Posts tagged Democratic
Opinion: It’s time to put American workers ahead of big labor
September 3, 2025 // in 2024 alone, the Department of Labor documented 177 enforcement actions against unions for fraud, embezzlement, wire fraud, and falsified records. Congressional investigations have targeted a dozen unions for similar abuses, highlighting a pattern of self-dealing that diverts funds from pensions, training programs, and strike support. When union officials embezzle or racketeer, it’s the everyday worker who pays the price through diminished benefits and tarnished reputations. Perhaps most troubling is the growing chasm between union leaders’ policy stances and the actual views of their members. Union bosses, often ensconced in Washington or state capitals, pour millions into liberal causes and Democratic campaigns, even as their grassroots base leans increasingly conservative or independent. In the 2024 election, while top labor officials doubled down on Democratic endorsements and criticized Republican outreach, many union households shifted toward Donald Trump.
Major state employee union approves new contract after bitter negotiations
August 12, 2025 // After one of the most bitter contract campaigns in recent memory, members of the union representing some 18,000 state employees approved a two-year contract that largely maintains the status quo with modest pay increases. Although voting, dues-paying members supported ratifying the contract by a wide margin — 6,857 to 1,813 — the Minnesota Association of Professional Employees said the 79% approval was the lowest since the union went on strike in 2001.
Democratic governors face off with unions at home
July 22, 2025 // Democratic governors who may be eyeing 2028 presidential runs have been at odds with public sector-unions in their states over a variety of issues, including return-to-office policies and the impact of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown. In Colorado, state workers sought to join a lawsuit after Gov. Jared Polis allegedly instructed employees to provide Immigration and Customs Enforcement with information on undocumented immigrants. Unions have also sparred with California Gov. Gavin Newsom over his order calling state workers back to the office for at least four days a week, with three of them securing eleventh-hour temporary exemptions. And Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz’s office has been engaged in a tense bargaining process with state employees over health care benefits and paid parental leave.
Commentary: Ivy Leaguers Aren’t Auto Workers
July 21, 2025 // In general, NLRB decisions are fake law made by fake judges who have to interpret a poorly written statute from 90 years ago that is based on assumptions about industrial organization that no longer obtain in the United States. But the NLRB remains powerful nonetheless, and its decisions matter. That’s why Russell Burgett, a doctoral candidate at Cornell University, which is private, is asking the NLRB to overturn the 2016 Columbia ruling. He isn’t a member of the Cornell graduate students’ union, a UE affiliate, and he said in charges filed with the NLRB on Monday that his choice not to join makes it harder for him to complete his education.
Trump Names NLRB Nominees, Providing Path to Functioning Quorum
July 17, 2025 // The administration Thursday nominated Scott Mayer, chief labor counsel at the Boeing Co., and James Murphy, a former career NLRB lawyer, to fill the two open Republican board seats. The NLRB has been unable to issue decisions for most of Trump’s second term because his January firing of Democratic member Gwynne Wilcox dropped the board below the three-member minimum necessary for a quorum. The US Supreme Court blocked a federal judge’s order to reinstate Wilcox as litigation over her termination proceeds. If Trump’s nominees sail through the Senate approval process, they would join Chair Marvin Kaplan to form a three-member GOP majority on the board, with David Prouty continuing to serve as the sole Democratic member.
Justices allow mass layoffs at Education Department
July 16, 2025 // A coalition of employee unions and Democratic attorneys general challenged the efforts to carry out the order in court, arguing that the firings and other moves violated federal law by hampering the department’s ability to carry out its legal obligations. Joun agreed in May and enjoined the Trump administration’s firings while the case played out. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit upheld the preliminary injunction and the administration asked the Supreme Court to weigh in, ultimately resulting in Monday’s order.
Nation’s most liberal, union-beholden congressman wants out
July 8, 2025 // Notably, he has received hundreds of thousands of dollars in contributions from major public-sector unions such as SEIU and AFSCME. Evans was a vocal supporter and co-sponsor of the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act, a controversial bill criticized by opponents for undermining workers’ freedom to choose union membership and expanding the political power of union leadership. Before serving in Congress, Evans spent 35 years as a Pennsylvania state representative. In 1998, he notably opposed the teachers union, which spent more than $150,000 in an unsuccessful effort to defeat him.
ISBA distances itself from Idaho teachers union’s anti-GOP campaign—sort of
May 15, 2025 // According to the IEA, the “central focus” of its so-called “May Matters” campaign will be “[m]obilizing IEA members to turn out voters in the May 2026 primary elections and return a pro-public education majority to the Idaho Legislature.” Part of the union’s strategy involves getting Democratic and independent teachers to make some “pragmatic political calculations” and “re-register” as Republicans “in strategic districts” so they can vote for the most liberal candidates running under false colors in the GOP primary. Such rhetorical fire-breathing and political scheming is par for the course when it comes to teachers unions. More notable, however, was the IEA’s claim that “allies” like the Idaho School Boards Association (ISBA) “will join” the union’s May Matters effort.
The AFL-CIO Doesn’t Need To Lobby — It Has Its Own Caucus Now
May 6, 2025 // It was billed as a press conference announcing a new legislative caucus — but the real headliners weren’t the lawmakers. When more than 30 Democratic legislators gathered on April 30 to unveil their “Blue Collar Caucus,” they quickly stepped aside and handed the microphone — and the spotlight — to Connecticut AFL-CIO President Ed Hawthorne and Building Trades President Joe Toner. The union bosses weren’t just there to show support — they were the main event, delivering lengthy remarks packed with labor talking points, many of which now appear in the caucus’s legislative agenda and are posted proudly on its website.
The Teamsters’ Trojan Horse
April 16, 2025 // Hawley may believe that Sean O’Brien and his Teamsters Union speak for a new faction of a political coalition he hopes to one day lead. But in an era when fewer than 6 percent of private-industry workers are unionized, O’Brien does not. For that reason, organized labor comfortably lives in the house of the political left — no matter what rhetorical blandishments union bosses like O’Brien contribute in Republican Party meetings, no matter what chump change union PACs give Republicans like Hawley who abandon the party’s traditional labor policies, and no matter what union members like the majority-pro-Trump Teamsters might want their dues to do.