Today's AFL-CIO press clips
POLITICS
Unions Ready for 'Righteous Fight' as Sanders, Dems Reintroduce PRO Act
Common Dreams
By Jessica Corbett
March 5, 2025
Labor leaders also called on members of Congress across the political spectrum to back the bill—which largely lacks GOP support, but is co-sponsored by Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.). "In too many workplaces, in too many industries across the country, big corporations and billionaire CEOs still retaliate against us for organizing," said AFL-CIO president Liz Shuler, who has led the federation since the bill's namesake, Trumka, died in 2021.
Democrats Reintroduce Sweeping Bill To Strengthen Unions
HuffPost
By Igor Bobic and Dave Jamieson
March 5, 2025
Congressional Democrats on Wednesday reintroduced the Protecting the Right to Organize Act, or PRO Act, a sweeping bill aimed at boosting union membership after decades of decline. The legislation, led this year by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Bobby Scott (D-Va.), would amount to the most significant overhaul to labor law in nearly 80 years, making it easier for workers to organize and bargain union contracts and more costly for employers to violate their rights.
Fired workers tell Trump, Musk how their lives have been ruined
People’s World
By Mark Gruenberg
March 5, 2025
“I haven’t even received official notification that I’ve been fired,” a former Labor Department worker told People’s World during a watch party at AFL-CIO headquarters here last night where she joined a crowd observing Donald Trump’s speech to Congress. “I really loved this job and thought it would be a career.
US Supreme Court won't let Trump withhold payment to foreign aid groups
Reuters
By John Kruzel
March, 5, 2025
A divided U.S. Supreme Court declined on Wednesday to let President Donald Trump's administration withhold payment to foreign aid organizations for work they already performed for the government as the Republican president moves to pull the plug on American humanitarian projects around the world.
Social Security expected to fire 7,000 jobs, as federal worker unions protest cuts (Video)
WUSA
By Staff
March 4, 2025
Federal employees have once again received a "What did you do last week?" email. The email said workers can expect these emails weekly.
Federal hiring is nearly frozen. For those who can hire, a new roadblock has emerged (Audio)
NPR
By Staff
March, 5, 2025
Gwen Freiermuht is worried that OPM's stalling tactics might lead to veterans not being diagnosed or treated in a timely manner, and she's not alone. NPR spoke with congressional offices, veterans organizations and VA staff from at least five other states, and they're reporting the same problems.
Trump may have just helped the lawyers going after DOGE
MSNBC
By Allison Detzel
March 5, 2025
President Donald Trump’s shoutout to Elon Musk during his joint address to Congress may end up helping the lawyers challenging the Department of Government Efficiency. During his speech Tuesday night, the president touted DOGE, which has been the subject of more than 20 lawsuits. “I have created the brand-new Department of Government Efficiency, DOGE — perhaps you’ve heard of it,” said Trump, adding: “Which is headed by Elon Musk, who is in the gallery tonight.” The billionaire then stood up as Republican lawmakers gave him a standing ovation.
Trump administration plans to cut 80,000 employees from Veterans Affairs, according to internal memo
AP
By Stephen Groves
March 5, 2025
The Department of Veterans Affairs is planning a reorganization that includes cutting over 80,000 jobs from the sprawling agency that provides health care and other services for millions of veterans, according to an internal memo obtained Wednesday by The Associated Press.
US judge in case over fired NLRB member questions Trump's broad claim of executive power
Reuters
By Daniel Wiessner
March 5, 2025
A federal judge on Wednesday questioned President Donald Trump's power to fire a Democratic member of the National Labor Relations Board and seemed deeply skeptical of the expansive theory of presidential power being put forward by his administration. U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell in Washington, D.C., held a two-hour hearing in a lawsuit by Gwynne Wilcox challenging her unprecedented removal from the board by Trump in January and seeking to be reinstated and finish out her term, which expires in 2028.
Here’s How Trump’s Executive Orders Align With Project 2025—As He Touts Agenda In Speech To Congress
Forbes
By Alison Durkee
March 5, 2025
President Donald Trump touted the “swift and unrelenting” steps he has taken during his first month in office during speech to Congress on Tuesday, as the president’s first weeks in office have featured a slew of executive orders—many of which reflect proposals outlined in the hard-right policy blueprint Project 2025, even as Trump has long tried to distance himself from it.
