Still Got the Power of the People
Immigrant workers are still fighting and winning. In Houston, Hilton housekeepers and laundry attendants have just won the first hotel strike in Texas history. They walked the line for 40 days and won a $20 minimum wage. Photo: Texas AFL-CIO
In these terrifying times, I keep thinking of something Racine, Wisconsin, educator Angelina Cruz once said: “There’s a reason we’re supposed to feel isolated and powerless. It’s because we’re not.”
Every day Trump unveils some outrageous new cruelty against immigrants, federal workers, peaceful protesters dressed as frogs, or whoever is the target of today’s Two Minutes Hate. He and his gang of billionaires act like they’re all-powerful—and they’re getting away with so much, so fast, that it’s easy to start believing it.
But they’re not all-powerful. To keep that in view, we should be celebrating and retelling every instance of people power we can find—large and small, in the workplace and beyond.
For instance: Jimmy Kimmel and his union staff of writers got their jobs back.
ABC suspended his late-night comedy show after Trump’s FCC chair demanded “action” against Kimmel for remarks in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination. But the backlash in defense of free speech was swift, with Hollywood unions among the prominent voices. People started canceling their Disney+ subscriptions. Within a week, Kimmel was back on air.
Meanwhile at the Pentagon last week, rather than accept new rules restricting their reporting, nearly every journalist handed in their press badge, and they all walked out together.
And last Saturday, 7 million people turned out for "No Kings" protests, more than 2 percent of the U.S. population. (Trump's terse official response of "Who cares?" suggests that he does. It's giving classic boss: Unions have no power! Definitely don't bother forming one!)
DEFYING FEAR
At the University of Washington, when some jerk walked into a psychology lecture shouting slurs and doing Nazi salutes, dozens of students chased him out of the building—led by their professor, her middle finger raised high.
Brave volunteers from around the world, including union members from Italy, joined the Sumud Flotilla of 42 sailboats carrying humanitarian aid to Gaza. When the Israeli navy halted the boats and arrested the mariners, Italy’s labor federation called a general strike, and 2 million people joined.
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In Chicago, brigades of neighbors have organized to guard school entrances, blow orange whistles when they spot ICE agents, and even chase them away. When agents launched tear gas out a car window near an elementary school, Chicago Teachers Union delegate Maria Heavener quickly mobilized 100 people to line nearby streets and offer safe passage to kids walking home.
Teamsters who work in the cafeterias, buildings, and grounds of the University of Minnesota, many of them immigrants from East Africa, won their wage demands in a five-day strike. They got a solidarity boost from singer Willie Nelson and from union stagehands who refused to cross a picket line as the campus prepared to host a star-studded Farm Aid concert.
In Houston, Hilton housekeepers and laundry attendants have just won the first hotel strike in Texas history. They walked the line for 40 days and won a $20 minimum wage. Many of them are immigrants, too.
In Cedar Rapids, Iowa, the worker center Escucha Mi Voz has been organizing clergy, workers, and neighbors to rally outside the ICE office to defend immigrants who come for scheduled check-ins. Last week a mother was detained for two hours—but then released to the crowd of 150 people chanting "Let her go!"
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I could go on. Tens of thousands of public workers in British Columbia and postal workers across Canada are on strike, despite their government’s recent practice of forcibly ending strikes. A co-worker just sent me a video of jubilant railway strikers storming a Tesla dealership in Paris, singing an anthem, waving neon union flags.
Stories like these were exchanged at our recent Troublemakers Schools in Seattle, Milwaukee, and Durham, North Carolina, where hundreds of state workers, nurses, electricians, letter carriers, Boeing workers, grocery clerks, educators, and more inspired each other to keep up the fight..
Want to do something where you are? Labor Notes is trying something new: local Fightback Schools. We’ve put together a guide that anyone can use to organize one. The idea is to get together across unions to identify which local bosses and billionaires are benefiting from Trump’s assaults, and how you can build power to resist.
There’s a lot we can do. That’s what they want us to forget.
