Are unions the answer to fascism? Any worker considering going to war against the bosses will tell you that the first obstacle they must get passed is their union leadership. The AFL-CIO and their affiliates around the US are the actual handmaidens of fascism. Based in Washington, DC, blocks from White House, they were silent when Trump fired 300,000 federal workers, 100,000 of them Black women. They remained silent as Trump stripped more than one million federal workers, roughly 80 percent of unionized federal workforce, of their collective bargaining rights. When asked about the possibility of the 15-million-member labor federation calling for a one-day general strike in response, AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler said, “We are not there.” (NYT, 1/27/26)
In NYC, with the highest union concentration in the US at around 35%, the story is the same. Few unions answered the call to stop ICE from snatching our coworkers off the streets and out of the courtrooms. And even among those that have responded the best, like more than 200 members of the CUNY Professional Staff Congress (PSC), the leadership’s outlook remains lining workers up to vote for the Democratic Party, the same racist warmakers that got us here. The NYC Central Labor Council has allegedly endorsed the May Day march in lower Manhattan, but there is no mention of it on their website, which is also true for the largest city-workers union, AFSCME. The union leaders and the Democratic Party fear seeing millions of workers in the streets, defying injunctions and violating their contracts, as much as Trump & Co. Certainly, I'm all for organuizing a union on your job, but what we're up against is much bigger, its the whole profit system. And the unions are fully invested.
There are plenty of problems with institutional unions, which I write a lot about, but if unions were the handmaidens of fascism then fascists wouldn’t be trying to destroy unions.
Now that Adolf the cheating golfer has killed the National Endowment for the Arts, I am so hoping that my unions can fight this along with the Courts--except, of course, The "Supreme Court", which is now just another branch of a huge golden check made out to the majority of the berobed frauds who call themselves "Justices".
Are unions the answer to fascism? Any worker considering going to war against the bosses will tell you that the first obstacle they must get passed is their union leadership. The AFL-CIO and their affiliates around the US are the actual handmaidens of fascism. Based in Washington, DC, blocks from White House, they were silent when Trump fired 300,000 federal workers, 100,000 of them Black women. They remained silent as Trump stripped more than one million federal workers, roughly 80 percent of unionized federal workforce, of their collective bargaining rights. When asked about the possibility of the 15-million-member labor federation calling for a one-day general strike in response, AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler said, “We are not there.” (NYT, 1/27/26)
In NYC, with the highest union concentration in the US at around 35%, the story is the same. Few unions answered the call to stop ICE from snatching our coworkers off the streets and out of the courtrooms. And even among those that have responded the best, like more than 200 members of the CUNY Professional Staff Congress (PSC), the leadership’s outlook remains lining workers up to vote for the Democratic Party, the same racist warmakers that got us here. The NYC Central Labor Council has allegedly endorsed the May Day march in lower Manhattan, but there is no mention of it on their website, which is also true for the largest city-workers union, AFSCME. The union leaders and the Democratic Party fear seeing millions of workers in the streets, defying injunctions and violating their contracts, as much as Trump & Co. Certainly, I'm all for organuizing a union on your job, but what we're up against is much bigger, its the whole profit system. And the unions are fully invested.
There are plenty of problems with institutional unions, which I write a lot about, but if unions were the handmaidens of fascism then fascists wouldn’t be trying to destroy unions.
I love that picture of her. It captures the exact moment Trump sucked her soul from her body
Now that Adolf the cheating golfer has killed the National Endowment for the Arts, I am so hoping that my unions can fight this along with the Courts--except, of course, The "Supreme Court", which is now just another branch of a huge golden check made out to the majority of the berobed frauds who call themselves "Justices".