America’s Work Force Union Podcast

The city of Corvallis, Oregon, calls itself an employer of choice. Over the past four years, 75% of its union-represented workforce has turned over. Management recently gave itself extra pay steps for retention. Workers at the bargaining table are being offered a contract worse than the one they already have.

On today's episode of America's Work Force Union Podcast, AFSCME Local 2975 President Evan Newton discusses where the contra...

Every three hours in the United States, a vehicle or a person is hit by a train. More than 2,300 people are injured or killed every year in North America at railroad crossings and along tracks. More than 60% of those collisions happen at crossings already equipped with lights or gates. And the train that derailed at East Palestine, Ohio, started in Decatur, Illinois. SMART-TD crews flagged it before it left. They were required to t...

Two conversations that cut to the heart of what workers are facing right now — one on the fight to lift airport workers out of poverty wages today and one on what AI and quantum computing are doing to skilled work tomorrow.

32BJ SEIU Executive Vice President Jaime Contreras discusses the campaign to amend the Secure Maryland Wage Act to raise wages, secure employer-paid healthcare and establish paid ...

94% of workers say their paychecks are not keeping up with the cost of living. Four in five say politicians are not showing up for them. The AFL-CIO's response is 50,000 trained election protectors deployed in yellow vests at battleground-state polling locations, a worker-first endorsement standard that holds Democrats and Republicans equally accountable, and one of the largest political ground games the federation has mounted in m...

The Yotta data center conference in Las Vegas started three years ago with 1,500 attendees. This year it drew 7,000. Columbus/Central Ohio Building and Construction Trades Council Executive Secretary-Treasurer Dorsey Hager was there, meeting one-on-one with hyperscalers and developers — some looking at Ohio for the first time — while the Columbus building trades are on pace to eclipse 20 million work hours this year, up...

Two conversations capturing what the union movement looks like right now — one tracing how remote animation workers at DreamWorks won their first collective bargaining agreement and one showing what the national data says about where the labor movement is headed.

Animation Guild TAG Local 839 IATSE field rep Mairghread Scott and DreamWorks character rigger and negotiating committee member JJ Jay disc...

At Ellis Island in the early 1900s, the Bricklayers' union was advertising to arriving immigrants. The biggest selling point beyond wages was the eight-hour workday, because the workers coming over had been working 12- and 14-hour days. That was a union promise. The eight-hour workday, the 40-hour workweek and OSHA all exist because unions fought for them. Every American worker has benefited, union member or not.

On today's Trades ...

He spent eight and a half years writing for Jimmy Kimmel, went on strike twice with the Writers Guild and watched a well-organized union deliver real results. Then he went to medical school, became an ER doctor at UCLA, and watched conditions worsen every year for 11 years. Now he is one of the organizers behind UC Doctors United — an effort to unionize nearly 10,000 attending physicians across the University of California sy...

A McKinsey report argued that 95% of a firm's value is produced by 5% of its workforce. An MIT professor spent years finding out what that means for the other 95%. His answer: approximately 35% of the entire US workforce is now employed with no employer intention of retaining them — building cleaners, security guards, travel nurses, freelance journalists, adjunct faculty and millions of W-2 workers in jobs their employers nev...

CSX reported $3.94 billion in quarterly revenue and approximately $1 billion in quarterly net earnings. Then it notified the union it plans to cut its maintenance of way workforce by 29% and defer capital track maintenance at the same time. Nine hundred system production employees will be furloughed by November 15. Human track inspections have been reduced by 40% in the past 90 days. Workers who find defects are being pressured not...

A refinery worker responds to an eight-hour fire and is later diagnosed with PTSD. ExxonMobil does not record it as a workplace illness. OSHA cites them. The case goes to the Fifth Circuit. Three judges rule that OSHA never had authority to require mental health injury reporting in the first place — because the word illnesses in the 1970 OSHA Act might not have meant mental illness. The regulation they just invalidated has be...

A union member stands before a construction crew and tells his story. Raw. Personal. The crew that did not want to be there goes completely silent. And the phone rings a dozen times the next day, with workers saying, "I think I need help." That is what a stand-down looks like. That is what the Massachusetts Building Trades Recovery Council has been building for five years — and what other states are now asking how to replicat...

A union worker hands a coin to a colleague. On it: someone cares about you. Call or text 988. That act — started in the construction trades with poker chips, now at 150,000 coins distributed in the industry and heading into schools nationwide — is what the BCBS National Labor Office is building into a nationwide youth mental health campaign.

On today's episode of America's Work Force Union Podcast, BCBS National Labor O...

Two conversations connecting veteran service and senior advocacy to the November election — one previewing the October issue of The American Legion Magazine and one with an urgent message for every voter: check your registration now.

American Legion Director of Media and Communications Henry Howard previews the October issue, including the cover story by Alan Dowd tracing America's centuries-long com...

She walked into a conference room full of ironworkers for a one-hour presentation on suicide prevention. The room was packed beyond fire code. When she finished, no one left. Union brothers and sisters stood up and said: “We are dying. We are losing our colleagues. We don't know what to do.” People handed her their phones showing text messages from apprentices in active crisis. The presentation stretched into hours. Her...

Two conversations that connect the stress of the classroom to the energy on the shop floor — one on a national survey showing the teaching profession is in crisis and what Ohio educators are facing in the November governor's race, and one on a wave of recent union wins and how CWA is mobilizing members to make their voices heard on November 3rd.

Ohio Federation of Teachers President and AFT Vice Pres...

Wages for young workers peaked in 1973. Real wages for young men did not fully recover until after 2015, reaching a low of approximately 25% below the 1973 peak — a 42-year stagnation caused not just by the baby boom entering the labor force but by that cohort continuing to occupy jobs for decades afterward, suppressing demand for new workers. Now the boomers are retiring. Births fell 17% between 2007 and 2024. And a Universi...

Two conversations connecting the ground-level work of organizing to the political moment that makes it possible — one tracing the first wall-to-wall unionization of an American opera company in more than 40 years and one taking the temperature of Ohio workers heading into a November election that could determine whether any of it gets easier.

Adam Da Ros, a member of both the organizing and negotiati...

If typical worker pay had kept pace with productivity over the past 45 years, today's typical paycheck would be roughly 40% larger. That income went to shareholders and corporate executives. A new Economic Policy Institute report finds that tripling union density to 30% — where Canada sits today, where the United States was before decades of attacks on collective bargaining — would shift $1.2 trillion annually back to w...