MADISON, WI—On Tuesday, April 1, voters in Wisconsin elected the pro-worker Susan Crawford to a seat on the state supreme court, despite billionaire Elon Musk spending more than $20 million to support Crawford’s conservative opponent. Crawford won by a margin of almost 10 percentage points, winning many counties which supported Trump in the 2024 presidential election.

The Wisconsin Supreme Court is scheduled to hear cases on collective bargaining rights for public-sector workers — which were severely restricted by the Republican-passed “Act 10” in 2011 — and for workers at the University of Wisconsin Hospitals and Clinics. It is also scheduled to consider the constitutionality of Wisconsin’s draconian abortion ban, which was passed in 1849, before women even had the right to vote.

UE Local 1186 in Madison endorsed Crawford and phone-banked their members to turn them out. In addition to asking members to vote in the election, they also encouraged them to participate in solidarity actions supporting workers at the Transportation Security Administration and the Veterans Administration, who are under attack from the Trump administration and Musk’s so-called “Department of Government Efficiency.” Crawford was also endorsed by the UE Western Region.

The Guardian reported that “Musk reprised some of the tactics that he used last fall to help Trump win, including offering $100 to people who signed a petition opposing ‘activist judges’ and offering $1 million checks to voters.” Following her election, Crawford told supporters, “Today Wisconsinites fended off an unprecedented attack on our democracy. Wisconsin stood up and said loudly that justice does not have a price. Our courts are not for sale.”

The post Wisconsin Voters Defy Billionaire Elon Musk, Elect Pro-Worker Supreme Court Judge appeared first on Labor Today.

Dear colleagues,

I am obliged to begin my intervention by protesting the unfair treatment suffered by my organization and by extension our hundreds of thousands of members, particularly in the maritime sector for which we are here now.

It is clear that the representation of workers is systematically monopolized, and the opinions of hundreds of millions of workers represented by the WFTU and other international organizations are underrepresented or even marginalized and ignored.

The WFTU will not stop fighting and demanding a genuinely representative and pluralistic ILO, with democratic and participatory functioning, as dictated by its role and the reasons for its creation.

Regarding the document before us, we would like to make the following observations:

The wording of the convention should be clearer and more explicit regarding the responsibilities of shipowners and the substantive intervention of flag states.

Τhe most important of all is the faithful implementation of the Convention and its universal incorporation into the national law of all States, as well as the consequent responsibility of shipowners and flag States.

Recognizing the particularly difficult political conditions that humanity experiences with wars, we ask that seafarers be exempt from any disciplinary proceedings by shipowners and any legal proceedings by a member country that has adopted the Convention in the event of rescuing migrants who are facing difficulties or in the event of refusing to participate in the escort of weapons and military equipment to war zones.

Thank you for your attention.

The post Intervention of the  TUI Transport, Harbour, Fisheries and Communications of the WFTU in the Fifth meeting of the Special Tripartite Committee of the Maritime Labour Convention appeared first on Labor Today.

This is a phenomenon that not only affects companies and their main shareholders or investors, but also involves the “Private Investment Funds”, through which are channeled substantial pension resources contributed by workers from all over the world, deceived, as the Chilean dictatorship did in the 70s/80s of the last century, aided by several yellow unions of the ITUC, which were then called ICFTU.

The trend towards the privatization of pensions and retirement systems is a process that is part of the privatization of public capital in general, which in fact seeks to appropriate funds that far exceed the money currently managed by private banks throughout the world. It is a process that is part of the privatization of public capital in general, which in reality seeks to appropriate funds that far exceed the money currently managed by private banks throughout the planet.

It is part of the trend towards commodification and privatization of economic activity in general, a product of liberalization policies in favor of capital, corporate profit and capitalist accumulation. It is an exploitation by capital of the savings of working men and women who have contributed to receive income in pensions and retirement pensions, often necessary because public pensions are very insufficient.

The fall of the stock markets is a manifestation of the capitalist crisis, mainly in the USA, Europe and Japan, the main countries of developed capitalism and imperialism. This crisis affects the dynamics of capitalist accumulation and exacerbates the offensive of capital against labor, nature and society, against labor and social security rights; deepening the plundering of common goods and deteriorating the socioeconomic rights of the peoples of the world.

