Picnics, parades and empowering workers

This Labor Day, we’re focusing on what all working people deserve. 

Many people associate Labor Day with barbecues, beach outings and back-to-school shopping. But the holiday’s roots go back to the height of the Industrial Revolution, when many Americans—even children—toiled brutally long hours in harsh, unsafe conditions. Labor activism has won many improvements in the ensuing years, but America’s economy still favors wealth, not workers. We’re still fighting for what all working people deserve: fair pay; affordable healthcare, housing and higher education; strong public schools; a voice on the job; and a democracy in which power is derived from the people. These are the essentials for a better life, and that’s why, this Labor Day, America’s labor movement is renewing our fight for what all workers deserve.

Inequality in the United States has returned to Gilded Age levels. Men with a high school degree make 22 percent less than similar workers did 45 years ago. More than 4 in 10 young Americans under 30 say they’re “barely getting by” financially. One in 6 Americans don’t have enough food to eat. All this is happening as the rich get richer: CEO pay has soared 1,085 percent since 1978, compared with a 24 percent rise in typical workers’ pay.

Working families need help, and they are looking to elected leaders to provide it. Zohran Mamdani’s successful primary campaign for New York City mayor was built on a platform of making life more affordable for working people and families. And President Donald Trump promised voters that if they returned him to the White House “inflation would vanish completely”—but his policies have done nothing to lower prices. In fact, consumers are paying higher prices because of Trump’s tariffs.

Instead of helping people afford life’s necessities, Trump and his allies in Congress are making life harder for working people. Their so-called Big, Beautiful Bill is a brazen redistribution of wealth from poor and working-class Americans to the rich. It pays for tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires by ripping healthcare away from millions of Americans, closing rural hospitals, taking food from children in need, stunting job growth, hurting the climate, defunding public schools and, according to the Congressional Budget Office, adding $3.4 trillion to the deficit over the next 10 years. Trump’s big bill isn’t beautiful. It is a betrayal that will make Americans sicker, hungrier and poorer.

Labor Day is a reminder that unions offer one of the surest ways for working people to get ahead. Workers who belong to unions earn more than their nonunion counterparts. They are more likely to have health insurance and retirement plans through their employers. No wonder more than 60 million workers in the United States would join a union if given the opportunity. Support for unions is especially strong among young Americans; nearly 9 in 10 people younger than 30 favor unions.

Here, too, the Trump administration is out of step with what Americans want and deserve. Trump has tried to pack courts with anti-labor judges, and he stacked the National Labor Relations Board with anti-union appointees. He signed an executive order stripping collective bargaining and union rights for 1 million workers across the federal government. And he is following the extremist blueprint laid out in Project 2025, whose dictates include making it harder for workers to form unions.

Why these bare-knuckled attacks on workers’ right to come together in unions? Because unions enable working people not just to ask for things from those in power, but to have some power of their own.

Consider these recent examples of AFT local unions: Staff in two charter schools in Washington, D.C., reached first contracts that agree to give educators a say in school decisions and provide historic raises, including for the lowest-paid school staff, to ensure that students have the support they need. And resident and fellow physicians at the University of Maryland Medical Center unanimously ratified their first contract, which improves working conditions, provides double-digit salary increases, and creates a rideshare program to ensure physicians get home safely after long shifts.

At marches, rallies, picnics and parades this Workers’ Labor Day, workers and union members will celebrate the power we have when we come together to demand dignity, affordability and opportunity. And we will demand that leaders, regardless of party, not just talk about helping working families but also act.