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    Hundreds of staff at California national parks to unionize amid Trump turmoil

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    Hundreds of staff at two of California’s most popular national parks have voted to unionize, a move that comes during a troubled summer for the National Park Service, which has seen the Trump administration enact unprecedented staff and budget cuts.In an election held between July and August, more than 97% of workers at Yosemite and Sequoia & Kings Canyon national parks voted in support of organizing a union, according to a statement from the National Federation of Federal Employees. The Federal Labor Relations Authority certified the results last week.“I am honored to welcome the Interpretive Park Rangers, scientists, biologists, photographers, geographers, and so many other federal employees in essential roles at both Yosemite and Sequoia & Kings Canyon to our union,” said Randy Erwin, the NFFE national president.“By unionizing, hundreds of previously unrepresented employees have obtained a critical voice in their workplace and now have the power to make significant changes to benefit themselves and their colleagues.”The vote means 600 workers at the parks, including park rangers, researchers, educators, fee collectors and first responders, among others, will be represented by the National Federation of Federal Employees (NFFE).Labor organizers have been trying to form a union at the parks for years but did not have the necessary support until this year when the Trump administration’s mass firings left the parks service in turmoil, the Los Angeles Times reported.“It comes as no surprise workers in the National Park Service are overwhelmingly in favor of unionizing, as federal employees across the country have been faced with reductions in force, threats to workplace protections, and slashed agency budgets under this administration,” Erwin said.Since Trump took office this year the National Park Service, which manages 85m acres (34m hectares) of America’s public lands, has lost a quarter of its permanent staff, seasonal hiring is down and the administration is seeking to slash more than $1bn from the NPS budget.The US interior secretary, Doug Burgum, has said the cuts were “clearing out the barn”. Despite the upheaval, the federal government has ordered parks to stay open to the public. That has left staffers scrambling to manage the parks amid the peak summer season, and, as the Guardian reported last month, archeologists are managing ticket booths while park superintendents have cleaned bathrooms.At Yosemite, scientists were also cleaning public bathrooms because there were no other workers to do it. Amid the turmoil this year, NPS employees told the Guardian earlier this summer they had received unsigned emails from the office of personnel management urging them to resign and find a job in the private sector.“Every day you come to work and you have no idea what is going to happen next. It’s like we are all being subjected to psychological warfare,” a staffer said this spring.Earlier this year at Yosemite, laid-off employees hung a US flag upside down, a symbol of distress, at the park’s El Capitan to bring attention the cuts.Erwin with the NFFE said the union would take “every step possible” to increase staffing and resources, and defend employees. More

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      ‘He’s brazenly anti-worker’: US marks the first Labor Day under Trump 2.0

