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The Troublemakers of the Labor Movement Are Still Fighting–and Winning

The Labor Notes conference brought together workers fighting for a better world amidst the threats of AI, attacks on federal workers, and ICE’s terror campaign.

Today’s labor movement faces headwinds both immediate and existential, from the threats posed by AI, to federal attacks on workers’ rights, to assaults on communities by ICE. This past weekend, organizers working to revitalize unions had to contend with another urgent threat: a swarm of 17 tornadoes that touched down across the Midwest on the eve of the Labor Notes conference, a biennial gathering of the “troublemakers” of the labor movement. As 4,700 attendees across the country prepared to convene in Chicago, group chats began lighting up with unfortunate updates: flights delayed, rerouted, or canceled altogether. But just as quickly, organizers mobilized. People volunteered spots in their cars to drive hundreds of miles, hunkered down in storm shelters together mid-journey, and braved eternal layovers.

Xavier Villerol, a worker at Amazon’s JFK 8 warehouse in Staten Island, drove 12 hours with his coworkers to make it to the conference by Friday. When I asked what he was hoping to get out of being here, he told me, “Courage.” He had already met Delta flight attendants fighting for unionization and spoken on a panel with other Amazon workers from across the country. “Meeting people who’ve been in the fight longer than me will help me strive to become a better organizer.”

As Labor Notes’ Barbara Madeloni said at the conference’s opening plenary, the weather was almost “too apt an analogy” for the tumultuous and often dangerous conditions workers are currently organizing under. The last conference was held in spring 2024, before President Trump was elected for a second time and launched a barrage of attacks on the organized left’s funding sources, rights to expression, and physical safety. That year, the conference was enlivened by the recent contract victory of UAW workers who struck the Big Three automakers, and waves of new organizing at Amazon and Starbucks. The workers at Labor Notes have long known that they need to build shop-floor power to guarantee their rights, regardless of who’s in office. But an openly hostile administration creates more obstacles for organizers to overcome, from a neutered NLRB that stalls union elections to the active targeting of union activists by the Department of Homeland Security.

This year’s conference made clear that workers’ responses to this moment of crisis are anything but passive. “It’s about how to defend our rights but not be on the defense,” said Judy Gonzalez, a nurse at Montefiore Hospital in the Bronx and the former president of the New York State Nurses Association, whose members went on a historic 41-day strike this winter. “The very act of coming together, sharing our knowledge, nurturing relationships, and acting toward the world we want—we’re not simply resisting,” said Madeloni. “We are creating the world that bosses and capital try to deny us.”

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This year’s conference featured reflections and calls to action from a host of organizers driving victories on the shop floor and in the streets, from federal workers fighting DOGE austerity to Twin Cities teachers defending their students from ICE to immigrant meatpacking workers who recently launched the first major strike in their industry in decades. The fighting spirit of the Labor Notes conference, and its host publication and organizing outlet, long predates the current political moment. Labor Notes has worked to “put the movement back in the labor movement” since 1979, when socialist organizers saw a need to reinvigorate their unions after decades of corrupt or weak leadership that sold out workers. The organization works to build unions led by rank-and-file workers, where decisions are made democratically about how to fight the boss. “If you don’t deal with the shop floor…people are not going to have faith in the union because you’re not resolving their day-to-day misery,” said Gonzalez, adding that she wished........

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