Find resources and guidance from leading experts, government agencies and America’s unions regarding the COVID-19 pandemic, with recommendations to limit its impact on working families.
Kurt Erickson
on Wednesday, July 25 2018 - 10:49am
The union-backed fight against making Missouri a "Right to Work" state has enlisted some star power to get its message out.
Actor John Goodman is featured in a 30-second radio ad saying a law that will be decided by Missouri voters in the Aug. 7 primary election will hurt the middle class.
"The bill will not give you the right to work," Goodman says. "It’s being sold as a way to help Missouri workers, but look a little deeper and you’ll see it’s all about corporate greed."
AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka says the nation’s labor movement has come to a conclusion about President Donald Trump’s latest U.S. Supreme Court nominee: “Workers are united to defeat Kavanaugh,” he declares.
His statement was part of a much longer July 12 speech behind closed doors to Democratic U.S. House candidates. While Trumka did not cite specific cases and rulings, the federation previously compiled a string of anti-worker decisions and statements by federal appellate judge Brett Kavanaugh in his dozen years on the bench.
Joseph Stiglitz, a professor at Columbia University, who was the Nobel laureate in economics in 2001, spoke at a talk on Monday with Damon Silvers, the director of policy and special counsel at the AFL-CIO, part of a day-long strategy session on “Bargaining for the Common Good in the World of Global Finance” held by the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung office in New York, a non-profit political German foundation.
House Democratic candidates in town this week for training at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in Washington got a visit from AFL-CIO President Richard L. Trumka for some tips on how they can win back working-class voters.
“I don’t have to tell you that you can’t count on the D next to your name to gain our support,” Trumka told Democratic leadership and a room full of candidates on Red to Blue, the DCCC’s program for its strongest candidates.
Sarah Jaffe and Michelle Chen
on Monday, July 16 2018 - 2:01pm
In the belly of the political beast in DC, grassroots organizers gathered at AFL-CIO headquarters to discuss collective action under Trump, beyond the beltway. Activists representing teachers, housekeepers, graduate students, and airline workers talked about union power in the wake of the Janus decision and keeping hope alive for the next generation of young labor leaders.
The moment you may have been dreading arrived June 27, when the Supreme Court imposed the open shop on the public sector nationwide with its decision inJanus v. AFSCME District 31.
Nicholas Riccardi
on Friday, June 29 2018 - 1:02pm
Their membership has been declining for decades. They’ve been bedeviled by crippling new laws, and by a devastating U.S. Supreme Court decision just this week. From all appearances, it would seem that labor unions are an endangered species.
But here’s the surprise: Organized labor is showing new signs of life.
In Janus v. AFSCME, the US Supreme Court's conservative 5-4 majority held that public employees cannot be required by state law to pay a fair share of the cost of services that unions must provide members and nonmembers alike.
Janus comes a month after Epic Systems Corp. v. Lewis, where the same majority decided employees can be required by companies to submit all workplace grievances to private arbitration and waive their rights both to go to court and join together in class-action lawsuits.
