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Worker Rights and Jobs

War Against Workers In United States Intensifies

August 26, 2025 Steve Gillis, Workers' World. , , ,
It has been a month-long whirlwind of fascistic maneuvers by President Donald Trump’s administration. First came the firing of Erika McEntarfer as director of the Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) on Aug. 1. Trump then immediately nominated Project 2025’s Heritage Foundation chief economist E.J. Antoni as her replacement. Next came the staging of hundreds of National Guard troops in the streets of Washington, D.C. All of this intensifies the war against workers and oppressed peoples coast to coast. McEntarger’s firing immediately followed the BLS’s monthly “jobs report,” which claimed that from May through July 2025, only 73,000 jobs had been created in the world’s largest capitalist economy.

Defying Back To Work Order, Flight Attendants Score Tentative Agreement

August 26, 2025 Jenny Brown, Labor Notes. , , , , ,
Flight attendants with Air Canada and subsidiary Air Canada Rouge walked out early August 17. As expected, the Liberal government ordered them back to work 12 hours later, declaring their strike unlawful. In a bold move with wide implications, the 10,000 striking flight attendants defied the order. They’d voted 99.7 percent to strike earlier this month. Their union, an affiliate of the Canadian Union of Public Employees, said the back-to-work order violated their right to strike, and CUPE president Mark Hancock ripped it up. “Members are reminded that it is not a criminal offence to remain on the picket line,” the union wrote in a bargaining update. “While union leaders may be subject to arrest, union members are not at risk of arrest for participating in the strike.

Court Ruling Clears The Way For Hundreds Of CDC Staff To Be Laid Off

August 25, 2025 Elizabeth Weill-Greenberg, Truthout. , , , ,
Hundreds of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) employees are losing their jobs after a federal judge ruled on August 12 that the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) was barred from terminating employees at only six CDC divisions. The court’s prior ruling had protected all CDC staff. The litigation stems from HHS Director Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s efforts to terminate thousands of HHS employees. In March, Kennedy announced that 10,000 of the department’s workers would be laid off, including 2,400 staff from the CDC. Kennedy, who has long peddled health disinformation to the public, has made numerous false claims about vaccines, COVID-19, chronic diseases, and autism.

The Fifth Circuit Ruled That The NLRB Is Unconstitutional

August 25, 2025 Matt Bruenig, Portside. , , , ,
For the last year or so, federal district court judges in the Fifth Circuit have been enjoining the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) from processing unfair labor practice charges against employers in Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi. I’ve written a couple of pieces about this including this one in September of last year. Three of these district court cases were consolidated into an appeal that recently went before the Fifth Circuit. Unsurprisingly, the Fifth Circuit, which is dominated by conservatives, endorsed this particular legal theory and upheld the district court decisions enjoining the NLRB from processing unfair labor practice charges against the involved employers. At this point, the practical significance of this ruling is essentially zero.

Liberatory Unionism In The US Art Museum Labor Movement

August 22, 2025 Amanda Tobin Ripley, Power At Work. , , , ,
Art museum workers in the U.S. are in the midst of the most exciting period of labor organizing in decades. Since the launch of the New Museum Union in January 2019, there has been a 223% increase in new organizing at private, not-for-profit art museums alone. Though precarious working conditions long predate the COVID-19 pandemic, there was a boom in organizing in its wake after institutional responses exposed and exacerbated worker exploitation, unsafe working conditions, and layoffs and furloughs, predominantly affecting front-of-house workers.  Museum workers are also enacting liberatory unionism, a term I borrow from labor journalist Eve Livingston. In liberatory unionism, workers are not simply organizing for higher pay and better working conditions, but are also connecting labor struggles with resistance to racism and gender oppression.

Air Canada And The Erosion Of Collective Bargaining

August 17, 2025 Eric Wilkinson, Canadian Dimension. , , , ,
On August 16, 10,000 Air Canada flight attendants walked off the job. Three days earlier, their union, the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE), had issued a 72-hour strike notice. In response, the airline served its own lockout notice, warning that it would cancel flights worldwide. The showdown came after months of stalled negotiations following the expiry of the attendants’ decade-old collective agreement in March. The strike did not last even a single day before the Carney government referred the parties to binding arbitration. A central issue in the negotiations is the flight attendants’ “ground pay.” Under the current system, they are only paid for time in the air, leaving the hours spent working before and after takeoff uncompensated.

Everyone Hates Airlines, Especially The Workers Set To Strike

August 11, 2025 Adam D. K. King, Portside. , , , ,
More than ten thousand Air Canada flight attendants could soon be on strike if a deal isn’t reached by August 16. In one of the strongest strike mandate votes in recent Canadian history, 99.7 percent of members in the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) airline division opted to authorize a strike, with a turnout of 94.6 percent. With this overwhelming strike authorization in hand, the union is now headed back to the bargaining table to make one last push for a deal before picket lines go up. Flight attendants at Air Canada and its “leisure airline,” Air Canada Rouge, are fighting for an end to unpaid work and poverty wages at the country’s largest airline.