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      For this Labor Day, the Donald Trump administration has draped an enormous banner outside the US labor department with his portrait and the words “American Workers First.”Trump was elected on promises, since repeatedly pledged, that he would fight for workers and forgotten Americans. But many labor advocates say that Trump has consistently put corporate interests first in his second term as he has taken dozens of actions that hurt workers, often by cutting their pay or making their jobs more dangerous.Despite his vow to help coal miners, Trump halted enforcement of a regulation that protects miners from a debilitating, often deadly lung disease. He fired the chair of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), leaving the US’s top labor watchdog without a quorum to protect workers from corporations’ illegal anti-union tactics. Angering labor leaders, Trump stripped one million federal workers of their right to bargain collectively and tore up their union contracts.“It’s a big betrayal,” Liz Shuler, president of the AFL-CIO, the main US labor federation, said. “We knew it would be bad, but we had no idea how rapidly he would be doing these things. He is stripping away regulations that protect workers. His attacks on unions are coming fast and furious. He talks a good game of being for working people, but he’s doing the absolute opposite.”“This is a government that is by, and for, the CEOs and billionaires,” Shuler added.Trump has hurt construction workers by shutting down major wind turbine projects and ending Biden-era subsidies that encourage the construction of factories that make renewable-energy products. In moves that will harm some of the nation’s most vulnerable workers, the Trump administration has proposed ending minimum wage and overtime protections for 3.7 million home-care and domestic workers. It has also killed a Biden plan to prevent employers from paying disabled workers less than the $7.25-an-hour federal minimum wage.“There is a huge disconnect between Trump’s pro-worker rhetoric and the policies he’s putting in place. The gulf is enormous,” said Heidi Shierholz, president of the Economic Policy Institute, a progressive thinktank. “In his second term, he’s been absolutely, brazenly anti-worker.”“I keep thinking about his taking away the Biden-era increase in the minimum wage for federal contractors. It’s unbelievably brazen,” Shierholz continued. (Trump ended the requirement that federal contractors pay their workers at least $17.75 an hour.) “The minimum wage is incredibly popular. He just took away the minimum wage from hundreds of thousands of workers. That blew my mind.” As a result, many full-time workers will see their pay drop by more than $9,200 a year.The administration disputes all these criticisms. “The American worker has been left behind by the Democrat party for years, but President Trump has championed an agenda that puts the American worker first,” said Taylor Rogers, White House assistant press secretary.Trump has “unleashed an economic boom”, she said. Inflation is cooling, native-born Americans are benefiting from private-sector job gains and blue-collar wages are rising fast. “Under President Trump’s leadership, Republicans are once again the party of the American worker,” said Rogers.Many labor experts say Trump is even more anti-union than Ronald Reagan, often called the most anti-union president of modern times. Reagan fired 11,345 air traffic controllers who went on strike, but the AFL-CIO’s Shuler said that “pales in comparison” to Trump’s ending collective bargaining for 1 million federal workers. “That’s the largest single act of union-busting in our history,” she said.“He is worse than Reagan when it comes to his approach to unions,” said Julie Su, who was acting labor secretary under Biden. “We saw what Reagan did in the 1980s. That began a long decline in unionization. This president wants to make America non-union again. He’s certainly trying to make the government non-union again.”Shierholz said the “absolute scale of crushing unions” under Trump is “on a whole different scale from what we saw under Reagan. Trump is saying it’s absolutely open season on union folks. He took an absolute chainsaw to the federal workforce. He’s giving the green light to the private sector and local government to do the same.”Justin Chen, president of an American Federation of Government Employees council representing 8,000 Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) workers across the US, is angry that Trump halted collective bargaining for EPA employees, voided most of their union contracts and fired probationary workers. “Whatever he said about fighting for workers was a complete lie,” Chen said. “He treats federal employees with a great deal of disdain, not as civil servants valuable to make our government and economy run.”Many labor advocates say Trump’s signature policies, including tariffs and deportations, are hurting US workers. Trump’s tariffs are pushing up prices and slowing economic growth, economists say. Trump’s “big, beautiful” tax cut will harm millions of working families by cutting food assistance and causing many to lose health coverage. As for Trump’s deportation campaign, many workers say it’s undermining their employers’ businesses and forcing them to work harder because they have to do the work of their departed co-workers.In her annual State of the Unions address, AFL-CIO president Shuler said on Wednesday: “The state of working people in this country is they’re under attack.” She added: “We want cheaper groceries, and we get tanks on our streets. We want more affordable healthcare, and we get 16 million Americans about to be kicked off their coverage.” Shuler said unions will hold close to 1,000 rallies and other events this Labor Day across the US to kick off a year of mobilization.Jenny Smith, a home-care worker in Champaign, Illinois, said Trump’s plan to end overtime and minimum-wage protections for home-care workers shows contempt for struggling, low-wage workers. “Trump doesn’t know what it means to go to work day after day to earn a living,” she said. “If you take away these wage protections, it will take money out of these workers’ pockets. The majority of these workers are Black, brown and single mothers. You’re taking from their children’s mouths.”Smith voiced dismay that Trump hasn’t made good on his promise to reduce prices. “I’m very disappointed that prices aren’t going down,” she said. “I just bought a dozen eggs for $6.”She added: “I don’t think he cares about us, but he does care about the billionaires.”Trump has taken numerous steps that will weaken safety protections for workers. He is cutting staffing by 12% at the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (Osha). His administration has proposed eliminating a requirement for adequate lighting on construction sites. It is reducing the fines that small businesses pay for violating safety rules. It has proposed blocking the government’s mine-safety district managers from ordering upgrades in mine ventilation and safety. It has slowed action on Biden’s effort to protect workers from high temperatures.Trump also froze enforcement of a Biden-era regulation that protects miners from silicosis, a serious lung disease.“Silicosis has become a major killer among coal miners, but the Trump administration is trying to make silicosis great again,” said David Michaels, a professor of public health at George Washington University who headed Osha under Barack Obama. “The Trump administration has taken several steps that are devastating to the safety and health of the nation’s workers. Osha, which is under-resourced and underpowered, has become significantly smaller as a result of the Trump and Doge [Trump’s unofficial ‘department of government efficiency’] cuts.”Michaels warned that Trump’s cuts to Osha penalties will reduce incentives for companies to ensure safe conditions.Administration officials point to the Trump-backed “no tax on tips” and “no tax on overtime” as clearly pro-worker. But Yale’s Budget Lab notes that only 4% of workers in the bottom half by income are in tipped jobs, while almost 40% of tipped workers earn so little they don’t pay federal income taxes.Moreover, the no-tax-on-overtime provision will reduce income taxes far less than most workers realize. The deduction applies only to the “half” in “time-and-a-half” overtime pay. If a worker earns $20 an hour and their overtime rate is $30, that worker can deduct only the $10 premium for each overtime hour, not the full $30.Shierholz said that if Trump were serious about helping workers, “he would raise the minimum wage, make overtime pay double pay and do away with the sub-minimum wage for tipped workers. That would truly help workers, but that’s not what he’s doing. He’s doing as little as possible to help workers, while helping employers.”While Trump says his deportations will create job opportunities for US-born workers, Shierholz’s economic institute forecasts that Trump’s effort to deport 1 million immigrants a year will result in 5.9m lost jobs after four years: 3.3 million fewer employed immigrants and 2.6 million fewer employed US-born workers. “If you don’t have immigrant roofers and framers, you’re not building houses, and that means electricians and plumbers lose their jobs,” Shierholz said. “Plus, you lose the consumer spending from those workers.”Corey Mahoney, a 35-year-old cargo handler at John F Kennedy international airport in New York, said Trump’s policies have whipsawed workers at his warehouse. “The tariff situation has slowed down work, and many people lost their jobs,” he said. When Trump ended protected status for many Venezuelans and other immigrants, some of his Venezuelan co-workers left or were deported. “Some of the people I was working with tried to come to work, but they weren’t allowed,” he said. “We were left with less people, and we had to work twice as hard. It’s unfair.”“Trump is in an alternative universe thinking everything is good,” Mahoney said. “He doesn’t realize that normal people who are just trying to make a living aren’t happy with what he’s doing.” More

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      Union leaders’ exit from DNC exposes ‘mind-boggling’ tensions inside Democratic party

