs. They are akin to apprentices before becoming fully licensed. In many hospitals and emergency rooms they are the ones who deal with patients on a daily basis.

They work very long hours under often stressful conditions. Their pay is low, considering their training and the importance of their work. That is why they have become a new front in labor organizing.

Across the country in the last few years medical residents have been unionizing and striking by the thousands. They comprise some of the largest new units to unionize in the United States. Some 40,000 of them are now members of Committee of Interns and Residents, a part of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU).

“Medical residents are monumental to the care that patients receive,” declared Dr. Armin Tadayyon, a resident physician at the University of Buffalo’s affiliated hospitals who helped lead a strike last year of residents affiliated with another organization, the Union of American Physicians and Dentists, that resulted in their first contract. In an interview with Truthout, an online publication, Dr Tadayyon explained, “Our labor holds the hospital afloat. Most of the direct patient contact is with residents. If residents don’t show up to work, the hospitals are in crisis mode.”

Another resident interviewed, Dr. Mahina Iyengar of the Los Angeles General Medical Center, elaborated:

“In many hospitals you visit, the residents will be the people taking care of you. They’re the backbone of whatever hospital they’re working at.

“We pretty much do everything, depending on the specialty. We’re usually in the hospital before 6:00 am. We do multiple rounds a day with patients. We order medications, call families for information, consent patients for surgeries, perform surgery under supervision, talk to nurses, explain treatment plans, and much more. Almost all this day-to-day work is done by interns, residents, and fellows.

“ Resident physicians have been overworked and underpaid for decades,” said Dr. Iyergar, “as we’ve seen the consolidation and corporatization of health care. We’ve been taught over generations to just push through and ignore our working conditions.”

What prompted the change in residents’ attitude was the Covid pandemic where they were working 14 and 16-hour days and 80-hour weeks. Their collective realization of their exploitation by hospitals who were completely dependent on their labor led to their desire to organize.

 Unionization has helped residents advocate for better patient care and get funds for equipment and supplies that patients need. Patients are ill-served by attending physicians who are exhausted after putting in 16-hour shifts.

Now hospitals find that a new generation of residents are union-minded and wish to be part of the labor movement.

Labor Start, 7/21

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GARBAGE WORKERS STRIKE SPREADS TO ATLANTA & SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA 

On July 9, Payday Report described a strike of garbage workers employed by the private contractor, Republic Services,that had spread to Illinois, Georgia, Washington State, and Massachusetts. 

Now, the strike has spread to Atlanta as well as to Southern California in Orange County and the suburbs of San Diego.

“Republic abuses and underpays workers across the country,” Sean M. O’Brien, Teamsters president, said in a statement Wednesday. “We will flood the streets and shut down garbage collection in state after state. Workers are uniting nationwide, and we will get the wages and benefits we’ve earned, come hell or high water.”

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UNIONS FEAR DEMISE OF NIOSH

 Multiple labor unions and states are challenging the Trump administration’s efforts to dismantle the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health.

NIOSH is an agency within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services that funds and develops research to support workplace safety regulations, including studies aimed to reduce cancer risk in firefighters and treat respiratory diseases in miners. NIOSH also evaluates the safety of worksite protective gear and investigates workplace disease outbreaks and health hazards.

In March 2025, HHS announced a “dramatic restructuring” of the NIOSH workforce, and over the course of the next few months, laid off approximately 90% of its workforce. Absent the support of NIOSH research and expertise, worker advocates fear that OSHA’s workplace safety enforcement will deteriorate. Already, the loss of NIOSH research leaves OSHA’s proposed heat stress regulations vulnerable to attack.

On Labor, 7/13

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