News from AFT Public Employees

No Kings to return Saturday, Oct. 18

AFT members will join with our allies nationwide on Oct. 18 for a No Kings day of action—rising up in every corner of America to defend our freedoms, our democracy and our future. Together, we will say loud and clear: No thrones. No crowns. No kings. We are building community, not division, and demanding dignity, affordability and opportunity for all. Find the “No Kings” toolkit and mobilization information here.

Trump spurs federal government shutdown

Carrying through on earlier threats, President Donald Trump has encouraged congressional Republicans not to negotiate with Democrats on a budget for the new fiscal year, prompting a shutdown of the federal government that began Oct. 1. At the heart of the funding fight, Republicans are trying to take away healthcare from 15 million Americans by making the largest cuts in history to Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act, while Democrats are trying to protect and extend Americans’ healthcare benefits. Find out more, watch a video on higher education staffing and use our shutdown watch page.

Save the research that makes the world better

Karen Schindler runs a lab where she and her students conduct research on fertility—work that could make all the difference for someone starting or building a family. The work is personal: Schindler has her own infertility story to tell. But this research is threatened by the Trump administration’s cuts to science. Learn more about Schindler’s work and why it is important not just to her and her students, but to the thousands of people who could benefit from it.

Trump is trying to wreck our democratic republic

Authoritarianism is not just a distant threat; it’s here, and U.S. democracy is under attack as President Donald Trump follows in the footsteps of authoritarian leaders over the past 100 years. In the fall issue of AFT Health Care, historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat explains how authoritarian leaders from Mussolini to Trump have sought to reshape education, medicine and science—and how they employ propaganda to dismantle the institutions that protect us. But Ben-Ghiat reminds us that history also shows the power of resistance. Unions and everyday citizens have a critical role to play in fighting back.

Shoring up free speech and democracy

In her latest column, AFT President Randi Weingarten discusses her new book, Why Fascists Fear Teachers. Weingarten says the title is intended as a warning, but at its core the book is a love letter to AFT members. “We’re under siege not for anything we do wrong, but for all the things we do right,” she says. In a related discussion, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) Mary McCord of Georgetown Law and Harvard University’s Nikolas Bowie join Marc Elias of Democracy Docket to expose how the Trump administration’s legal tactics and a partisan Supreme Court are undermining the Constitution—and what we must do to defend it.

New ‘Union Talk’ episode: Healthcare under attack

Three nurses join AFT President Randi Weingarten to take us to the frontlines of the Trump and GOP government shutdown. They share how the shutdown and continued attacks on healthcare are impacting them, their patients and their communities. Without action, millions of Americans will lose healthcare, hospitals will close and premiums will skyrocket. The nurses take us inside their hospitals to talk about the real-life impacts of the decisions by the president and Republicans in Congress to shut down the government rather than fix healthcare for Americans.