Portside

Labor leaders view this year’s elections – and 2024’s – with special urgency, as a goal-line stand to preserve America’s democracy.

The Covid-19 pandemic undercut feelings of job security at cultural institutions. Now there’s an uptick in efforts to organize.

A plan of a committee convened by the AFL-CIO, Teamsters and Service Employees International Union aims to encourage police union members "to speak up and take action if fellow members are violating their professional oath or abusing their power."

“It is so disrespectful of the agencies and the employers to shunt these cases aside and not do everything possible to investigate the exposures,” said Peg Seminario, a retired union health and safety director.

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka and some of his organization’s largest affiliate unions are getting behind Boston Mayor Marty Walsh. But others are pushing Michigan Rep. Andy Levin, a former Service Employees International Union organizer.

Union leaders hope Biden will be able to enact policies to reinvigorate the labor movement, bringing in more members, money, and political influence while dramatically expanding collective bargaining rights and protections from workplace abuse.

While some in the labor movement are seeking to distance themselves, most are supportive even as they call for reforms.

Similar efforts were successful at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and at The Shed in New York City.

The Supreme Court’s ruling was expected to diminish union membership. But so far, many unions have actually increased their numbers since the verdict. Conservative groups are working to reverse that trend in the long run.

Jerry Wurf, the national president of the public workers union American Federation of State County and Municipal Employees, considered the Memphis sanitation workers’ protest more than a strike; it became a social struggle, a battle for dignity. Wurf called the strike a “race conflict and a rights conflict.”