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What does Project 2025 mean for workers? The AFL-CIO has established an interactive website to provide summaries of how its proposals will affect workers. Here are just a few:

• Banning unions for public service workers 
• Firing civil service workers and replacing them with Trump anti-union loyalists 
• Letting bosses eliminate unions mid-contract 
• Letting companies stop paying overtime and allowing states to opt out of federal overtime and minimum wage laws 
• Eliminating child labor protections 
• Urging Congress to pass Sen. JD Vance’s bill to let employers create their own sham company-run unions 

[For more go to: https://aflcio.org/press/releases/afl-cio-highlights-anti-worker-foundation-trumps-second-term-agenda] 

What does Project 2025 mean for the climate? Here are just a few examples of its proposals summarized by the Sierra Club:

• Eliminating or rolling back safeguards that protect Americans’ access to clean air, clean drinking water, and protected public lands
• Dismantling the Inflation Reduction Act (President Biden’s 2022 Clean Energy Plan) that has already created more than 300,000 new jobs, and eliminating tax credits and rebates that are helping electrify homes and businesses across the country
• Handing our public lands over to oil and gas companies to drill whenever and wherever they want, including in some of our most precious and pristine public lands, while leaving us to deal with the pollution and toxic waste they leave behind  
• Halting all government action to reach our climate goals, putting Americans and the U.S. economy at further risk of more extreme weather and a faster-warming planet
• Privatizing the National Weather Service and preventing it from forecasting extreme weather events and providing research on the advancing climate crisis

[For more go to https://www.sierraclub.org/what-project-2025-and-why-would-it-be-devastating-environment] 

There are plenty of reasons for labor, climate and other allies to unite, but the need to fight these common threats to our future should by itself be reason enough.

Many unions have passed resolutions on climate change, but you may wonder how to make them more than “feel good” statements that have no effect on the struggle to protect the climate. The convention of the American Federation of Teachers just passed an action agenda, promoted by its Climate and Environmental Justice Caucus, to implement the strong climate resolutions the union has passed in the past. 

• The AFT encourage all locals to participate in local coalitions and efforts  to advance implementation of the Inflation Reduction Act to transition  their schools, universities and hospitals to clean energy alternatives; and
• The AFT and its locals pressure the States to do more to enable every community to make the energy transition especially by making no-interest loans available for up-front costs for decarbonization for public schools, universities, and hospitals; and 
• The AFT and its locals prioritize low income communities that are, in general, more vulnerable to the predicted ravages of climate change and more likely to experience the high asthma rates associated with burning fossil fuels; and, 
• The AFT and its locals urge and support efforts to ensure our young people engage in robust, meaningful, interdisciplinary climate change and climate justice curricula with the goal of preparing students to participate productively and responsibly in a rapidly changing world, and in emerging green, sustainable professions; and
• The AFT advance this work through articles in American Educator and state-wide communications, paving the way for AFT locals to join coalitions and organize for cities, towns, counties and states to support and facilitate the efforts to implement the IRA in our public schools, universities and hospitals.

For full text of resolution:

https://www.aft.org/resolution/support-decarbonization-our-public-schools-colleges-universities-hospitals-and-city 

By Bakari Height, LNS Transit Organizer

The public is invited to join young organizers and Asian Americans United for a solidarity rally on Sep. 7, 2024 at Noon EST at Philadelphia City Hall to protect Chinatown against unwelcome development. 

Chinatowns hold a special place in what it means to be a diverse city. However, Philly’s Chinatown is once again being the target of a proposal of community-destroying amenity that is now using public transportation as their pawn.  The owners of the Philadelphia 76ers are proposing a new basketball arena on many blocks of the existing Chinatown neighborhood in Central City Philadelphia.  While the existing arena sits next to every other major sports team stadium at the end of one of SEPTA’s subway lines, the owners mark Chinatown’s more centralized location to all SEPTA’s transit lines as a reason for this relocation. While some labor unions support this decision, equating it to jobs, there is a movement to halt these plans which include young organizers.  

I took a walk with Vivian Chang, the Executive Director of Asian Americans United one balmy August Sunday afternoon so she could show me the interconnectedness of her community.  There was a fire station, a community center, a realtor, and of course, many tasty restaurants - all so authentic and some decade-long standing. 

We need transit that supports our communities, not transit that destroys them.

LNS is hosting these organizers on Friday, September 6th at Noon EST  

Join us to hear more from Asian Americans United

According to NASA, on July 22, 2024, the earth experienced the hottest day in recorded history. 

According to an article in AP News, World Weather Attribution, an organization of scientists who run rapid climate attribution studies, found that “Sizzling daytime temperatures that triggered cases of heat stroke in parts of the United States were 35 times more likely and 2.5 degrees hotter because of the warming from the burning of coal, oil and natural gas.” 