Unions take their protest of federal layoffs to the US Capitol
WTOP
By Mike Murillo
March 5, 2025
The protest was organized by a coalition of unions, including NTEU, and those who spoke criticized President Donald Trump’s administration’s downsizing of the federal workforce. “There was only one professional employee I know who deserved to be fired, and his name is Elon Musk,” said Everett Kelley, national president of the American Federation of Government Employees. Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., expressed concerns about proposed cuts to the IRS, which could result in a large percentage of the workforce being let go.
Elon Musk says Post Office, Amtrak should be privatized
Reuters
By David Shepardson
March 5, 2025
Billionaire Elon Musk, who is advising President Donald Trump on plans to radically shrink the U.S. government, said on Wednesday that the U.S. Postal Service and passenger railroad Amtrak should be privatized.
Draft of Trump Executive Order Aims to Eliminate Education Department
The Wall Street Journal
By Matt Barnum, Ken Thomas and Tarini Parti
March 5, 2025
President Trump is expected to issue an executive order as soon as Thursday aimed at abolishing the Education Department, according to people briefed on the matter. A draft of the order, viewed by The Wall Street Journal, directs Education Secretary Linda McMahon to “take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Education Department” based on “the maximum extent appropriate and permitted by law.”
National Endowment for Democracy Sues Top Trump Aides Over Funding Freeze
The New York Times
By Edward Wong and Mattathias Schwartz
March 6, 2025
The National Endowment for Democracy, a nonprofit that has had bipartisan support over decades for its work promoting democracy abroad, is suing the U.S. government and cabinet officials for withholding $239 million in congressional appropriations. Members of the group’s board, which includes current and former Republican and Democratic lawmakers, said the organization filed the lawsuit on Wednesday afternoon as a last resort because it had been unable to get the State Department to restart the flow of money.
Trump administration plans 15 percent cut to VA workforce
The Washington Post
By Gaya Gupta
March 5, 2025
“The VA has been severely understaffed for many years, resulting in longer wait times for veterans in need,” Everett Kelley, the president of the American Federation of Government Employees, said in a statement. “The DOGE plunder of career VA employees, adding to the illegal mass firings of thousands of probationary employees, can only make matters worse.”
DOGE is driving Social Security cuts and will make mistakes, acting head says privately
The Washington Post
By Lisa Rein, Jeff Stein and Hannah Natanson
March 6, 2025
The newly installed caretaker at the Social Security Administration acknowledged this week that Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service is calling the shots as the agency races to slash thousands of jobs and shrink its budget, telling a group of advocates, “Things are currently operating in a way I have never seen in government before.”
USDA employees fired en masse by Trump administration reinstated, workers’ board says
CNN
By Katelyn Polantz
March 5, 2025
A workers’ board is reinstating – at least temporarily – almost 6,000 fired probationary workers from the Department of Agriculture, according to a newly issued order obtained by CNN. The order, by the Merit Systems Protection Board, undercuts President Donald Trump’s attempts to downsize the federal civil service and is a major indication that the mass layoffs were unlawful and may eventually be reversed by the board.
Politico
By Josh Gerstein and Kyle Cheney
March 5, 2025
A federal appeals court is allowing President Donald Trump to fire an official who investigates complaints from the federal workforce, lifting a lower court’s injunction that barred Trump from removing Special Counsel Hampton Dellinger. The Justice Department argued that Dellinger’s continued work as a federal ethics watchdog was undermining Trump’s agenda. In particular, Dellinger has spearheaded a recent effort to reinstate thousands of probationary workers who were fired amid Trump’s overhaul of the federal bureaucracy.
GOP must cut Medicaid or Medicare to achieve budget goals, CBO finds
The Washington Post
By Jacob Bogage
March 5, 2025
Republicans in Congress cannot reach their goal of cutting at least $1.5 trillion in spending over the next 10 years for President Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” on taxes and immigration unless they cut Medicaid or Medicare benefits, lawmakers’ nonpartisan bookkeeper reported Wednesday.
INFRASTRUCTURE
Let’s protect CT’s men and women who keep the lights on (Opinion)
CT Mirror
By Michael Monahan
March 5, 2025
To keep all these services functioning, utilities must continually invest in the critical infrastructure to ensure those systems work. If you don’t invest in that infrastructure, over time, these systems break down because they are out in the elements, or they simply become old and outdated. Across Connecticut, members of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) are doing this infrastructure maintenance daily to make sure the lights stay on.