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      As the Democratic party fights to rebuild from a devastating election defeat, the abrupt exit of the presidents of two of the nation’s largest labor unions from its top leadership board has exposed simmering tensions over the party’s direction.Randi Weingarten and Lee Saunders quit the Democratic National Committee, saying it isn’t doing enough to “open the gates” and win back the support of working-class voters. Ken Martin, the new DNC chair, and his allies told the Guardian that the party was focused on doing exactly that.Weingarten, president of the 1.8-million-member American Federation of Teachers, resigned after Martin did not renominate her to serve on the DNC’s important rules committee. In her resignation letter, Weingarten wrote that education, healthcare and public service workers were in “an existential battle” due to Donald Trump’s attacks and that she did not “want to be the one who keeps questioning why we are not enlarging our tent”.Saunders, the long-time president of the 1.3-million-member American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, also issued a critical statement. “These are new times. They deserve new strategies,” he said. “We must evolve to meet the urgency of the moment. This is not a time to close ranks or turn inward … It is our responsibility to open the gates [and] welcome others.”View image in fullscreenSeveral DNC officials asserted that the two departures were a “tempest in a teapot”, insisting that Martin is working to have the DNC welcome more people and battle against Trump. Weingarten and Saunders evidently felt sore that their candidate for DNC chair, Ben Wikler, the head of Wisconsin’s Democratic party, lost to Martin, the officials suggested.Steve Rosenthal, former political director of the AFL-CIO, the main US labor federation, said the resignations were an inarguable blow to the DNC.“When something like this becomes public, there’s clearly a spotlight on it,” he said. “Giving the longstanding leadership role that Randi and Lee have played in the Democratic party, and at a time when the party is trying to desperately improve its image with working-class voters and remake itself in a lot of ways, this is really unacceptable.”In an interview, Weingarten said she wished the DNC was conducting an all-out nationwide mobilization to defeat the Trump/GOP budget bill, which would throw an estimated 11 million Americans off health insurance, cut food stamps to millions of families and cause the federal debt to soar by over $3tn.DNC chair Martin told the Guardian that, under his leadership, the DNC was already doing what Weingarten and Saunders were calling for. “I’ve always called myself a pro-labor progressive,” Martin said, noting that he had been a union member and labor organizer. “My family grew up on programs that would be cut if Trump’s tax scam passes. Winning back the working class and stopping Trump from harming families is exactly where our focus is.”Martin added that in his nearly five months as DNC chair, the committee has held 130 town halls and launched an “aggressive war room” to take on Trump. “My first action as DNC chair was pledging to have strong labor voices at the table,” Martin said. “Our job is to win in 2025, 2026 and beyond.”But their resignation statements signal that Weingarten and Saunders have a very different view from Martin of what the DNC is doing on his watch. Several DNC officials said the pair might not be up to date with the DNC’s activities across the 50 states.Weingarten told the Guardian that Martin and the DNC are not showing nearly enough urgency in opposing the Trump/GOP budget bill. “The number one issue in the next two weeks is: how do we help fight the GOP budget bill that faces almost two-to-one public opposition,” she said, adding that the DNC should be going all out to help House and Senate Democrats torpedo the bill.“We can be the voice and be out there with stories about how the budget bill will hurt, and the DNC is a perfect place for doing that,” Weingarten said. “You got to win hearts and minds now, not in October 2026. That’s the kind of thing that we’ve been looking for since January. We have to be a party that wins on the ground.”Artie Blanco, a union activist and DNC vice-chair, said that under Martin, the DNC had been fighting hard against the budget bill.“There are over 16,000 Democratic volunteers making phone calls across the country in targeted congressional districts about the GOP budget, and how it will be devastating to working people,” Blanco said.Weingarten voiced dismay about not being renominated for the rules committee. “It was definitely a sign that my input was not sought any more and [not] appreciated,” she said, stressing that the AFT “will continue to be a leader in electing pro-public education, pro-working family candidates” and planned to be “especially engaged” in the 2025-26 elections.Jane Kleeb, president of the Association of State Democratic Committees, said that Weingarten’s and Saunders’s “claims that Ken and the DNC are not standing up for working people and not standing on the side of unions and union members is laughable”.“Ken has been on the front line to bring unions back to our party,” added Kleeb, who is also chair of the Nebraska Democratic party. “He has appointed more union leaders than any other [DNC] chair” – and put unions at the forefront while chair of the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor party, before he assumed the DNC’s helm, she said.Stuart Appelbaum, the DNC’s labor chair, and president of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, took issue with the statements Weingarten and Saunders made about Martin.“I am thrilled that Ken Martin is prioritizing the importance of having labor at the table and has ensured that there is strong labor representation in every part of the DNC,” Appelbaum said. He added that Martin “understands that working people are the backbone of the party”.Michael Podhorzer, a political strategist and former AFL-CIO political director, said the Democratic party has for decades not focused enough on working-class voters. He said Democrats would have a tough battle winning back blue-collar voters. “The experience of many American working people is they feel left off the radar,” Podhorzer said.Democrats, Podhorzer noted, have suffered the greatest loss of support in communities that were “gutted” after the 2008-09 recession; from the signing of Nafta, a trade deal with Canada and Mexico; and from normalized trade relations with China. Nafta and normalized trade with China were ratified under President Clinton, a Democrat.Arlie Russell Hochschild, a sociologist who has studied Trump’s success in wooing working-class voters, said the decline of US labor unions over the past 50 years has necessarily meant that unions have less sway in the Democratic party.Rosenthal, the former AFL-CIO official and also a former DNC deputy political director, called on the DNC and Democrats to work far more closely with unions.“Among working-class voters, support for unions is through the roof, and the Democratic party and the Republican party have no credibility with working-class voters,” he said. “They don’t trust the parties, but they trust the labor movement. It’s incumbent on the party to build bridges and put the labor movement front and center in everything it does.”“From that standpoint,” he continued, the tension that led to Weingarten and Sauders quitting “is mind-boggling”. Several labor leaders said Martin should have done more to keep prominent and powerful union leaders like Weingarten and Saunders satisfied and on the DNC, even if they backed one of his opponents for DNC chair.Responding to Weingarten and Saunders’ concerns, Martin said: “The DNC and our partners are leading the fight against Trump’s budget bill, investing unprecedented dollars into states so Democrats can win elections from the ground up, and reaching out to voters in working-class districts.”Martin told the Guardian that he’s trying hard to build bridges with the broader labor movement, and increase its role in the DNC and in the Democrats’ efforts. “Winning back the working class and stopping Trump’s budget bill isn’t a political goal, it’s personal,” he said. “Labor runs through my family’s veins.” More

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      Republicans are dodging fired federal staff: ‘They will not even look in our direction’

