Trump Poked The Bear
Strikes in Providence and Montreal continue
Labor unions are now leading the charge against the Trump administration’s attacks on immigrants. Trump has targeted union leaders in recent months, and the arrest and felony charges against California SEIU President David Huerta may have been a turning point: a broad swath of unions are fighting back.
“Whether you’re documented or not, you can be a member of a union, and those we represent, we vow to protect,”an AFL-CIO spokesperson told the Wall Street Journal, amid protests against immigration raids in Los Angeles.
The protests in Los Angeles and across the country “highlight how unions have become a bulwark against Trump’s immigration agenda, challenging his administration’s intensifying enforcement tactics,” the Washington Post reports. “The shift is in part driven by immigrants who have joined unions in growing numbers since the 1990s — and as organized labor objects to broader Trump policies that affect unions.”
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Trump’s Labor Department is “reassessing” a 2013 rule that expanded basic protections for home care workers, Bloomberg reports. The 2013 measure granted home health aides minimum wage and overtime protections – and a rollback or repeal of the rule would impact millions of workers, many of whom are immigrants.
Over 100 units of the Florida Education Association, a merged NEA/AFT affiliate, have successfully recertified in the face of a union-busting law passed by Ron DeSantis.
The strike by SEIU 1199NE against Butler Hospital in Providence continues. Democratic Providence Mayor Brett Smiley (a former aide to ex-Rhode Island Governor and Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo) had earlier been issuing plainly unconstitutional $500 citations for noise violations to striking workers. The President of the Providence City Council is seeking to amend the noise ordinance to ensure compliance with the First Amendment.
2,400 maintenance workers at Montreal’s public transit authority are on the third day of their strike.
I’m sorry - and I wish it were otherwise - but having a few hundred union staff rallying does not constitute fighting back. Maybe we’ll see something different this Saturday, but so far this year it looks like only in Chicago are labor unions turning out significant numbers of members - I mean thousands and tens of thousands marching under union banners - at rallies, and there’s little reportage anywhere of the sort of intensive anti-authoritarian labor education we so desperately need.