In his State of the Union address this year, President Trump declared that “our agenda is relentlessly pro-worker.” Despite this populist posturing, any sober assessment of Trump’s first term will show that it has been an all-out assault on labor. Trump has ruthlessly attacked federal workers, granted more tax cuts for the rich, and severely weakened …
Two reports out this week show how badly the Trump administration is failing workers during the coronavirus pandemic. The AFL-CIO’s annual Death on the Job report looks at 9,051 complaints workers have sent the Occupational Safety and Health Administration expressing concern about safety on the job during the pandemic. OSHA has investigated just 198 of them, and 85 of …
OSHA is doing virtually nothing to protect workers in the pandemic Read More »
Washington, DC—Brand-new analysis by Deborah Berkowitz and Shayla Thompson of the National Employment Law Project (NELP) shows that the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has failed to protect COVID safety whistleblowers who filed retaliation complaints. NELP analyzed OSHA’s public data showing 1,744 COVID-19-related retaliation complaints filed by workers from April through August 9, and found: …
Report: OSHA Investigated, Resolved Only 2% of COVID Retaliation Complaints Read More »
Throughout National Hispanic Heritage Month, the AFL-CIO will be profiling labor leaders and activists to spotlight the diverse contributions Hispanics and Latinos have made to our movement. Today’s profile features Henry L. “Hank” Lacayo. A longtime staple of labor, political and academic circles in California, Henry L. “Hank” Lacayo was a force from his beginnings …
National Hispanic Heritage Month Profiles: Henry L. ‘Hank’ Lacayo Read More »
Labor leaders are eyeing a Joe Biden victory in November as the start of a union revival, one with the potential to undo decades of policies that have diminished union influence, undermined the right to organize and exacerbated income inequality. And they’re planning on playing a central role. “It’s clear to me it’s going to …
Unions predict a Great Awakening during a Biden presidency Read More »
While U.S. union density hit an all-time low in 2019, the nonprofit sector appears to be one area where workers are unionizing. The Nonprofit Professional Employees Union (NPEU) brought seven new workplaces into their union during a 16-day period in April, including the environmental organization Friends of the Earth. And while there is no official data on …
How Unions Can Bridge the Gap Between Climate and Labor Movements Read More »
This article is part of a series on Amazon workers produced in partnership with the Economic Hardship Reporting Project. Courtenay Brown spends her day making grocery runs for others in a football-field-sized maze of narrow aisles and refrigerated enclaves. At the Amazon Fresh unit in a Newark, New Jersey fulfillment center, she works on the outbound ship dock, helping …
This Amazon Grocery Runner Has Risked Her Job to Fight for Better Safety Measures Read More »
Here is the most fundamental quandary of unions in America: Polls show that 65% of Americans approve of unions, and half of workers say they would join a union. But only about 10% of workers are actually union members. In the yawning gap between those numbers lies the entire story of the American labor movement’s decline. The systematic decades-long assault on labor power …
A Bunch of Union Organizers Explain What’s Wrong with Unions Read More »
For Sean Carlisle (a pseudonym) a 32-year-old graduate student and native of California’s Inland Empire, the last three years at his local Amazon fulfillment center have been an education. As a student of urban planning, he studies how built environments shape a community’s behavior. As a picker, he packs items at a breakneck pace amid stacks of inventory and snaking …
A new study from the Midwest Economic Policy Institute (MEPI) released exclusively to Wisconsin Public Radio finds the repeal of Wisconsin’s prevailing wage laws has resulted in lower wages for construction workers in Wisconsin, despite having no statistically significant impact on the cost of public construction projects. Prevailing wage laws set minimum pay requirements for wages …
Madeline Messa is a 3L at Syracuse University College of Law. She graduated from Penn State with a degree in journalism. With her legal research and writing for Workplace Fairness, she strives to equip people with the information they need to be their own best advocate.