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      Workers hit by the Trump administration’s sweeping cuts of federal government jobs, programs and services turned to congressional Republicans for help. But Republicans don’t want to talk about it, according to people who have tried to reach the politicians.Sabrina Valenti, a former budget analyst for the Coastal Wetland Planning, Protection, and Restoration Act at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa), was fired in February, then reinstated, and fired again weeks later.She started contacting Republicans in the Senate and the House of Representatives to express concern. “They represent hundreds of thousands or millions of people and those people deserve a safe and healthy life,” said Valenti. “They are allowing the people who create that safe and healthy life to be fired.”But as she worked with other fired federal workers in the Fork Off Coalition to reach members of Congress, the responses ranged “from indifference and being ignored to outright hostility”, Valenti claimed.Senators Josh Hawley and Chuck Grassley “just will not even look in our direction” in the hallways, she said. Hawley and Grassley’s offices did not respond to requests for comment.The House of Representatives narrowly passed Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful” budget bill on Thursday, which would extend tax cuts for individuals and corporations; sunset clean energy incentives enacted under Joe Biden; relieve taxes on tips, overtime and car loan interest; and fund construction of a wall along the border with Mexico, and facilities for mass deportations of undocumented immigrants.To offset its costs, the GOP has approved funding cuts and new work requirements for Medicaid, which provides healthcare for poor and disabled Americans, and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, also known as Snap, which provides food benefits to low-income families. Analysts fear these changes will bar millions from these benefits.Jeanne Weaver worked as an aide for 35 years at the Ebensburg Center in Ebensburg, Pennsylvania, one of two state-operated facilities for adults with intellectual disabilities, and is worried about the facility’s future .But when Weaver, now president of American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) Retiree Chapter 13, tried to reach her representative in Congress, the Republican John Joyce, she had no luck. Even when she traveled to Washington, she was unable to get a meeting.View image in fullscreen“I’ve called, I’ve left him messages,” Weaver told the Guardian. “If he votes for cuts for Medicaid, I will make sure everyone knows him, because they don’t know him now. He’s hiding out, not doing what his constituents want him to do.”After the Guardian went to Joyce for comment, Weaver heard from a member of his staff. His office declined to comment. On Sunday, after House Republicans advanced Trump’s tax cut and spending package out of a key committee, Joyce claimed the legislation would “strengthen, secure, and preserve” Medicaid for “future generations of Americans who need and deserve these benefits”.John Kennedy, senator for Louisiana, did speak with Valenti – a graduate of Louisiana State University – about her program at Noaa, and its impact on Louisiana’s coast.“He seemed really certain that if there was any, if any mistakes were made in the past, that they would be able to go back and reverse them,” Valenti said. Kennedy’s office did not respond to requests for comment.Other workers reliant on federal funds that have been cut, or are facing cuts, have also been pressuring their elected officials to address their worries.Jesse Martinez, a teacher and co-president of the La Crosse Education Association in La Crosse, Wisconsin, expressed concern about cuts to education, Medicaid and Snap benefits to staff working for the Republican representative Derrick Van Orden.The staff claimed Van Orden would not vote for cuts to Medicaid or Snap benefits, according to Martinez – but he voted for a budget blueprint that included cuts.“In the school district of La Crosse, we receive approximately $500,000 per year in Medicaid funding. We use that to pay for speech and language pathologists in our schools, occupational and physical therapists across the district and school nurses in our schools,” said Martinez. “Losing that funding would be devastating to our kids.”Van Orden argued in a statement that “being fiscally responsible and protecting benefits for vulnerable Americans can exist in the same universe”, and a spokesperson for Van Orden denied the budget bill cuts Medicaid.Stephanie Teachman, an administrative assistant at the State University of New York at Fredonia, and president of Suny Fredonia Local 607, an affiliate union of AFSCME, fears that cuts could threaten the future of the only hospital in her rural area, Brooks Memorial, and the university, which is one of the largest employers in the area.But attempts to speak with her congressional representative, the Republican representative Nick Langworthy, have not elicited any responses, she said.“I’ve been to Langworthy’s office and he’s never there. We’ve written letters to him, and he doesn’t respond,” she added. “All of us deserve to have a voice and be heard. It’s unfortunate the people we vote for aren’t listening to us and they don’t seem to care what people of their districts are up to or what life is like for us.”View image in fullscreenA spokesperson for Langworthy claimed his office did not hear from Teachman until a few hours before a debate on the budget bill. “Not one penny is being cut from eligible Americans who rely on Medicaid,” the spokesperson claimed in an email, accusing Democrats of “dishonest fearmongering”.In Washington, those urging Republicans to resist cuts to key services have struggled to make headway. Senator Bill Cassidy’s office “kicked us out”, said Valenti, who noted the senator Katie Britt of Alabama called Capitol police on some fired federal workers, and that the Indiana Republican senator Jim Banks called a fired health and human services worker, Mack Schroeder, a “clown” who “probably deserved it”.Senators Britt, Cassidy and Banks’s respective offices did not respond to requests for comment. Senator Banks declined to apologize for his remarks following the incident and said he “won’t back down”.Four of the largest public sector unions in the US – AFSCME, the National Education Association, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the Service Employees International Union, collectively representing 8.3 million workers – have launched a new campaign to target GOP representatives over the cuts.The drive includes a $2m ad campaign across 18 congressional districts held by Republicans, including in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, Iowa and Arizona.“Their goal is the gutting of the schools and hospitals that help working Americans have a shot at a better life. And for what? To pay for tax cuts for billionaires,” said Randi Weingarten, president of the AFT. “These ads send a message to Congress about the human toll of the administration’s attacks.” More

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      ‘Really a mess’: US’s air traffic control system suffering from years of neglect