In the 80s/90s, the search for higher profits led to the transfer of international investments to Asia, especially to China, changing the territoriality of accumulation.

This is a relevant fact that generates the ongoing geopolitical dispute and explains the unilateral sanctions imposed by the US in recent years and its global partners, as well as the commercial, financial, monetary and economic wars, which ultimately call for the pursuit of the wealth of the peoples.

To this end, they also promote militarization, increasing military expenditures and the dangers of nuclear war that threaten humanity, within the framework of the strengthening of a production model that threatens the very subsistence of the planet due to climate change.

We are witnessing a worsening of the capitalist crisis, in which the leaders of the largest economic groups on the planet are fighting and competing, exacerbating exploitation and plundering, so that, without prejudice to the devaluation of the stock market, the main people affected are the workers of the world, their labor and social security incomes, their working and living conditions.

The recession induced in the world economy by the US tariff increases will aggravate the situation of those who live on fixed incomes, even more so with the increase in prices and the predicted rising inflation. Therefore, from the TUI of P&R of the WFTU we denounce the regime of capital and its regressive and reactionary political initiative that in order to solve the problems of capital increases exploitation and inequality in favor of the concentration of wealth.

From our TUI of P&R we call on the workers of the world to strengthen the organization and struggle against privatizations, especially of the pension and retirement funds and to restore a criterion of inter-generational solidarity to solve the needs of the elderly, in a perspective of struggle against capitalism, imperialism and all forms of racism and discrimination.

The best response of women workers, workers and peoples is the worldwide struggle and organization in defense of our rights historically won by the struggle of the workers’ and popular movement worldwide.

The crisis also shows that the money saved by wage earners is being speculated on in order to steal it instead of being untouchable funds that cannot be affected by the economic wars that only interest and benefit the owners of the large multinationals.

No to the swindle of private pension and retirement funds!

The current crisis makes it clear, once again, that Private Pension Funds only benefit their managers and private investors and never the workers!

Yes to the organization and struggle of retirees and pensioners that we promote from the TUI of P&R of the WFTU!

The post Declaration of the TUI of Pensioners and Retired of the WFTU on the Current Capitalist Crisis appeared first on Labor Today.

Railroad workers would go on to reject a tentative agreement that outright ignored the demands of the rank-and-file over these conditions. Using the anti-labor Railway Labor Act, a bipartisan Congress and then President Biden would go on to force that rejected agreement onto the rail workers in December 2022. With the warnings of the railroad workers ignored, disaster would soon strike on February 3, 2023, just two months after Congress ignored the safety concerns as a Norfolk Southern train derailed right outside East Palestine, OH leading to a massive environmental disaster.

This grim situation on the railroads was a catalyst for the cross-craft caucus of rank-and-file railroad workers, Railroad Workers United (RWU), passing a resolution in support of the nationalization of the railroads. This resolution would lead to the creation of the Public Rail Now campaign which is a grassroots coalition fighting for the nationalization of the railroads using the 1920s Plumb Plan as a model.

The Plumb Plan had a call for a tripartite leadership of the railroads consisting of labor, the public, and management. Though it was a step in the right direction, it kept the same abusive bosses in at least partial leadership of the railroads. Public Rail Now has improved on this concept now pushing a tripartite leadership consisting of labor, the public, and the planet. This concept is the embodiment of the labor-led anti-monopoly coalition LUEL has been organizing for, it unites the labor movement with community and climate mass organizations to fight the monopolist railroad cartels.

The Public Rail Now campaign has already brought a large variety of groups together like RWU, LUEL, Labor Network for Sustainability, national unions like the United Electrical Radio and Machine Workers Union (UE), the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU), and others to organize a push to nationalize the railroads. LUEL calls on rank-and-file leaders to fight for their unions to endorse the campaign and to go to their local labor councils to push for endorsements. Look out for events throughout the country as the campaign heats up, get involved, and join the fight against the monopolists.

The post To Fight the Monopolist Railroad Cartels We Must Unite to Fight for Public Rail appeared first on Labor Today.

