BALTIMORE—The U.S. labor movement finds itself “between two worlds,” AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler says. The current one features “violence, racism, tension and war all over the world…a world of privilege.” The future one, which has yet to be born, features justice and equality, she declared.
Shuler delivered that comparison on January 16 to the labor federation’s 26th annual Martin Luther King Jr. Civil Rights conference, this year in downtown Baltimore. Her speech featured a long recital of the oppression labor and its allies faced in the first year of GOP President Donald Trump’s second administration, though she never mentioned the president by name.
“When we see tanks on our streets. Is that justice?” she asked. “No,” roared the crowd. “Hell, no,” Shuler said. “When they drive hundreds of thousands of Black women out of the workforce through mass firings of federal workers, is that justice?” “No,” attendees chanted. “Hell, no,” Shuler repeated.
“And when we have masked agents disappearing our siblings and our neighbors, is that justice?” she demanded, referring to Trump’s ICE agents wounding and killing peaceful demonstrators and protesters against the president’s mass migrant roundups—notably Minnesota poet and activist Renee Good. “No!” “Hell, no!
“None of us reaches our potential” in such circumstances, Shuler said. We could do so if the Republican regime didn’t deprive the entire country of clean air and water, safe food, and other services which government workers—”our brothers and sisters” provide.
Trump, of course, has done mass firings of federal workers in the first full year of his second term, aided by his Office of Management and Budget chief, Russell Vought, and multibillionaire Elon Musk.
More firings may be on the way, though Shuler didn’t say so. The temporary money bill to keep the government going expires January 30, and so does its ban on Vought’s depredations.
The workers’ response, and a potential better world, will come at the polls this fall if labor and allies have their way and Trump’s plans to sabotage the elections fail. Labor activists hope they can retake both the House and the Senate from ruling Republicans. The margin for worker-hating House Republicans has virtually disappeared, due to the unexpected death of a GOP lawmaker from California and expected wins in vacant pro-Democratic districts.
“We’ll wake up on November 4…and take the future back from an authoritarian,” Shuler declared. The election “is about all of us standing together and working together to build that better future” for workers and the country.
In her speech, however, Shuler carefully did not mention the obstacles workers and their allies face in negating Trump’s clout by retaking control of at least one house of Congress. The Republicans have plenty of money, congressional Democrats suffer from weak leadership, and not all unions sing from the same songbook all the time.
And another, of course, is Trump. Voters must wait until 2028, with—some analysts warn—the threat that Trump and his MAGAites may control enough of the U.S. state-based election machinery to skew the outcome, regardless of what the voters want.
And while Shuler criticized the millionaires and billionaires who have overtaken and corrupted U.S. politics with their tsunami of campaign cash, she—like other AFL leaders for more than a century—did not challenge the system itself, which puts corporate honchos and the 1% atop the rest of us. CIO leaders, before the merger of the two labor federations in 1955, often did.
Meanwhile, unlike prior presidents who respected and worked with the U.S. political system, tyrannical Trump’s favorite method of governing is by extreme dictates through executive orders—edicts which lawmakers rarely overturn. It was one such edict that eliminated all union contracts covering 1.5 million federal workers.
Nevertheless, the labor struggles to remain optimistic. After intense and effective union lobbying, the House, with almost two dozen Republicans defying the anti-worker party line, revolted against its GOP rules and passed the Protect America’s Workforce Act. It’s now before the GOP-run Senate and the federation and its member unions have launched yet another nationwide e-mail and telephone lobbying blitz to get senators to approve it, too.
What workers want, and what the AFL-CIO envisions, Shuler said, “an economy that aids the least of us, that works by us and for us, and where AI gives us a better future with more time off at the same pay.”
“The future is a world where we wake up on November 4 and have taken the future back from an authoritarian president,” Shuler declared. “It’s about all of us standing together to build that better future.”
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