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      Twice in the past two weeks, communications between air traffic controllers and airplanes at Newark Liberty, one of the US’s busiest airports, have failed – leaving controllers unable to communicate with pilots.The outages have, thankfully, only led to massive delays, not disaster. But they have also once again focused a harsh light on the persistent safety problems at US airports, which handle over 50,000 flights a day.As a result of that estimated 90-second communications breakdown on 28 April, many air traffic controllers said they felt traumatized, and thousands of passengers suffered from the hundreds of canceled and delayed flights. A brief radar outage on Friday morning left radar screens black for another 90 seconds – underlining a growing crisis.Political leaders were quick to criticize the rickety state of the air traffic system. Senator Charles Schumer of New York said the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) was “really a mess”, while New Jersey’s governor, Phil Murphy, decried “decades of underinvestment” in air traffic control infrastructure, “delays” in modernizing technology, and “inadequate air traffic control staffing”.The transport department’s inspector general has found that at 20 of the nation’s 26 most critical airports, air traffic control staffing falls below the 85% minimum level, with many controllers forced to work 10-hour days and six-day weeks. After the communications breakdown in Newark, several air traffic controllers there was so shaken that they went on “trauma leave”, leaving that airport even more understaffed.The Trump administration moved swiftly to respond after the alarming episode at Newark. On Thursday, Sean Duffy, the secretary of transportation, unveiled a plan to build a new state-of-the-art system that would overhaul the technology used by the nation’s air traffic controllers. Duffy said his plan would replace “antiquated telecommunications, with new fiber, wireless and satellite technologies at over 4,600 sites”.“A lot of people have said: this problem is too complicated, too expensive, too hard,” Duffy said on Thursday. “But we are blessed to have a president who actually loves to build and knows how to build.”Airlines and the air traffic controllers’ union applauded Duffy’s proposal, but several airline industry experts voiced fears that it would fall short, as have many past plans to fix the system. In a statement, the Modern Skies Coalition, a group of industry associations and experts, said: “We are pleased that the secretary has identified the priorities of what must be done to maintain safety and remain a leader in air navigation services.”The air traffic control system has been through some tough months. In January, a commercial jet collided with an army helicopter near Reagan Washington National airport, killing 67 people in the deadliest aviation disaster in the US since 2001. Trump upset many aviation industry experts and outraged many Americans when he, even before an investigation was begun, rushed to blame the crash on diversity, equity and inclusion.On 1 May, another army helicopter forced two flights to abort their landings at Reagan airport. Newark airport has suffered at least two other similar communications breakdowns since last August. A New York Times investigation in 2023 found that close calls involving commercial airlines occurred, on average, several times each week – with 503 air traffic control lapses occurring in the 12 months before 30 September 2023.For some these latests issues are part of a much older story. “The system’s staffing problems started when Ronald Reagan fired over 10,000 air traffic controllers,” after they went on strike in 1981, said Sara Nelson, president of the Association of Flight Attendants.“And those problems were worsened by his pushing the hatred of government and the dismantling of government. That’s what’s put us on the track to where we are today. There were budget cuts and tax cuts for the rich, and all that stopped us from doing the infrastructure projects and hiring and training that we needed to have a stable system.”The nation’s air navigation system has just under 10,800 certified controllers, but their union, the National Air Traffic Controllers Association, says there needs to be more than 14,300, the number recommended by an arm of the FAA, called the Collaborative Resource Workgroup. There are over 2,000 controllers in training, and the union has urged the Trump administration to increase the number in the pipeline. Training usually takes 18 to 24 months, and getting up to speed to work at the most demanding airports such as JFK and Newark can take more than three years.“There is a shortage of controllers nationwide, but not to the degree it’s occurring at Newark,” said Jeff Guzzetti, an industry consultant who was an investigator for the FAA and National Transportation Safety Board.“There’s been a shortage of controllers for years, if not decades. That shortage was exaggerated by Covid; they couldn’t conduct training for new controllers. Beyond that, they’ve always had a problem finding the right people with the right skills to control traffic and to get people to pass the course work at the training academy and then to get them up to speed.”Many trainees drop out and don’t pass their exams, and many controllers don’t stay in the job because it is so stressful. In recent years, the number of controllers has been relatively flat. The total has declined by 10% since 2012 due to retirements and trainees failing to finish their requirements.“It’s not only the shortage of air traffic controllers. It’s antiquated facilities and equipment and software,” Guzzetti said. Many facilities still rely on floppy disks and copper wire.He said: “It’s all coming to a head now in New York and Newark. Newark has always been the worst in terms of air traffic staffing and modernizing its equipment.”Last September, the Government Accountability Office said the FAA needed to take “urgent action” to deal with its antiquated air traffic control systems. It said 51 of the FAA’s 138 air traffic control systems were unsustainable.On Thursday, Duffy did not say what his modernization plan would cost. The House transportation and infrastructure committee says it would cost $12.5bn to overhaul the air traffic control system, but Duffy says his plan would cost more than that. “Decades of neglect have left us with an outdated system that is showing its age,” he said. “Building this new system is an economic and national security necessity.”On May 1, Duffy announced a related plan filled with incentives that he said would “supercharge the air traffic controller work force.” It includes $5,000 bonuses to new hires who successfully finish the initial training.Joseph McCartin, a labor historian at Georgetown University who wrote a book about the 1981 air traffic controllers’ strike, said that ever since Reagan fired 11,345 striking controllers, “the system has been out of sync”.“The natural rhythm of the system broke down and we never fully recovered,” he said. “We’ve improved over time, but the FAA still has grave difficulty staffing facilities.”McCartin added: “[Elon Musk’s] Doge has made things only worse. The entire system that federal employees operate under has been terribly destabilized. The FAA exists in a world where this entire project of the federal government is teetering.”Robert W Mann Jr, an aviation industry analyst, said that for 40 years there have been FAA reauthorizations approved by Congress, but they haven’t fixed the problems. “Unless you do it right, it doesn’t make a difference what you spend,” he said. “You won’t have solved the root causes.”Nonetheless, Mann said he remained confident about airline safety. He said: “There’s a primacy in this business. Whether you’re working at airlines or the FAA, safety is the first thing.”Mann said that days when an airport faces severe understaffing of air traffic controllers or a crush of airplanes eager to take off as bad weather lifts, there will often be delays to ensure safety. “I’m not worried about safety,” Mann said, “but I might be worried that my flight will be four hours’ late.”Nelson, the flight attendants’ president, said that the US should be thankful to air traffic controllers because their job is so hard, stressful and important. “They should be commended for working in a system that’s crumbling,” she said. “They’re the ones we all need to applaud right now. They’re like the nurses during Covid, when everyone came out at 6 o’clock to bang pots and pans.”A big question now is whether Congress will approve the money for Duffy’s ambitious modernization plan. Nelson said: “I hate to say we’re a canary in the coalmine, but those of us in the airline industry have known for a long time that a lot of this [the air traffic control equipment] has been a problem. What happened in Newark is a sign of what will come in other airports if we don’t get the budget we need.” More

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      Protecting democracy is not enough: five things Americans must fight for | Huck Gutman