The DBDT leadership has claimed that the decision to terminate all of their dancers was not in response to their unionization efforts but was a response to a video posted by the dancers to Social Media. The DBDT stated in a Dallas Morning News article that this video “promoted content and practices that contradict our core values and standards of professionalism”. This article was posted in response to the uproar over the termination of the dancers, but the public sentiment still fell clearly on the side of these dancers, with AGMA “[receiving] reports of declining ticket sales, donors withdrawing their support, and major foundations severing ties with DBDT in the wake of its actions”.

Taking the air out of DBDT Leadership’s arguments, in November 2024 The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) issued a formal complaint against the DBDT including more than 40 counts of unlawful conduct based on the dancers’ protected activities. In an Instagram post by the dancers they stated “The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has issued a formal complaint, finding reasonable cause to believe that Dallas Black Dance Theatre committed numerous unfair labor practices, the most extreme of which was the termination of the entire company. Additionally, the NLRB is recommending seeking emergency relief in federal district court, due to the grievous nature of DBDT’s actions.” The NLRB recommended emergency relief in this matter, including reinstatement of the fired workers with back pay and “making all employees or former employees whole for any loss of wages, benefits, or other direct or foreseeable pecuniary harm.”

The long-fought struggle came to a close in December 2024, with the AGMA posting to their website that the DBDT had reached a Settlement Agreement with the terminated dancers. The agreement was brokered by the NLRB and included monetary compensation for the dancers including front pay, back pay, and other pecuniary harms, personal apologies, training and union access, and other worker protections. In addition to these, “the full 7-page NLRB Notice detailing the Company’s misconduct will be: published in The Dallas Morning News for seven days, read aloud to employees by a senior leader, and posted and distributed physically and electronically.” This historic win for performing arts workers shows the power that organized labor has in standing up to unfair treatment at the hands of the bosses. The dancers who fought in this struggle for over 6 months demonstrated for workers throughout Dallas, Texas, and the USA the strength we can achieve when banding together and fighting for our rights.

Photo courtesy of AGMA.

The post Dallas Dancers Defeat Bosses in Major Unfair Labor Practices Case appeared first on Labor Today.

Comrades,

Before I begin my speech, I would like to warmly thank the FNE for hosting the 20^th Congress of FISE.

The conditions created by our Moroccan comrades guarantee that this Congress will be successful and worthy of all our expectations.

FISE is a valuable pillar for the WFTU. It expresses the struggles and demands of a group of workers whose object is education, learning, culture, and ultimately the consciousness formation of the new generations of every society.

It is one of the longest-operating TUI of the WFTU, founded just one year after the establishment of the WFTU, and its history is rich in struggles and creative contributions to the achievements related to education as well as the intellectual and cultural development.

It is true that in recent years, FISE has not been as mobilized and active as we would have wished.  Organizational, financial, and other problems have limited its activity and presence.

That is why I am confident that our conference here in Rabat will be a new dynamic start.  The discussion that will take place here, the exchange of experiences, the decisions that will be taken, will constitute a guideline for action that will lead us to the new struggles that await us, and the fresh and renewed leading bodies that we will elect will, I am sure, undertake the burden and the noble responsibility of organizational reorganization and a more active and productive operation of this historic International.

Dear colleagues, brothers and sisters,

Our era is characterized by the generalization and deepening of the capitalist crisis, which is accompanied by new attacks on workers’ rights and achievements, a dramatic widening of social inequalities, further environmental degradation, and reckless overexploitation of our planet’s natural resources.

The genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza and in the West Bank, with the support and encouragement of the USA, the EU, and their allies, has once again revealed in all its grandeur the hypocrisy, cynicism, and inhumane nature of imperialism.

Global geopolitical and economic rivalries continue to directly threaten world peace and security, even with the risk of nuclear destruction. Imperialist wars, interventions, sanctions, and blockades continue and intensify.

The USA, the EU, and their NATO allies are announcing new massive increases in military spending, which, apart from being a threat to global peace and security, also mean even harsher austerity policies and widening social inequality.

Nowadays, the shift towards a war economy is clearly a priority for the ruling circles of capitalism, as it ensures profitability for multinational monopolies and the expansion of the geopolitical power of developed imperialist states.

Harsh and intense attacks continue against the labor and social achievements and the democratic and trade union freedoms.

The high cost of living and inflation are brutally undermining workers’ and pensioners’ living standards.

Unemployment, precariousness, and the overexploitation of cheap labor of vulnerable workers due to mass economic migration or refugee flows, as well as anti-popular and anti-labor legislative measures systematically promoted by neoliberal governments, have significantly undermined labor with rights and regulated collective agreements that reflect the modern needs of workers.

Individual contracts, privatizations, outsourcing, teleworking, and “service leasing” are just some of the forms taken by this harsh neoliberal attack. The authoritarian and arbitrary increase in retirement ages continues methodically.

Major social achievements such as public education, social security and public health are being privatized.

Thousands of workers are killed or injured daily due to the lack of measures to protect against workplace accidents and occupational diseases.

Safety and health at work are seen by employers as undesirable costs that reduce their profits.

This attack is, of course, also faced by the workers in the education sector that all of you delegates at this conference represent.

It is obvious that for the dominant circles of global capitalism, education is not a public good to which everyone is entitled rightfully and equally, but is still a commodity that must be profitable.

Hence, education is continuously privatised, state expenditures are constantly shrinking, and responsibility for public education is shifting onto the parents themselves and, consequently, onto the popular strata.

The attack against universal, free, and quality education has not only economic incentives.  The education sector shapes the consciences of the new generation and the bourgeoise aims in the creation of a new shift of the working class which will not be overall educated but fragmentary and superficially trained as tool in the market need, a new shift of the working class that will be taught a falsified and distorted history and will be socially indifferent and ideologically conservative.  Consequently, FISE and the progressive teachers also have a crucial task to defend the scientific, quality, progressive, and human-centered education.

The attack on the rights and achievements of teachers continues, as their work is increasingly becoming precarious and temporary, without security and without employment contracts, with humiliating wages and with all the consequences for the quality of the education they provide.

The encouraging and hopeful element in the depressing picture of today’s world, is the fact that workers do not passively accept the neoliberal capitalist, anti-popular, and anti-labor offensive. Millions of workers around the world are choosing the path of struggle to defend their trade union, social, and political rights.

With militant mobilizations in every corner of the globe, they are demanding work with rights that ensures the satisfaction of their contemporary needs.

The WFTU members or friends are always on the frontlines of these struggles.

The response of bourgeois governments to the just popular demands is the sharpening of state repression and authoritarianism, and such attacks and persecutions are particularly intensified against the struggling teachers.

At the same time, employers and governments are attempting to manipulate labor struggles, betting on the role of yellow unions and compromised trade union leaders.

It is no coincidence that the ITUC have intensified its attacks, aiming to limit the presence and influence of the WFTU within the global trade union movement, either by exerting blackmail and undue pressure or by distributing promises and luring with buy-offs.

The more they feel the increasing questioning by workers of the path of class collaboration and trade union tradition that they serve, the more their attacks will intensify.

That is why a particularly important goal for us, in today’s conditions, is to ensure the greatest possible expansion of the presence and influence of the WFTU in all sectors and all regions of the world.

We do not underestimate the means at their disposal.

But we also have weapons. Strategically much more powerful than theirs. We have our ideology and our class orientation, our history and our action, our militant spirit, and our moral advantage.

But to utilize these weapons, we need good organization, enlightenment, and ideological and political education.

Dear colleagues, brothers and sisters,

2025 is the year we will celebrate 80 years since the founding of WFTU.

Born from the ashes of the most destructive war in the history of humanity, the WFTU completes 80 years of continuous and uninterrupted struggle for the rights of workers, for justice and social progress, against all forms of discrimination, against wars and imperialist interventions, against may by man exploitation.

80 years of solidarity and internationalism.

These celebrations should be used as a motivation and impetus to highlight the history of the struggles and actions of the WFTU and to emphasize its difference from the organizations of compromised trade unionists and yellow unions that promote class collaboration and integration into the system of exploitation.

The Presidential Council of the WFTU already approved a declaration and a rich program of activities in honor of the 80th anniversary.

A program that includes seminars, local and regional events, publications, podcasts and video clips, photography and poster competitions, events all over the world by our members, and of course the central commemorative event, which is going to be organized on October 3 in Paris, the city where the historic founding Congress took place.

Comrades, fellow comrades,

It is obvious that in our era, the prerequisites for truly dignified working and social living conditions for all workers exist in abundance. The rapid development of science and technology has led to a leap in the productive capabilities of human labor. What we are fighting for these capabilities not to be utilized to increase the profits of capitalists and create unimaginable wealth for a few, but to ensure dignified living and working conditions for those who, through their labor and toil, are the true creators of the produced wealth.

Organization and struggle are the only path that can overturn the existing realities of misery, exploitation, and social injustice.

The weapon of workers everywhere is solidarity and internationalism.  The WFTU remains firmly committed to these principles.  It continues its 80-year path with the same vision that inspired its founding: for a world without wars and imperialist interventions, without exploitation and discrimination.  A world where work will be permanent, stable, regulated, and safe.

Long live the unity and struggles of the Working Class.

Long live FISE and the WFTU.

The post WFTU General Secretary Opening Speech at the 20th FISE Congress appeared first on Labor Today.

In the 1930s, as rank-and-file workers in the electrical manufacturing industry were establishing UE in workplaces like the giant General Electric plant in Erie, PA (Local 506) and Sargent Lock in New Haven, CT (Local 243), a union with a similar “Them and Us” philosophy of unionism was building militant, interracial unions in iron ore mines in an area known as “Red Mountain” near Birmingham, Alabama. Although those local unions fell victim to the same forces of red-baiting that attempted to destroy UE in the 1940s, for a decade they created a culture of aggressive struggle and unity among Black (and many white) miners, a culture whose legacy informed the civil rights movement decades later.

That union, the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers — commonly known as “Mine Mill” — already had a storied history before it arrived in Alabama. Founded in 1893 as the Western Federation of Miners, it had won the eight-hour day as early as 1894 for union miners in Cripple Creek, Colorado. It helped found the Industrial Workers of the World in 1905, although later left and joined the American Federation of Labor.

Alabama iron miners had invited Mine Mill organizers to help them organize in 1918, but the organizers were violently driven out of town by company thugs before they were able to build stable organizations. Those company thugs, according to historian Brian Kelly, became “the basis of the Jefferson County Ku Klux Klan … the Klan has its origins, really, in the attempt by the employers to break up the union.”

In the 1930s, as workers in industries across the country were rising up and establishing the new industrial unions of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), Mine Mill — one of the CIO’s founding unions — returned to Alabama. Although strikes in 1934 and 1936 were unsuccessful, in 1938 the newly-established National Labor Relations Board ordered the company to rehire 160 Mine Mill members who were fired during the strikes and provide back pay. Shortly thereafter the union won recognition from the Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad Company (TCI), a subsidiary of the giant U.S. Steel corporation.

Mine Mill, like UE, practiced aggressive struggle and had a strong commitment to uniting all workers across racial barriers. Its locals in Alabama had a provision in their charters ensuring that the locals’ top offices would be evenly split between Black and white workers. Also like UE, it was accused of being “Communist-dominated” which, in the context of the South, carried connotations not only of foreign domination but of seeking to promote social equality between Black and white workers.

While Mine Mill received its most enthusiastic support from Black workers, significant numbers of white workers also supported the union. Historian Horace Huntley, whose father and grandfather were Mine Mill members, told an NPR interviewer in 2018 about a white Mine Mill activist named Phil Tindle:

He lived in the iron ore mining camp. He and other white miners … they were different kinds of people, you know. They didn’t hold one to a position based upon their color. And that was unusual for Alabamians in the 1930s, ’40s, ’50s and ’60s and, to some degree, even today.

Up against the Company, the CIO and the Klan

Mine Mill not only limited the companies’ ability to exploit their workers, its example of interracial unionism also threatened the social structure of the Jim Crow South, which kept power in the hands of a small number of wealthy white people and impoverished workers of all races. As happened in many UE workplaces after World War II, the companies, the local elite, and the CIO conspired to replace Mine Mill with a more compliant union — in this case, the Steelworkers.