Source: https://apnews.com/article/heat-wave-climate-change-causes-blame-4787a8bb1eb3aca0d398f46207f24247

Photo credit: Edgar Franks 

A recent article “Rising danger: Urgency grows for Washington to protect the most vulnerable from extreme heat features” features an interview with LNS Board Member Edgar Franks. Franks is political director of Familias Unidas por la Justicia, a union that represents hundreds of Indigenous Mexican migrant farmworkers in Skagit County, WA.

People who work outdoors, such as landscapers, construction workers and farmworkers, are at especially high risk for heat exposure. According to Franks, the agricultural industry is grueling. During harvest season, workers toil from dawn to dusk with limited breaks and often receive pay that is effectively below the minimum wage. They brave the elements, facing cold rain in the winter and wildfire smoke in the autumn.

During a heat wave in the summer of 2017, 28-year-old Honesto Silva Ibarra passed away while working on a blueberry farm in Sumas, a city in northern Washington. Silva Ibarra, who also had diabetes, requested breaks numerous times but was denied. Four other workers were also treated for heat exhaustion. More than 70 workers went on strike to protest against Silva Ibarra’s treatment and were subsequently fired by the owner, Sarbanand Farms. Franks said the incident catalyzed a movement to fight for climate protections for farmworkers.

Up until that moment, we did not know anything that existed but at least could give any protection for workers for either wildfire smoke or heat,” Franks said. “There was really nothing in the books that we could point to and say, ‘Look, workers that are outdoors all day need these protections to stay alive.’

Familias Unidas por la Justicia petitioned Washington Labor and Industries to better protect outdoor workers, holding rallies and participating in meetings with regulators. Finally, in June 2023, L&I adopted permanent rules requiring employers to provide water, shade, breaks and other accommodations for farmworkers when temperatures exceed 80 F. L&I also adopted more limited rules in December, requiring employers to provide N95 respirators to outdoor workers when wildfire smoke creates hazardous air quality levels.

This summer is the first time these new rules will be activated. Franks said that while he is proud of the changes FUJ advocacy has won, L&I could go further.  He also said he is not sure how the department will enforce the rules to ensure growers are informing workers of their rights at non-unionized farms. Franks hopes employers will not discipline workers for taking breaks that are guaranteed under state law during extreme heat events. “In the past, if you asked for a break, they would fire you almost on the spot,” Franks said.

For full article: 

https://www.realchangenews.org/news/2024/07/03/rising-danger-urgency-grows-washington-protect-most-vulnerable-extreme-heat 

In late August airport, fast food, retail, and farm workers in 13 cities from Atlanta to Los Angeles joined to demand on-the-job heat protections from employers and the federal government. Dubbed “Heat Week,” their action included rallies, town halls, and delegations. They called for immediate action from employers to ensure their safety in the workplace, including adequate breaks and access to drinking water during periods of extreme heat. 

Service workers rallied at major airports in Charlotte, North Carolina, and Phoenix. Phoenix had passed a heat ordinance earlier this year, but its enforcement has been inadequate. At the rally City of Phoenix Councilwoman Betty Guardado asked, “Why is it after passing an ordinance we’re still asking for the basics? Water. Breaks. These are humans rights.” At the end of Heat Week, workers across the country – in a sort of multi-industry mini-strike -- took coordinated water breaks to demand the right to water at work.

Heat Week was spurred in part by the recent heat-related sudden deaths of North Carolina postal worker Wednesday “Wendy” Johnson and Maryland sanitation worker Ronald Silver II.

According to a recent article in Labor Notes, some workers are winning heat protections through direct action on the job. At Amazon’s San Bernardino air hub, for example, workers organizing a union drive established their own health and safety committee. They complained to the state job safety board, which sent inspectors and eventually cited the company for unsafe heat exposure. As a result, they won breaks and cold drinks. IBEW workers in Jacksonville, FL refused to work until they were provided the water they were entitled to under their union contract; the foreman immediately left to get water for them. When a manager failed to respond to workers’ complaints about heat and wildfire smoke at a Starbucks in Prosser, Washington, workers walked out on the spur of the moment. They rapidly moved to unionize and won a union authorization election the next month—and fans in their workplace.

To learn more:

https://grist.org/extreme-heat/heat-week-workers-rally-extreme-heat-protection/

https://labornotes.org/2024/06/beat-heat-how-workers-are-winning-fans-ac-and-even-heat-pay 

Sometimes, the most civil act is to be disobedient. We are living in those times now. Non-Violent Civil Disobedience (NVCD) is central to our country and retaining our freedoms, and to our movements to reverse global warming, restore a livable future, and build a better world. 