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      A recent dinner was peaceable until it was just about over, when a friend’s son spoke up in praise of a middle-of-the-road columnist and how his opposition to Donald Trump’s attack on democracy revealed that we were all on the progressive left now.“Not true,” I responded with more vehemence than I expected. “Wanting democratic norms is not sufficient; it is merely a precondition for meaningful change.” Making sure the US’s plumbing was secure did not mean that anything of importance would pass through the pipes.There has been a great outcry about the erosion of democratic practices during these first hundred days of the second Trump presidency. Many Americans, probably a solid majority, are appalled at the attack on our courts and judges, at the willful ignoring of habeas corpus, at the intrusion of unelected figures – not just Elon Musk, but his whole “department of government efficiency” (Doge) team – into the privacy of American lives, at the undoing of the independence of agencies intended to protect the public.But protecting democracy is not enough. It is a rearguard action, one that fights against incursions that would transform the United States into an oligarchic state serving special interests. It does not address the needs of the larger public. Fighting for procedures and not substance is insufficient.Those who fight for the future of our nation need to fight not just against threats, but for a just and equitable future. Too often the well-deserved plaudits for those who fight against do not extend to articulating a program of what the American nation needs, in addition to democratic institutions.Here are five specific suggestions for what we should be fighting for. Without these reforms, defenses of democracy ring hollow, elevating a defense of form while denying any attention to substance.First, the nation needs a new minimum wage, a living wage, not the residue of 1938 legislation called the Fair Labor Standards Act. No one can live on $7.25 an hour, which translates to about $15,000 a year.Second, Americans deserve healthcare as a right. A Medicare for All system would extend healthcare to every person. Its cost would be more than offset by eliminating the 25% of healthcare spending that goes for overhead in our private-insurance-dominated system. Cutting $1tn of needless bureaucratic expenses and bill-keeping would ensure that we have the money to provide healthcare to everyone.Third, Americans should find it easy to join unions if they wish. The decline in unionization is a major reason why, as the wealthy get ever wealthier, wages have been flat or declining for almost 50 years. As it stands, the table is tilted toward management. Corporations regulate all employee concerns, from wages to healthcare to retirement benefits, leaving workers little to no chance to say what they actually want. We must level that playing field so that workers together can fight for their needs.Fourth, we need to increase taxes on the wealthy. There is no reason that Warren Buffett, as he has said, should pay a lower tax rate than his secretary. Increasing the marginal tax rate for the highest earners, limiting the exorbitant pass-throughs of the inheritance tax, and ending the unhealthy practice of taxing paper gains in wealth, or capital gains, less than the money earned by workers would diminish the federal deficit and at the same time fund many needed services to Americans. Removing the cap on income subject to social security taxes would ensure the solvency of the nation’s pension program for generations.Fifth, we should reverse the deeply damaging Citizens United decision, which enabled the wealthy and their special interests to buy elections. Currently, money and not votes determines the priorities of the United States. If the supreme court does not reverse this decision, a constitutional amendment limiting contributions – one person, one vote, with a low limit on individual contributions and no contributions by corporations – would fix this loophole, which has corrupted all of American politics.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThere is, rightly, much concern about the undemocratic moves made by the Trump administration. But unless we demand changes in what the United States does, unless we do more than just defending the practices of democracy, our society will remain dysfunctional. Those who focus only on the process of maintaining the pipes required for quenching our thirst, without giving us actual water to drink, are fighting only a small part of the battle.What’s giving me hope nowWe need to fight for democracy, but we also need to fight for the achievable goals democracy can bring us, particularly economic justice for all Americans. Raising wages, providing healthcare to all, fostering unions, taxing the wealthy and corporations, preventing big money from buying elections: these are the things the renewal of democracy can and should bring us.

      Huck Gutman is a former chief of staff to Senator Bernie Sanders and an emeritus professor at the University of Vermont More

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      The case for American reindustrialisation | Dustin Guastella

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      A poll from the conservative Cato Institute recently went viral. It found that 80% of Americans think the country would be better off if more people worked in manufacturing. At the same time, only 25% of respondents said they themselves would be better off working in a factory. What should we make of the results?First, there’s nothing contradictory between these figures. It’s easy to see how it would be good for the country to reshore manufacturing jobs, even if it’s not good for you, personally, to work in a factory. Imagine a local pharmacist in an industrial town. He can see how his business would benefit from the expansion of a nearby plant. Yet he could also see that he would personally lose out on a lot of income if he gave up his trade and marched into the factory himself. The same can be said for any number of other workers. The reason so many people find appeals to reindustrialization attractive is because life was undoubtedly better when the old factories in their town were buzzing with activity than it is today, where they sit idle.Second, that 25% figure represents a lot of people. Across the political spectrum, libertarians at Reason Magazine, liberals at the Financial Times, mainstream conservatives, and even some on the far left have misread this figure. They think 25% indicates a woefully low ceiling for appeals to reindustrialization. Yet currently only 8% of Americans are directly employed in manufacturing. If we gave the people what they wanted, we would more than triple the amount of manufacturing jobs in the United States, an increase from about 12.7 million workers to more than 40 million. That is not small, it’s seismic. That a quarter of Americans think they would be personally better off with a factory job – jobs that are often dangerous and difficult – represents a scathing indictment of the so-called “knowledge economy” that promised prosperity but has often delivered devastation instead.Back in 1987, the economists Stephen Cohen and John Zysman warned:“Lose manufacturing and you will lose – not develop – high-wage service jobs.” How prescient they were. Everywhere factories have fled, social rot has followed. Since then, wage growth for most Americans has been stagnant. For those without a college degree it has declined. The promise of a “service economy” was built on the myth that jobs in services could simply replace jobs in manufacturing, without any real trade-off. But, as experience has shown, many service jobs have proved to be stubbornly low-waged. And there is good evidence that, all things being equal, jobs in manufacturing still offer pay advantages over jobs in services. Moreover, as developmental economists have long acknowledged, the health of a nation is tied to the health of its industrial heartlands. Just look at China’s explosive rise to see how important manufacturing is to a nation’s economic strength. Or, alternatively, look at the deindustrialization of the United States, and now Germany, for examples of the equal and opposite effect. A decline, especially a rapid one, in manufacturing is linked to a decline in the social and economic health of the country as a whole.Still, some argue that the only thing special about manufacturing jobs in the US was that the sector was highly unionized and that in a more pro-labor environment, service jobs would make just as much money as factory jobs. For instance, Matt Bruenig notes: “McDonald’s workers in Denmark make more than Honda workers in Alabama.” He’s right. Yet, as he knows, the Danish example doesn’t just show the power of unions, it actually helps make the case for a strong manufacturing sector. For one thing, Danish manufacturing workers make nearly twice the amount that Danish McDonald’s workers do. For another, Denmark employs nearly twice as many (15.7%) workers in manufacturing than does the United States (8%). And, according to the World Bank, manufacturing counts for a significantly larger portion of Denmark’s GDP (about 16%) than it does in the United States (about 10%). Ultimately, a major reason Danish McDonald’s workers can earn high wages is that, thanks to intelligent industrial policy, Denmark has retained its manufacturing sector. It is because blue-collar Danes earn high wages that McDonald’s can afford to pay high wages. The same can’t be said of the United States.While unionized service workers at say, Starbucks, may be able to win significant wage increases through union bargaining, they won’t be able to make anything close to the wages made by union auto workers. And that is not due to a lack of effort or heroism on the part of the baristas. It’s structural. Manufacturing jobs simply have greater wage potential than many jobs in services because they have more room for productivity growth and a higher degree of leverage to win wage demands.Increases in productivity, the amount of work accomplished by each worker in a set period of time, make firms more efficient and more profitable. As productivity increases, so do profits, which can translate to higher wages through bargaining. But service firms and factories have very different productivity curves. A Starbucks store can introduce more efficient espresso machines but ultimately the potential for increased productivity is limited by the nature of the business itself. Starbucks is selling a service, a consumer experience, and it’s hard to increase the per-worker output of an experience. This is a problem across the service sector where the rate of productivity growth remains low. By contrast, manufacturing firms can rapidly increase the output of each worker by introducing new techniques and technologies.As a result, these workers have a regular claim to corresponding wage increases – each year they get more productive, they make the company more money, and therefore the company can afford to pay their wage demands. Still, whether they can win those demands depends on leverage. Here too manufacturing workers have the advantage. A strike in a key auto plant can shut down all downstream operations, resulting in windfall losses quickly. Yet no strike at any given Starbucks store could have the same effect. Productivity and worker-leverage give manufacturing its unique high-wage potential, and for these reasons, a strong manufacturing sector has a salutary effect on the entire economy.Even for union baristas, manufacturing matters.Besides the pay advantages, there are other good reasons for reshoring manufacturing. As John Maynard Keynes argued, national self-sufficiency, the ability of a nation to provide its own industrial necessities, has all sorts of benefits. Including increased leverage in trade negotiations, more sovereignty over economic policy, and greater potential for robust social programs (remember, none of the famously generous Nordic states allowed their major industries to shrivel and die the way that Britain and the United States have). Put simply, if we want more social equality, we need a better economic balance. Consider that in 1960 almost 95% of the clothing worn by Americans was made in the US – today it is 2%. And unionized American garment workers made more then than Bangladeshi garment workers make now.Finally, reindustrialization is great politics. With the left struggling to reach working-class voters, an economic appeal that reaches some 80% of the country is a good way to win back favor. Donald Trump’s chaotic and contradictory policies won’t yield an industrial renaissance, and his fumbling of the economy could make it yet harder to do so, but while we are in the political wilderness the left should figure out the right mix of industrial policies that can bring back manufacturing jobs. We need to figure out an exit path from neoliberal globalization and that involves a wholesale rethinking of trade and industrial policy; immigration and labor market policies; monetary and fiscal policies.The good news is there is hope. As UAW’s president, Shawn Fain, notes, even a modest reorganization of economic policy can result in an instant boost in new manufacturing employment. By the union’s calculations more than 50,000 new jobs could be reshored simply by filling out the capacity of existing plants. That may not sound like a lot, and it’s far short of the 25% figure, but if you’re among those newly employed it could mean the difference between scraping by in a post-industrial town and having a living wage with union rights.Beyond the short term, US deindustrialization, ironically, could be an advantage for its industrial rebirth. After the second world war, Europe saw the most fantastic industrial turnaround ever recorded. Decimated economies such as France and Germany, where industrial towns were bombed to smithereens, suddenly emerged as manufacturing powerhouses. How? The destruction of their old factories gave them a fresh start. Industrial policy-makers didn’t have to deal with stubborn institutional inertia or outmoded infrastructure. While British firms struggled after the war, unwilling to build new plants, French and German manufacturers, with a clean slate upon which to build, surged ahead.Walking through America’s deindustrialized zones is a bit like walking through Dresden after 1945. Maybe then, with a clean slate, we can rebuild better than before.

      Dustin Guastella is a research associate at the Center for Working Class Politics and the director of operations for Teamsters Local 623 More

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      Democrats in Congress warn cuts at top US labor watchdog will be ‘catastrophic’

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      Democrats have warned that cuts to the US’s top labor watchdog threaten to render the organization “basically ineffectual” and will be “catastrophic” for workers’ rights.The so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) has targeted the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) for cuts and ended its leases in several states.Representatives Bobby Scott, Mark DeSaulnier and Greg Casar have written to NLRB’s chair, Marvin Kaplan, and the acting general counsel, William Cowen, requesting answers on the cuts.“If the NLRB reduces its workforce and closes a number of regional offices, it will render the NLRB’s enforcement mechanism basically ineffectual, thereby chilling workers from exercising their rights to engage in union organizing and protected concerted activities,” they wrote.The letter noted the NLRB has already been suffering from drastic understaffing and budget constraints, while caseloads have increased. NLRB field staffing has declined by one-third in the last decade, while case intake per employee at the agency grew by 46%.“The harm to America’s workers by potential directives to reduce this independent agency’s workforce cannot be overstated,” the letter added. “Any NLRB reduction in force (RIF) or office closures would be catastrophic for workers’ rights.”The representatives also requested all information related to Doge’s role at the NLRB, including all communications Doge had with employees at the NLRB or regarding the NLRB with other agencies.Doge is led by billionaire Trump donor Elon Musk. Musk’s SpaceX has challenged the constitutionality of the NLRB. A whistleblower at the NLRB told NPR earlier this month that Doge accessed sensitive data at the agency and took steps to cover their tracks in doing so.The National Labor Relations Board Union, representing workers at the agency, reported last week that Doge cancelled the NLRB regional office’s lease a year early in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, ending it in August 2025.In March 2025, Doge terminated the lease for the NLRB regional office in Memphis, Tennessee. In February 2025, Doge terminated the leases for NLRB offices in Buffalo, New York; Puerto Rico; Los Angeles, California; Overland Park, Kansas; and Birmingham, Alabama.“The NLRB is an agency that has been starved of funding and resources for over a decade. We have seen massive staffing cuts simply from attrition. There is no need for any austerity measures with our operations; Congress has already done that to us.” the NLRB Union stated on social media.The NLRB declined to comment. More

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      USPS workers sound alarm over Trump efforts to dismantle service: ‘The hounds are at the door

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      US postal workers – and many who depend on them – may have sighed in relief when the Trump-appointed postmaster general, Louis DeJoy, resigned last month. Now, postal workers and others fear the worst is to come.Many feared DeJoy, a prolific Trump donor and trucking logistics executive who pushed a 10-year consolidation plan at the agency, would be the man who would finally dismantle the United States Postal Service (USPS). Now the service is facing off with an empowered Trump and Elon Musk, his billionaire backer and chainsaw-wielding leader of his government job-cutting “department of government efficiency” (Doge).At stake, supporters argue, is the very existence of a service woven into US society, which can be traced back to 1775. “These are real threats. The hounds are at the door,” said Don Maston, president of the National Rural Letter Carriers’ Association, the union representing more than 130,000 mail carriers in rural America.Workers and labor unions at the USPS are sounding the alarm and calling for public awareness of the threats of dismantling and privatizing the agency by the Trump administration.In March, the USPS reached an agreement with Doge to cut billions of dollars from its budget and finalize a voluntary retirement buyout program announced under the Biden administration to cut 10,000 employees. The Washington Post has reported industry executives are preparing for government efforts to outsource mail and package handling and long-haul trucking routes, and offload leases for unprofitable post offices.“There are other organizations on the chopping block right now, and it is just an amount of time before they get to us. So we just need to get the message out and get ahead of them to say ‘hands off the post office’,” said Tameka Brown, a rural letter carrier in Louisiana and president of the Louisiana Rural Letter Carriers’ Association. “We are the lifeline for a lot of American people, so to feel that your job is being threatened, it’s heart-wrenching.”View image in fullscreenDeJoy’s cuts are already affecting service, especially in rural areas and states. Wyoming, for example, looks set to lose all afternoon mail pickup.Brown warned that if the postal service is privatized, the services it provides would be eliminated or offered at much higher prices by private companies.“We touch American lives every day,” added Brown. “You’re linked to us throughout your whole life in one way or the other. They need to keep their hands off the post office. Through the rain, sleet, snow and through Covid, we were there. We didn’t miss a day.”Doge was even too much for DeJoy, who reportedly left after clashing with its staff over access to the agency.Last month, Musk voiced support for privatizing the USPS. The idea has been praised on the right, including by staff at the Heritage Foundation, which organized Project 2025, and by Trump: “It’s an idea that a lot of people have liked for a long time. We’re looking at it,” he said last year.Maston of the National Rural Letter Carriers’ Association said Trump had been “floating balloons, seeing what he can get away with and what the reaction is going to be” over his interest in privatizing the USPS. But Trump also seems cautious. The postal service is popular with Americans, and especially rural Americans.“It’s not the US Postal Business, it’s the US Postal Service,” said Maston. “It’s owned by we, the people, you and I and every other American.“The postal service is the No 2 most trusted and loved government agency. The threats and the attacks by the current administration and Elon Musk, it’s all just for a bottom line and to make something that they can make a profit off of, another piece of the pie.”Marc Mancini, a letter carrier in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and shop steward with the National Association of Letter Carriers, said the USPS was already under intense strain. “The way I feel they’re going about it is they’re trying to save money by squeezing more and more out of workers. So you’re getting a lot more pressure from management, upper management, to have the carriers run faster and move quicker,” he said.He noted any changes to the independence of the USPS must be made by Congress, but he said he was worried that the Trump administration might try to skirt around the proper channels.“I think a lot of people cling to the hope that because of that, Trump and Doge cannot fully implement a full privatization of the post office, but I don’t think Trump really cares much for what the constitution says or what the laws are,” Mancini added. “He’s already making threats that if judges rule against them, he’s going to remove them. So I think the threat of privatization should be taken a lot more seriously.”No permanent replacement has yet been named for DeJoy. The Washington Post reported in February 2025 that Trump was considering dissolving the leadership of the USPS by executive order and absorbing the agency into the US Department of Commerce.The White House rejected the report of a planned executive order, though the president said it was being looked into it. Trump claimed during the swearing-in ceremony of US Department of Commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, that the USPS was a“tremendous loser for this country”.View image in fullscreenThe merger proposal was characterized by unions representing USPS workers as an attack on the workers, postal services and the people who rely on them.Brian Renfroe, president of the National Association of Letter Carriers, said the USPS was far from being a “loser”. “It is a public service that does not operate on taxpayer dollars. It’s self-sustaining. It is paid for. It’s funded solely by revenue from people that mail things,” he said.The USPS lost $9.5bn in fiscal year 2024. Indisputably, it faces huge challenges, although 80% of its continued net losses are due to factors outside management’s control. Revenue losses by the agency are not entirely due to operation costs, but from liabilities for pensions and retirements that require policy changes to alleviate, such as enabling better pension investments.“It’s challenging during a period of modernization where they’re trying to change and improve their network, but you have to still provide service every day. It’s almost like rebuilding a ship while you’re crossing the ocean,” said Renfroe. “Maintaining that network and public service where everyone, no matter where they live, receives the same postal services for the same price is ultra important, and that is really where the problem comes in with privatization. That would be virtually impossible to maintain in a privatized model.”Postal workers have held rallies around the US in recent weeks, including those organized by the National Association of Letter Carriers, the American Postal Workers Union, the National Postal Mailhandlers Union and the National Rural Letter Carriers’ Association. Of the 640,000 workers at the USPS, about 91% are union members.Legislation has also recently been introduced in the House and Senate with Democratic and Republican support to oppose privatization of the USPS.Tim Thomason, vice-president of the West Virginia chapter of the National Rural Letter Carriers Association and a retired mail carrier of 33 years who served out of the Princeton, West Virginia, post office, argued that rural communities rely on the postal service even more as many private mail services do not serve them because doing so is not profitable.“Those folks rely on us. I took medicine to disabled people. I pulled cars out of ditches. I changed flat tires. It wasn’t just about being the mailman. I felt like I was part of our community,” he said. “If it is torn apart, then we lose the universal service and and I think that the people that I delivered mail to are the ones that are hurt.”The USPS did not respond to multiple requests for comment. A senior White House official claimed “the Trump administration is not considering privatization of the USPS”.The official added in an email: “Doge is actively assessing ways to cut waste, fraud and abuse while eliminating the presence of DEI in the USPS. The president is committed to ensuring no disruptions to the critical mission of the USPS.” More