The company explicitly used race as a tool in its attempts to destroy the union. Before Mine Mill was recognized, the workers at TCI were approximately 80 percent Black — TCI hired Black workers because they could pay them less. But once the union came in, TCI mostly hired white workers, assuming that they would be less likely to support Mine Mill. According to an oral history interview with Mine Mill member Elsie Culpepper, “It was so designed that there were never too many whites that worked in the mines. They hired all those white men, and they killed Mine Mill.”

Mine Mill, which was still at this point a member of the CIO, appealed to the labor federation to intervene to prevent the Steelworkers’ raid, but to no avail. (UE withdrew from the CIO in 1949 in part because of its failure to prevent other CIO unions from raiding UE shops.) In fact, CIO representative Van Jones met with white Mine Mill members and promised them that if they joined the Steelworkers they would have all-white locals.

An NLRB election to replace Mine Mill was scheduled on April 21, 1949, but Mine Mill wasn’t just facing off against the company and the Steelworkers — the Ku Klux Klan also joined the fray. Although firmly under the control of local elites, the Klan was successful in recruiting a significant number of white workers, who sadly chose to align with their bosses on the basis of shared racial identity instead of standing in solidarity with their Black co-workers. The night before the representation election, a hundred Klansmen in white robes and hoods rode by the Mine Mill office with burning torches. Mine Mill’s national Secretary-Treasurer Maurice Travis travelled to Alabama to speak in a radio debate with the Steelworkers, but after showing up at the radio station was beaten so severely by Steelworker supporters that it left him blind in one eye.

On the day of the vote, according to Mine Mill Education Director Graham Dolan:

Repeated reports of intimidation were phoned into our office during the day. Every automobile carrying white workers was stopped and its occupants told by roving gangs of Steel hoodlums that if they did not vote for Steel they would be killed or beaten up. The Steel hoodlums told the workers that they would know how they voted, that they had an arrangement with the Company for so knowing.

The race-baiting, red-baiting and violent intimidation proved too much, and Mine Mill lost the representation election at TCI to the Steelworkers.

“The Union meant a coming of freedom”

Huntley, the historian, conducted oral history interviews with many former Mine Mill members in the 1970s. He sums up what the union meant to Black workers:

To black workers, Mine Mill was much more than just another labor organization. Many miners related to this writer that prior to Mine Mill on Red Mountain, blacks lived in the “shadow of slavery.” For them the Union meant a coming of freedom, justice and equality. That labor organization became a way of life, and one that those workers cherished. With the loss of the election, that way of life was dealt a near fatal blow.

Nonetheless, Mine Mill’s legacy lived on in the Birmingham area, especially in the Bessemer Voters’ League (BVL), which historian Max Krochmal calls “the most durable institution” of the civil rights movement in Bessemer, the industrial suburb of Birmingham that encompassed much of the iron ore mining areas. Asbury Howard, Sr., a TCI miner who became a Mine Mill official, led both the BVL and the local NAACP until the latter was banned by the state in 1956. According to Krochmal, Howard “and untold others served as the foot soldiers of the civil rights movement.” Mine Mill veterans and other Black workers

led the battle for access to skilled jobs, joined the ACMHR [the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights, an organization founded in 1956 after the NAACP was banned], formed the unit of “ushers” who protected the movement against violent attack, conducted direct action demonstrations in cafeterias and on buses, and registered voters.

Although it was defeated by the Steelworkers at TCI, Mine Mill survived into the 1960s as an independent union (in 1950 it was formally expelled from the CIO for “Communist domination”). A militant strike waged by mostly Chicano Mine Mill members in Grant County, New Mexico in 1951 was the subject of the legendary labor film Salt of the Earth. Most of Mine Mill merged into the Steelworkers in 1967, but its largest local — in Sudbury, Ontario — remained independent until 1993, when it became a local of the Canadian Autoworkers, who later helped found UE’s Canadian sister union Unifor.

The iron ore mines in Alabama all closed by the 1970s, but the city of Bessemer was thrust from obscurity into the national spotlight in early 2021 when workers at the giant Amazon warehouse there became the first workers at an Amazon facility in the U.S. to try to organize their shop through the NLRB process, an effort that some commentators connected to the history of Mine Mill in the area.

