No legislative session in recent memory has been particularly "good" for working families. The first half of the 112th Tennessee General Assembly, however, was in a league of its own. We break down the good, the bad, and the very ugly in our 2021 Legislative Recap.
AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka discusses why America needs a strong labor movement and how the Biden administration is committed to strengthening unions.
The AFL-CIO, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), the Sindicato Nacional Independiente de Trabajadores de Industrias y de Servicios Movimiento 20/32 (SNITIS) and Public Citizen announced Monday that they have filed the first complaint under the Rapid Response Mechanism of the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) against Tridonex, an auto parts factory located in Matamoros in the state of Tamaulipas, Mexico.
Billionaire Elon Musk is slated to host Saturday Night Live this weekend, and AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Liz Shuler (IBEW) is calling his infamous labor practices and anti-union tactics anything but funny. “Musk has used his social-media megaphone to spread misinformation about COVID-19, endanger employees’ health and violate their organizing rights.
The PRO Act is about as important a piece of labor legislation as we’ve seen in some time. It holds the potential to open the door for workers and organizers to step up and reverse 40 years of losses for organized labor. The law, whose initials stand for Protecting the Right to Organize, aims to do just that: protect workers from being harassed or fired if they try to organize a union or if they try to help their already existing union become more active in their workplace. This is seen as the number one legislative priority for organized labor.
In 2019, 5,333 working people were killed on the job and an estimated 95,000 died from occupational diseases, according to the 30th edition of Death on the Job: The Toll of Neglect report released today. That means every day, on average, 275 U.S. workers die from hazardous working conditions. And this was before the devastating COVID-19 pandemic that has been responsible for far too many worker infections and deaths in our country.
The U.S. Senate should pass the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act, five human rights and labor groups said today in releasing a question-and-answer document about the issue. The groups—including Human Rights Watch, the AFL-CIO, Amnesty International USA, the Economic Policy Institute and the National Employment Law Project—called on senators to seize this once-in-a-generation opportunity to tackle rampant economic inequality by empowering workers and building a more just and human rights-based economy.
Few presidents in America’s history have demonstrated a higher commitment to the labor movement than President Biden. “The truth is I’m a union president, and I make no bones about that,” he said on Saturday. “I’m committed to strengthening our unions and rebuilding the backbone of this country—the middle class.” Biden sat down with a UAW local president and talked about his administration’s policies to promote American manufacturing.
Yesterday, ahead of the Leaders Summit on Climate, the AFL-CIO Industrial Union Council and BlueGreen Alliance, along with the UAW and United Steelworkers (USW), released a report highlighting the need to preserve high-paying union jobs in the U.S. auto industry as part of any equitable clean energy transition. The report reviews the economic impacts of the transition to electric vehicles as well as policy options for creating and preserving good union jobs.