Whether it’s protecting reproductive rights, protesting a pipeline, a  coal train, genocide in Gaza, fighting for a world where we all belong, restoring clean air and water for everyone, or many other critical life-affirming issues, the basic right to dissent and protest is under severe attack.

The Koch Brothers, and their American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) started moving anti-dissent legislation at the state level six years ago. Sadly, some unions got on-board. That’s right, they got on board with the same Koch Brothers who have promoted anti-labor legislation across the country.

Their anti-dissent legislative initiative makes protest a crime with large financial penalties and prison sentences. What’s worse is that in some states labor unions carved out exemptions for themselves.

Labor can protest, but no-one else can. 

The right to protest is not issue-specific. You may disagree with pipeline fighters, or people protesting genocide in Gaza, but their right to do so is sacrosanct. In America it is never, ever, unpatriotic to question anything our government says or does.

And when the actions of government and corporations are so disagreeable that they imperil people and planet, it is our solemn duty to dissent and protest. 

When it comes to global warming, our international institutions have failed us, our national institutions have failed us.

We all have to stand up, sit down, get arrested, go to jail, if that’s what it takes. Rosa Parks did it. Cesar Chavez did it. Dorothy Day did it. Doctor King and Ghandi did it, Nelson Mandela, John Lewis, Martin Luther King, Mother Jones, and many others, did it. So can you.

For Joe’s full statement go to https://www.labor4sustainability.org/articles/lns-president-says-protect-dissent/

Excerpts from address by LNS board member April Sims, President, Washington State Labor Council to the Council’s August Convention in Wenatchee WA. 

Fascism is growing in the United States, and globally. Fascism is not a new ideology. But we must recognize what it looks like today, and how it threatens working people. 

Fascism is the forcible suppression of opposition, it is the violent enforcement of a supremacist society, it is the disempowerment of the people and forced obedience to anti-democratic, authoritarian leadership. 

Fascism is the opposite of organized labor, a movement that has been the principal force in this country for turning misery and despair into hope and progress, in the words of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King. We must continue to be that force.

Conceding to fascism is not inevitable. We must stand together. We must fight back. Here is how we do it.

We beat back fascism at the ballot box. We support pro-worker candidates who reject strategies to divide and diminish working people and our communities. 

Here in Washington State, we reject attempts from ultra-wealthy donors to undo the progress this movement has made for working families, and fight to defend what we’ve already won. 

We defeat donor-bought ballot initiatives, and defend a union-made, green energy economy, support for long term care, and tax revenue from billionaires to fund kids’ education.  

Beyond the ballot box, we embrace unity. We reject divide and conquer strategies in our workplaces. We empower ourselves and our coworkers to call out fascism when we see it. 

We center racial and gender justice as an organizing strategy for building the broad, people-powered movement we need to win. We reject the concentration of power in the hands of a few, and instead work towards the liberation of all people.

For the full text:

https://www.thestand.org/2024/07/how-we-beat-fascism/ 

On a summer drive our family stopped at Red Square in New London, CT to visit with internationally acclaimed muralist Mike Alewitz. We toured his Red Square labor art museum. In the photo is (L-R): Joe Uehlein, Anna Grace Uehlein, Mike Alewitz, Lane Windham. We are standing in front of his mural of Joe Hill. 

[For Joe's report on his trip to Red Square, and the Alewitz-Uehlein relationship over the years, click here. ]

Photo credit Wikipedia Commons

Isaac Myers, was born in 1835, was a pioneering Black trade unionist, a cooperative organizer, and a caulker. Since the state of Maryland did not offer public education for Black youth, Myers had to acquire his early education from a private day school run by Rev. John Fortie. At 16, he began work as a caulker, sealing seams in ships.

In 1860, Myers left caulking to work in a grocery business leading him to set up a short-lived cooperative grocery in 1864. He returned to caulking in 1865. After the American Civil War, white workers' competition for jobs led to strikes and protests, forcing over 1000 black caulkers to lose their jobs. Myers proposed the workers collectively pool resources and form a cooperative shipyard and railway, the Chesapeake Marine Railway and Dry Dock Company, to provide themselves with employment. The cooperative, opening in February 1866, was initially a great success, employing over 300 black workers. Myers and others also established the Colored Caulkers Trade Union Society in 1868, to which he was elected president. The National Labor Union took an interest, inviting the Colored Caulkers Trade Union Society to their annual convention. The move was significant for what had previously been an all-white union, but black workers continued to face opposition to membership. In response, the Colored National Labor Union was established in 1869, with Myers as president. 

https://aaregistry.org/story/isaac-myers-labor-union-administrator-born/ 

Our Mission

To be a relentless force for urgent, science-based climate action by building a powerful labor-climate movement to secure an ecologically sustainable and economically just future where everyone can make a living on a living planet.

Making a Living on a Living Planet is published by the Labor Network for Sustainability: