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What Can The US Labor Movement Do To Build On Its 2024 Victories?


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With the recent election upheaval in the US government, it’s important to remember that the labor movement flourished in 2024. Workers across sectors and interests challenged wage ceilings, sought job safety and security, and looked to unions to represent their collective interests.

The ascendance of Donald J. Trump to the executive office, however, could jeopardize worker gains. The labor movement must play a major role in sustaining worker rights, and all indications are that union organizers are preparing to fight back by compelling working and young people to participate in protests, occupations, and walkouts.

The need for collaborative solutions is pressing — and the stakes are high for the US labor movement.

US Labor Fights over the Last Four Years

Thousands of workers achieved wage gains last year through organizing as a result of state-level ballot campaigns, strikes, and union negotiations.

  • In 2024, large and powerful labor unions like The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and the UAW publicly called for a Israel/Gaza ceasefire, and rank-and-file members of those organizations pushed for even more action, like divesting from Israel bonds.
  • Seventy-three percent of the employees at a Volkswagen factory in Chattanooga, Tennessee, voted to join the United Auto Workers (UAW). The massive victory came after unionization efforts narrowly failed at the plant in 2014 and 2019.
  • The Transport Workers Union (TWU) secured a new four-year contract for Southwest flight attendants, giving them a 22.3% raise by May 2025.
  • Delta Air Lines raised its starting wages to $19 in response to a union-organizing campaign.

Then again, Trump’s first term was a series of constant attacks on workers’ rights — in 2020 the Economic Policy Institute outlined the first Trump administration’s 50 most egregious attacks on working people. Then union petitions doubled during the Biden years, thanks in no small part to the pro-labor bent of the administration’s NLRB. Biden became the first US president to walk a strike picket line when he joined UAW workers in Michigan in 2023, as chronicled by Truthout. Biden refused to intervene during a dockworkers’ strike despite mounting pressure from Republicans and business groups.

Last year, the UAW filed federal labor charges against what it calls “disgraced billionaires Donald Trump and Elon Musk” due to their illegal attempts to threaten and intimidate workers, whether explicitly or implicitly. Workers who self-advocate for better working conditions by engaging in protected concerted activity, such as strikes, cannot be fired under federal law — even threatening to do so is illegal under the National Labor Relations Act.

Now under the Trumpsters, the NLRB seems poised to usher in more attempts to dismantle worker rights — will the right to organize, to protect workplace health and safety rules, and to assure overtime pay prevail?

The shapeshifting of the Trump administration has rocked many labor rights advocates. Public sector unions, for example, have been forecast to be severely weakened and possibly banned under Project 2025.

US Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) has spoken out about the Democratic Party’s need to halt its sycophantic attention to billionaires and corporations and, instead, fight for the interests of “everyday people.” Trump’s alliances with with tech billionaires like Tesla CEO Elon Musk have forged plans to to extend the 2017 tax cuts that primarily benefited the wealthy and deregulation of oil drilling on public lands.

AOC acknowledges that the Democrats are bankrolled by many of the same billionaires and corporations as the Republicans. In an interview with Jon Stewart on his podcast, “The Weekly Show,” she stated that the party must abandon its own allegiances to the billionaire class.

Trump won the support of working class people across the country, increasing his support among voters who earn less than $100,000 per year despite the fact, as Ocasio-Cortez said, “that he has a Supreme Court that guts labor rights, that [Republicans] are overwhelmingly opposed to raising a minimum wage, that they are really gutting the civil rights around working people and organizing.”

Even with the backdrop of Trump’s executive office victory, enthusiasm for unions remains high. A recent Gallup poll found that disapproval for unions is at 23%, the lowest level in almost 60 years. Support for them is at 70% — just one point under their highest rating ever.

A Case Study: Colorado’s Labor Movement

Gathered at a Denver training facility earlier this month, members of several labor unions took a stand. There were the brothers and sisters from the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, the drivers hailing from Amalgamated Transit Union Local 1001, and the craftspeople from the Colorado Building and Construction Trades Council. Others joined them and together they announced Climate Jobs Colorado, a coalition to address the growing climate crisis, its impacts on workers, and worker inequality. A Colorado where clean energy, strong unions, and justice go hand in hand to build a future that benefits everyone, they say.

“About a year and a half ago, labor leaders from across our state started discussing what we can do with the triple aim of advancing climate goals, improving our ability to organize and represent workers across the state in the green economy, and combating economic inequality,” Dennis Dougherty, executive director of the Colorado AFL-CIO, told the group, as reported by the Colorado Sun. “Now is the time to do something about it, and that is why we are here today.”

A 2025 report from Cornell University’s Climate Jobs Institute focuses on Colorado’s two mounting and intertwined crises: the crisis of climate change and the crisis of widening inequality. The authors argue that “these overlapping crises cannot be solved without the leadership of union workers. Addressing the climate crisis will require an incredible transformation of Colorado’s infrastructure, whether it is building utility-scale wind and solar farms, installing geothermal heating systems, performing deep retrofits to reduce home energy use, or constructing passenger rail lines.”

Colorado has already made great strides to move toward net zero emissions, the report says, yet such “climate leadership would not have been possible without the efforts of organized labor to ensure these kinds of climate policies create good jobs and support communities.”

Final Thoughts about the Current State of the US Labor Movement

In the US, we recently remembered the life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who devoted critical work to the labor movement. In fact, as Danielle Atkinson writes in Common Dreams, labor rights were so deeply entrenched in Dr. King’s work that it was the right of the individual worker that brought him to Memphis before he was assassinated. “We deserve an economy that works for all of us,” Atkinson argues, especially working class people, who are critical to keeping our economy afloat. “A resilient economy is a collaborative effort, not a competition,” and, so, uplifting each other means both bracing ourselves “for what will come under a Trump administration” as well as standing together.

Organized labor is currently preparing to fight back. Just a week into 2025, the SEIU announced that it was rejoining the AFL-CIO to help fight Trump’s anti-worker agenda. The two unions have been unaligned for almost 20 years.

A supermajority of workers at battery maker BlueOval SK filed a petition Tuesday with the NLRB for a vote to form their union with the UAW. The election filing at BlueOval SK (BOSK), a new joint venture of Ford and SK On, is the first major filing in the South in 2025 and continues the movement of Southern autoworkers organizing with the UAW.



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