‘The US Mail Is Not For Sale’: Threat To USPS Is Real Postal Workers Warn

August 1, 2025 Joe Maniscalco, Work-Bites. , , , ,
Despite putting out an “Equity Research” paper earlier this year highlighting “The Required First Steps” to privatizing the U.S. Postal Service—Multinational financial services giant Wells Fargo told Work-Bites this week it isn’t actually advocating selling off the U.S. Mail. Postal worker unions and their allies, however, dismiss that as nothing but corporate “double-speak” and insist the threat is very real and immediate. Dimondstein told protesters, which also included members of the Communication Workers of America [CWA] embroiled in their own protracted contract fight with Wells Fargo, as well as customers and small business owners opposed to privatization from as far away as Iowa, that they were sending a message to the entire country—the “US Mail is not for sale.”

Teacher Strike Threat And Community Support Stop Bad Proposal

July 31, 2025 Barbara Madeloni, Labor Notes. , , , , ,
As educators fend off attacks at the federal and state level, they’re also seeing some local wins. From striking for more recess to demanding more nurses and support personnel, teachers across the country have successfully organized for policies that improve children’s school day. In May, members of the Coquille Educators Association in Oregon challenged the district on a critical decision and won. And they did it in a way that built unity between the union and their small community. It started when the district superintendent announced a new schedule. As in most elementary schools, fifth-grade classes in the district had operated on a whole-class model: students stayed with one teacher all day except for special classes like art or gym.

Independent Union Loses Bid To Represent Second Mexico GM Plant

July 29, 2025 Natascha Elena Uhlmann, Labor Notes. , , , ,
The independent National Auto Workers Union (SINTTIA) lost its bid to represent General Motors workers at the company’s San Luis Potosí SUV plant. Workers there voted to join another union, Carlos Leone, with ties to the Confederation of Mexican Workers (CTM), which is notorious for its employer-friendly contracts. SINTTIA, which has represented workers at another Mexican GM pickup truck plant since 2022, received 1,115 votes, while the Carlos Leone union pulled in 1,888. Only half of the plant’s 6,500 workers voted. SINTTIA alleges that the Carlos Leone union received support from GM management.

CTU Hosts ‘Billionaire Bake Sale’ At School Board Meeting

July 29, 2025 Kobi Guillory, Fight Back! News. , , , , ,
Chicago, IL – A crowd of Chicago Teachers Union members attended the school board meeting, July 24, carrying giant cardboard cupcakes with price tags representing the net worth of Illinois billionaires. Their demands are for Governor JB Pritzker to call a special legislative session and secure more funding for public education and other services, and for higher taxes on the rich to counteract the effects of Trump's “Big, Beautiful Bill.” “The top 5% of top earners in Illinois got $7.7 billion in tax cuts from the Big Horrible Bill,” Jackson Potter, the CTU vice president, explaining that these tax cuts are happening while public education, healthcare and transportation each face hundreds of millions of dollars in budget cuts.

Facing Rising Caseloads And Stagnant Pay, NYC Legal Workers Strike

July 27, 2025 Schuyler Mitchell, Truthout. , , , ,
In a historic coordinated campaign, hundreds of nonprofit legal services workers in New York City are currently on strike, demanding both better employment conditions and better legal representation for their clients navigating everything from the criminal legal system to housing and immigration courts. Eleven chapters of the Association of Legal Advocates and Attorneys (ALAA), representing almost 2,000 workers, voted in 2023 to commit to sectoral bargaining — a strategy in which unions across multiple workplaces bargain collectively to raise standards for an entire industry. To maximize union leverage, the shops aligned their contracts to expire at the same time this year on June 30.

Department Of Labor Proposes Rollback Of Workplace Safety And Wage Protection Regulations

July 24, 2025 Natalia Marques, People's Dispatch. , , , , ,
This month, the US Department of Labor, led by Trump-appointed Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer, announced a proposal to repeal 63 workplace safety rules in what the Department called “aggressive deregulatory efforts” in order to “put the American worker first.” The regulations that the DOL has dubbed “obsolete” include eliminating minimum wage and overtime protections for millions of home health care workers, rolling back protections for farm workers, rescinding a requirement for employers to provide adequate lighting at construction sites, weaken safety standards in the mining industry, and limit the authority of OSHA to protect workers in what the DOL dubs “inherently risky professional activities” such as entertainment or journalism.

Underpaid, Overworked Medical Residents Want A Union

July 23, 2025 Derek Seidman, Truthout. , , ,
Amid rising labor militancy over the past few years, one group of workers has gone under the radar: medical residents. Also known as resident physicians or housestaff, medical residents are doctors who have finished medical school and are working in hospitals as apprentices on the path to getting independently licensed. They are the patient-facing backbone of hospital operations, working extremely long hours under stressful conditions for mediocre pay. Over the past few years, from California to New England, medical residents have been unionizing and striking by the thousands.

In Uncertain Times For Entertainment, IATSE Reformers See A Way Forward

July 23, 2025 Greg Loebell, Labor Notes. , , , ,
The International Alliance of Theatrical and Stage Employees (IATSE) will hold its Quadrennial Convention in Hawaii starting July 28. The 2025 “Quad” convention would be business as usual, if not for an upstart group of IATSE members in a reform caucus called CREW that believes they can fix some of their union’s worst flaws. The union covers 170,000 entertainment workers in the U.S. and Canada. “When I first started working in the film industry in the summer of 2021, I began to notice that many IATSE members had little faith that our union leadership could change anything in regards to bettering work conditions like eliminating ‘fraturdays” [work days that start Friday night and end Saturday morning],” said Juniper Jensen, a Local 700 Assistant Editor.
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