The 3,000 teachers and support staff of the Oakland Education Association walked out May 4, shutting down all 85 elementary, middle, and high schools.

After a bruising three-year fight, workers at school bus manufacturer Blue Bird in Fort Valley, Georgia, voted May 12 to join United Steelworkers (USW) Local 697.

One of the reasons this process takes so long is that the many who are in power now are afraid of change. Here’s some of the excuses we heard for not supporting revitalizing amendments at the convention last month. We break them down, and you can see why they just don’t make any sense.

LAS VEGAS—The movement for union democracy, campaigning for directly elected leaders who are much more accountable to members, has come to the United Food and Commercial Workers, the AFL-CIO’s third-largest union.

A growing group of workers, “Essential Workers for Democracy,” or ewd.org, is campaigning for reforms in the 1.2-million-member union.

The world, even then, could often feel hopeless and cruel, but within that heat we felt transformed, energized, empowered by a truth we held together, by a faith in something greater than each of us that bound us together in a common cause.

Growing worker power and changing the culture of an entrenched, status quo form of leadership is a frustrating and slow process. But it's worth the time and effort it takes to achieve the member power a union needs to be successful and to grow. 

A 2022 Gallup poll found that 71% of Americans support organized labor, higher than at any point since 1965.

This enthusiasm presents a huge opportunity for workers to organize our workplaces. But one thing standing in our way is a growing $340 million industry of “union avoidance” consultants. Essential Workers for Democracy believes that unions need to spend at least 30% of their budget on organizing. Because the “union avoidance” firms we’re up against are a serious threat.