Marble Falls      Back in the day, we used to call the Economic Policy Institute, the “good EPI”, because there was a rightwing business poser trying to troll them with the same initials, which of course was the “bad” EPI.  ACORN tussled with them regularly since they were on the other side of us in our numerous fights to raise the minimum wage in US cities and states.   All of which led me to make a note when an email hit my in-box for a session arguing that “Amid this escalating US worker rights crisis, states across the country are stepping up to strengthen threatened labor standards, level the playing field for unionizing workers, and expand pathways to collective bargaining.”  Hey, we can all make time for some good news in these hard times for unions and workers, so, “sign me up!”

Listening to a researcher at the beginning of the session was in fact encouraging on some fronts based on the new numbers from the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics.  US union membership over the last year grew by 500,000, moving the total to 16.5 million members in organized labor.  Amazingly, this was in the face of drastic losses in some areas, like Trump’s attack on unionized federal workers.  Importantly, she reported that the growth was also among workers younger than 45, where the more recent trends in membership had been with older workers 45 and up.  Also, significant was the fact that more than half of the growth was in the Southern states, the least unionized area of America.  Those factoids were all very, very interesting.

Then, there’s the rest of the story.  The researcher in her words had “done her due diligence,” and tabulated 300 anti-worker actions by the Trump administration in their first year of the second term, and, no matter how hard she looked, she couldn’t find even one single positive pro-worker measure.  Her list included the attacks on immigrant workers of course, the stalemate at the NLRB, the rollbacks of worker protections on wage and hours, equal opportunity, and health and safety, as well.

The better news was supposed to be that states were advancing workers’ interest, even as the federal government was retreating.  Possibly, when EPI first scheduled this session, that seemed the case, but the panelists reported a different story.  In Virginia, the legislature expanded organizing rights for hundreds of thousands of workers, but in a last-minute movement by the legislature left homecare health workers out of the bill, disappointing a huge segment of workers.  University healthcare workers also still faced opposition.  Washington State also reported a narrow defeat in the effort to expand workers’ rights to organize.  Protections for immigrants were also not extended as hoped by progressive labor groups.

All of that was hard to swallow and made it difficult to paint a happy face on the environment for unions.  I also may have missed something, but there were no reports of progress in the South, despite the earlier report of significant interest and success in unionization now being achieved in the South.  Much of that seems to be in spite of state opposition, rather than advancing a theory of states being able to fill in the gap of federal retreat.

We need to put the best face on progress that we can, but despite the kernels of good news on the call, it was hard not to sign off and not feel we are still very much under the heel, nationally and locally.