NLRB
Demonstrators rally to reinstate former National Labor Relations Board chair (Video)
NBC Washington
By Juliana Valencia
March 5, 2025
Demonstrators show support to Gwynne Wilcox, the first Black woman to serve as the National Labor Relations Board chair, who was fired by President Trump.
ORGANIZING
Penn State graduate students rally for union election as university pushes back
Centre Daily Times
ByHalie Kines
March 4, 2025
They filed the union authorization cards with the Pennsylvania Labor Relations Board, the entity that oversees public employees in Pennsylvania, and the next step is having an election. But Penn State has said research assistants are not workers, Amy Wrobleski, a staff member with the United Auto Workers — the union that CGE is affiliated with — said in a phone interview. It will likely go through a hearing process to decide who is a worker in the unit and who is not. That issue has already been litigated during a previous unionization attempt, she said.
Outsourced Providence lab workers unionize
Northwest Labor Press
By Don McIntosh
March 5, 2025
A unit of 114 laboratory scientists and technicians working at Providence Portland hospital voted Feb. 19 to unionize. The tally was 79-23 in favor of joining Oregon Federation of Nurses and Health Professionals (OFNHP). They were formerly Providence employees, and they work at the Providence facility on 4400 NE Halsey St. But in 2023, the Catholic health chain outsourced diagnostic lab operations and leased their workplace to a giant for-profit company, Laboratory Corporation of America Holdings, known as LabCorp.
UNION NEGOTIATIONS
Kern County services limited due to SEIU strike
Bakersfield Now
By Emily Coffey
March 5, 2025
The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) has informed Kern County of a one-day strike taking place today, prompting the county to limit public services. Many of the county's operations rely on local SEIU 521 workers, leading officials to restrict services to the public due to potential staffing shortages.
900 Northwell hospital nurses to strike
Becker’s Hospital Review
By Kelly Gooch
March 4, 2025
The union and hospital began negotiating a new contract in November, according to NYSNA. Union members voted to authorize a strike in February. In a statement shared with Becker's, the hospital said that management aims "to reach an agreement that continues to provide our valued nurses with competitive compensation, benefits and a safe, supportive working environment." The union contends that management has failed to agree to a fair labor deal that retains enough experienced nurses to provide safe patient care to patients.
CATS works to maintain service amid strike
Greater Baton Rouge Business Report
By Dillon Lowe
March 5, 2025
Stanley Smalls, a senior organizer with Amalgamated Transit Union 1546, tells Daily Report that 80 CATS workers are currently withholding their labor. He says the strike is a direct result of CATS bypassing negotiations with the union to impose its own labor contract at the end of January. “Our members will hold the line until [CATS CEO Theo Richards] retracts that implementation letter from Jan. 31, 2025,” Smalls says. “This strike wasn’t about wage increases. It was about CATS forcing an illegal contract on the workers.”
Denver’s Alamo Drafthouse strike ends with promise to rehire 3 workers, union says
Denverite
By Lauren Antonoff Hart
March 5, 2025
In early February, Alamo Drafthouse laid off corporate and hourly workers, citing box office slowdowns in the first quarter of 2025. This culling of the workforce included 47 people across Colorado’s three Alamo locations. The layoffs, which the Communications Workers of America Local 7777 union claims violated national labor laws, triggered a strike at Denver’s Alamo Drafthouse Sloans Lake.
UO workers unions consider authorizing labor strikes
KLCC
By Nathan Wilk
March 5, 2025
United Academics of UO represents more than 1,700 university employees. They’re seeking a contract with higher wages and more professional development time. The union is currently in a 30-day cooling off period, after declaring an impasse in negotiations last month. After that period ends, they can choose to strike. The faculty’s Lead Negotiator, Nathan Whalen, said the union met with the university for nearly nine hours on Monday. But he said there was no progress on the workers' core demands.
The Badger Herald
By Anna Kristoff
March 5, 2025
At the beginning of the fall semester, the University of Wisconsin Teaching Assistants’ Association released a letter addressed to several of the university’s bioscience-related steering committees asking for an increase in pay for 2025-2026 graduate student workers, according to co-president of TAA and PhD student in microbiology Madeline Topf. “No grad student makes a living wage to live in Madison,” Topf said. “So we’re really trying to get that as the biosciences students who bring in millions of dollars in grant money, and that will hopefully pull up the stipend for everybody else as well.”