The history of Mine Mill in Alabama is a cautionary tale about how organizations like the Klan — and today’s so-called “alt-right” — can lure workers into choosing their racial identity over class solidarity, with disastrous consequences for militant unionism. But it also demonstrates that building militant unions that unite workers across racial lines is possible even under the most difficult circumstances.

The post “Them and Us” Unionism in the Deep South appeared first on Labor Today.

Farmworker and union leader Alfredo “Lelo” Juarez Zeferino was taken into custody by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE) on Tuesday, March 25^th. An explicit politically-motivated targeting of a union activist, Zeferino’s detainment occurred in Sedro-Woolley, WA while he was driving his partner to her job. Zeferino defended himself by exercising his 5^th Amendment rights and refusing to exit his vehicle, to which ICE officers reciprocated by breaking his car window. He is confirmed to be a recipient of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA).

Zeferino helped found Familias Unidas por la Justicia, a farmworker union in Skagit County, WA as a teen. He is also a volunteer with Community to Community Development (C2C) and a former member of the City of Bellingham’s Immigration Advisory Board.

House Rep. Rick Larsen (WA-02) remarked, “The Trump administration and ICE have claimed that they are going after ‘the worst of the worst’ — but there is no indication that Alfredo Juarez Zeferino and the other people detained today represent the worst of the worst … Immigrating to the United States is legal. Union organizing is legal.”

Zeferino is currently being held in ICE custody pending removal proceedings, according to an ICE spokesperson. The illegal detention of Zeferino is not just a sign of the continued attacks on immigrants, but a direct attack on the labor movement. Class-oriented trade unionists must take the lead in standing up against these fascist attacks. If we don’t, in the near future we may hear, “First they came for the immigrants …”

The post ICE Targets Organized Labor: Farmworker Union Leader Detained in Washington State appeared first on Labor Today.

We urge you to read these resolutions in full (click on the links), join with activists across the U.S. this Saturday, April 5th, and on May Day, Thursday, May 1st to fight back and say Hands Off! our dignity, safety, and security. To find a local April 5th action near you, visit the Hand Off! national campaign website.

RWU Resolution on Solidarity with Unionized Federal Workers

RWU strongly opposes the federal government’s sweeping staffing cuts across agencies, causing harm to public services — especially for poor and working-class communities — and threats to the livelihoods of dedicated civil servants. We call on railroad unions, workers, and labor activists to unite in solidarity with federal workers and actively resist these attacks.

We strongly endorse April 5th and May 1st, “May Day,” as days of action and urge broader labor organizations, including the AFL-CIO, to organize and participate in national efforts defending unionized federal workers.

RWU Resolution in Support of the Railroad Retirement System 

RWU defends the Railroad Retirement System, opposing field office closures and funding restrictions despite the system being self-funded and essential for workers. We call for modernization and protection, urging the government to release internal funds for tech upgrades and to preserve the system’s infrastructure. We urge collective union action, and encourage all railroad workers and retirees to mobilize and advocate for the system’s preservation.

RWU Resolution in Support of Amtrak

RWU supports keeping Amtrak public, and we oppose any efforts to privatize it that would reduce service, compromise safety, and eliminate good union jobs. We call for expanded investment in Amtrak, including more routes, better stations, new trains, and a larger union workforce. We urge unions, communities, and allies to stand with us in protecting and growing Amtrak as a critical public transportation system.

The post HANDS OFF!!! RWU Proposes Action in Defense of Amtrak, Railroad Retirement, and all Federal Workers appeared first on Labor Today.

The Secretariat unanimously considers these statements, which praise the new regime and essentially justify even the recent massacres of political opponents and religious minorities, as unacceptable. The views and statements of both that issued in the name of the WFTU Middle East Regional Office and those of the leadership of the GFTU, do not align with nor reflect the positions and decisions of our Federation’s collective bodies.

In light of these facts, the Secretariat has decided to suspend the operation of the WFTU Middle East Regional Office and to convene, as soon as possible, the Conference of WFTU affiliates from the Arab world, which will take the necessary decisions regarding the responsibility for coordination of the WFTU Regional Office in the broader Middle East region.

The Secretariat

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