Posts tagged unions
Seven years after Janus, public employees still can’t quit their unions
October 24, 2025 // Seven years after the U.S. Supreme Court’s Janus v. AFSCME decision established that public employees cannot be compelled to pay union dues, a troubling pattern has emerged: unions nationwide are systematically obstructing workers’ rights to resign. Consider Chaquan May, a California in-home caregiver, who has spent more than two years trying to resign from SEIU Local 2015.
White Collar Workers Are Considering Unionizing as Their Jobs Are Threatened
October 23, 2025 // The scenario was recently explored in a Washington Post article titled “The future of white-collar work may be unionized,” which noted “(l)aw firms, banks and tech companies are seeing an uptick in employees choosing to organize.” Interestingly, the paper didn’t mention that its own tech workers overwhelmingly voted to form a union earlier this year, despite management efforts to prevent them. Post owner and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, has for years battled to stop the online marketplace’s employees from doing the same. In any case, it was probably no coincidence that the Post’s IT workers led the push to organize. Employees at Alphabet, Microsoft, Kickstarter, and other tech companies began organizing as far back as 2020 to gain better leverage against what they considered heavy-handed management decisions.
How are unions pushing back against Trump’s attacks on labor and layoffs?
October 21, 2025 // Unions are battling the administration in federal courtrooms nationwide, after filing dozens of lawsuits to try to halt attempts to shed hundreds of thousands of government employees, strip collective bargaining rights from over a million workers, and gut some federal agencies. On Wednesday, they made a significant breakthrough: Judge Susan Illston, of the US district court’s northern district of California, granted a temporary restraining order blocking Trump’s latest mass layoffs from the government shutdown.
The next major film studios could be in Nevada if some unions have their way
October 21, 2025 // “We believe if we can get the public behind us, we’ll be able to get the legislators to understand what a big change this can bring to Southern Nevada,” said Tommy White, business manager-secretary treasurer of Laborers’ International Union of North America, Local 872 in Las Vegas. Trade unions formed a political action committee called Nevada Jobs Now, which has raised over $1 million to be used for digital advertisements, mailers and some TV commercials, White said. The production companies behind the project say it would create 19,000 construction jobs.
How Josh Hawley Is Empowering Unions in New York and California
October 19, 2025 // A week later, the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee voted to confirm two of Trump's NLRB nominees. Mayer's nomination was tabled. Without that seat filled, the NLRB still lacks a quorum—and, as a result, the labor boards in New York and California have power. Of course, blocking Mayer's appointment to the board is within Hawley's authority as a senator and a member of that key committee. Still, exercising that authority has opened Hawley to criticism. "Hawley is definitely trying to help unions," Sean Higgins, a research fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a free market think tank, told Reason via email.
Dollar store workers fight to improve jobs, even without a union
October 17, 2025 // In 2022, Williams joined an organization that seemed, to him, like his best shot: Step Up Louisiana. Like several successful campaigns before it, Step Up organizes workers to improve their jobs, but stops short of calling for a union under the National Labor Relations Board. The approach, sometimes referred to as “premajority unionism,” is a natural fit for places like the South, with histories of public hostility to unions. Today, suggest experts, it may also be workers’ best bet for building power amid the hostility of the Trump administration.
Why California Teachers Are Walking Away from Their Union
October 16, 2025 // Yes, you read that right. The nation’s biggest teachers’ union circulated classroom content that literally wiped Israel off the map and connected educators to sources that excuse terrorism. When caught, the NEA quietly deleted the materials. No apology. No accountability. Just silence. That kind of moral blindness is not confined to Washington. In California, it has become a way of life.
The 15 Most Unionized Places in America
October 16, 2025 // To determine the most unionized locations in the U.S., researchers at Construction Coverage analyzed data from UnionStats.com and the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The researchers ranked metropolitan statistical areas according to total union members as a percentage of total employment. In addition to union membership, the researchers also included statistics on union representation, which is the share of workers whose terms of work are collectively negotiated (whether or not they are union members). Only metropolitan statistical areas with available data were included in the analysis.
The Federal Workforce Will Be a Little Smaller After the Government Shutdown Ends
October 16, 2025 // While further reductions in the size of the federal workforce are certainly welcome, the layoffs will have to become significantly more aggressive to more than scratch the federal Leviathan. While smaller than its peak at 3.4 million workers in 1990 and then again in 2010, the federal government still employed 2.9 million people, not counting military personnel, as of August 2025. That's almost 3 million people living off the taxes collected by the federal government (or, increasingly, the money it borrows) rather than productively creating goods and services for willing consumers. And those nearly 3 million people aren't all just sitting around. Too many of them get up to mischief by exercising the power of the government to interfere in people's lives and to enforce intrusive rules and laws. Just see my comment above about the public health establishment and the pandemic. Fewer federal employees mean not so many mischief-makers to cause trouble, along with some cost savings.
Major federation of unions calls for ‘worker-centered AI’ future
October 15, 2025 // The AFL-CIO represents the UAW and dozens of other unions and wants more collective bargaining and state bills regulating AI.