'Enough Is Enough': Nurses To Strike At LI Hospital
Patch
By Jade Eckardt
March 5, 2025
Nurses at South Shore University Hospital plan to go on strike later this month, the New York State Nurses Association announced. NYSNA nurses delivered a strike notice to SSUH management on Tuesday, stating that they will go on an unfair labor practice strike on March 17 unless hospital administration agrees to a fair union contract that keeps enough experienced nurses at bedsides, NYSNA said in a statement.
GM-LG Tennessee battery plant workers approve first union contract with company
Reuters
By Kalea Hall
March 5, 2025
The United Auto Workers said on Wednesday that workers at a battery manufacturing joint venture between General Motors, opens new tab and South Korea's LG Energy Solution, opens new tab have overwhelmingly approved a first contract with the company. The agreement, approved by nearly 1,000 UAW members working for the Ultium Cells joint venture, improves upon gains achieved in the union's national contract with GM for those workers, the union said.
JOINING TOGETHER
Parents, teachers, students march nationwide against school dollar cuts
People’s World
By Mark Gruenberg
March 5, 2025
Parents, teachers and students in hundreds of cities nationwide marched on and into schools on March 4, declaring education is central to the future of democracy and that cuts in federal education dollars—plus dictates from the Republican Trump administration—endanger that. “This is a direct attack on the future of our communities. Our government is failing them by deciding they are not worth an education,” says Maria Vasquez-Luna, a Manassas, Va., city councilor, Teachers/ AFT member and a member of Labor’s Council for Latin American Advancement. Manassas school students are 70% Latino.
‘Stop the cuts!’: Educators, school activists rally to protect federal funding for public education
Chalkbeat
By Catherine Carrera, Carly Sitrin, Jessie Gómez and Becky Vevea
March 4, 2025
“The millions of children and young adults who get funding to help them in literacy, to help them with occupational therapy and physical therapy, to help them go to college, to help them with hands-on learning — that’s what the federal government spends this money for,” said AFT President Randi Weingarten in a virtual press conference. “It goes directly to schools for these kinds of services.”
Unions march against Trump education cuts
Yale Daily News
By Zachary Suri
March 5, 2025
“We are here because we want to send a clear message to our leaders in Washington, D.C. that we will stand up and fight back to protect our kids and protect our schools,” Leslie Blatteau, president of the New Haven Federation of Teachers, told the crowd. “They’re trying to give billionaires tax cuts while they decimate the Department of Education, and we’re not going to let it happen.”
STATE LEGISLATION
Utah unions will attempt to repeal HB267 ban on collective bargaining for public workers
Salt Lake Tribune
By Robert Gehrke
March 5, 2025
“This isn’t just about one profession; it’s about protecting the rights of all working people,” said Jessica Stauffer, president of CWA Local 7765. “The Legislature has not only taken away bargaining rights but also made it nearly impossible for voters to challenge bad laws. 141,000 signatures in 30 days is an outrageous barrier, but we are ready to meet the challenge.”
Labor unions file referendum against public sector collective bargaining bill
KSL.com
By
March 5, 2025
The fight against Utah's public sector labor union bill isn't over. HB267, which bans public sector collective bargaining and was sponsored by Rep. Jordan Teuscher, R-South Jordan, was signed into law by Utah Gov. Spencer Cox last month. Collective bargaining occurs when an employer and a union come together to negotiate a contract for employees. HB267 applies only to public sector labor unions and does not affect the private sector.
WA lawmakers consider extending unemployment to striking workers
Columbia Basin Herald
By Elizah Lourdes Rendorio
March 5, 2025
“None of us should have to choose between our right to strike and care for our families,” said Jan Abapo, union member of Machinist District Lodge 751 and factory worker at Boeing. Jon Holden, president of Machinist District Lodge 751, explained the unemployment benefits would provide greater financial resources, allowing workers to successfully organize without the threat of financial ruin.
IN THE STATES
At Steelworkers HQ, Deluzio and Lee speak with Pitt researchers about impact of NIH funding cuts
WESA
By Kiley Koscinski
March 5, 2025
“Graduate workers, many of whom also rely on NIH funding… represent the next generation of researchers and scientists,” said Bernie Hall, USW District 10 director. “Our members have told us stories about their fears of losing both their jobs and progress on critical medic