Posts tagged pro-labor
The Providence City Council has passed 14 pro-union resolutions. What’s behind the push?
June 20, 2025 // Last month, Miller and Councilors Justin Roias and Miguel Sanchez joined striking workers at the Butler Hospital picket line. The council is currently considering an amendment to the city’s noise ordinance that would exempt striking workers, following a series of $500 fines issued against those at Butler Hospital for violating the ordinance. Miller has a background in labor organizing, but she said that everybody on the council is passionate about supporting working-class people in Providence and that’s why they prioritize causes such as addressing the city's housing and affordability crisis.
Trump Targets Spending on Labor Union Talks in Latest DOGE Move
March 18, 2025 // President Donald Trump’s administration is mandating federal agencies report how much they spent negotiating labor union contracts for the past year, a sign that collective bargaining agreements could be the next target in a government cost-cutting push. An Office of Personnel Management memo sent Monday directs federal agency heads to report the amount spent on the collective bargaining agreement process, including how much they paid their employees involved in the negotiations, fees for engaging in mediation or arbitration and the fair-market-value of the office space used for the talks.
Scoop: Hawley leads bipartisan pro-labor push
March 4, 2025 // "Greedy corporations will stop at nothing to keep workers from getting a fair first contract," Teamsters General President Sean O'Brien said in a statement to Axios. "Teamsters are proud to support the Faster Labor Contracts Act—real labor law reform that forces employers to bargain in good faith and holds them accountable when they don't," O'Brien continued.
Dockworkers to resume contract negotiations as strike threat looms
January 4, 2025 // The big sticking point holding up a deal is automation. The union wants to hold it back and stop the installation of more semi-automated cranes at the ports. (Two ports, in Norfolk, Virginia, and Bayonne, New Jersey, already use the technology.) The group representing port employers, the United States Maritime Alliance, wants to advance its use of technology.
Missouri Republicans are reaching out to the state’s trade unions, but some workers are wary
October 10, 2024 // Bernie Ryan, an electrician with the St. Louis-based International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, said fans of GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump sometimes encounter hostility at worksites. He recalled a situation where a pro-Trump electrician received a chilly reception inside a construction trailer. “If you’re a Trump voter and an electrician, you would know just to keep his mouth shut and save it for at home,” Ryan said. “But there's other trades that are different from mine where it's more prevalent.”
Teamsters social media rips union president in critical, now-deleted post
July 18, 2024 // “The message this sends to Teamsters of color, Teamsters women, and LGBTQ Teamsters is that they are not welcome in the union unless they surrender their identity to a new kind of anti-woke unionism,” the account wrote. “You don’t unite a diverse working class by scoffing at this diversity.” The account also suggested that O’Brien was endorsing what it said was an attempt by Hawley to tie bigotry to a “cynical pro-labor message.” During his speech at the RNC, O’Brien suggested that the union could revert from its historic posture of endorsing Democrats. The Teamsters account later posted that the union wasn’t “beholden to anyone or any party.”
Opinion: Protect workers by preventing union neutrality agreements
February 21, 2024 // A neutrality agreement is a contract between a union and an employer that typically forbids employers from communicating with employees about the unionization effort or the union behind it. This includes not discussing with workers the viability of any promises the union makes, the accuracy of information provided by the union, or details about the union’s record. Employers that sign neutrality agreements are even precluded from answering employees’ basic questions about how the bargaining process works. So in short, these deceptively named neutrality agreements are anything but. Employers are not actually asked to be neutral, but instead to leave employees in the dark about the choice they face.
Looming auto strike puts Biden’s labor loyalty to the test
September 1, 2023 // On Monday, the Treasury Department sent a love letter to unions in the form of a new report, arguing that unions are central to the U.S. middle class. “The Biden-Harris Administration recognizes the benefits of unions to the middle class and the broader economy and is committed to fulfilling the policy objectives of the [National Labor Relations Act],” the report said. While unions are seeing a surge in popularity in the U.S., organized labor has been in long-term decline, with union participation rates falling by half since they first started being measured in the early 1980s.
Op-ed: BIDEN’S NEW DEAL: GOVERNMENT STACKED FOR UNIONS
July 24, 2023 // With Democrats facing tough midterm elections, expect more union giveaways while still controlling Congress. Love it or hate it, the federal government is pushing its thumb firmly on the Union side of the scale.
Biden’s push for electric cars alienates longtime union allies
June 29, 2023 // The union initially backed many of Trump's protectionist trade policies when he was president, including renegotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which they blamed for allowing U.S. manufacturing jobs to go to Mexico. Biden's re-election campaign, meanwhile, points to the historic early endorsements from the AFL-CIO and 17 others unions as proof of the president's pro-labor stance. The bottom line: At a time when Democrats need the Midwest to preserve political power, the president's commitment to promoting EVs is testing his support among longtime allies.