Labor leaders call on local groups to unite, protect worker rights

Presenter: Labor Day weekend 2025: Union leaders say worker rights and protections are being threatened by the Trump administration and at our local institutions of higher education. Sean Townsend:

Sean Townsend (APWU Local 679): My name’s Sean Townsend. I’m the vice president of APWU (American Postal Workers Union) Local 679 here in Eugene.

For seven months, the Trump administration has waged unrelenting war on federal workers and their unions. Jobs have been lost by the thousands. Hundreds of thousands of employees have had their union rights stripped away. Nationwide labor contracts have been tossed aside. This is not just policy. This is a systematic dismantling of worker power.

[00:00:42] The latest blow came just days ago. The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals declared that the very structure of the NLRB likely violates the Constitution. (Boo!) They have targeted the safeguards that protect NLRB, judges and board members from presidential interference.

[00:01:05] Make no mistake: This decision is a green light for more attacks, more lawsuits, and more attempts to strip federal agencies of their ability to stand up to executive overreach.

I would also like to point out some key legislature that they are trying to weasel their way through the process.

[00:01:26] HR 2174, aka the Paycheck Protection Act. An agency may not deduct any amount from the pay of an employee for labor organization dues, fees, or political contributions. What? That’s right. (Boo!)

[00:01:48] Which goes in tandem with our next entry: HR 1210, aka the Protecting Taxpayers’ Wallets Act of 2025. This allows management to charge federal unions who cannot strike, by the way, for the time their union reps spend handling union business like grievances, contract issues or worker protections. (Boo!) The cost would be based on the union rep’s hourly pay, multiplied by the hours they spent on union work.

[00:02:24] The implications of this being: (1) Federal unions can’t legally strike. (2) Instead of the agency covering the cost of union time, union members themselves. We’ll have to pay for it and it will be expensive. And (3) This makes it harder and more expensive for unions to represent workers. This is by design. Boo.

[00:02:51] They want it to be as inconvenient as possible for us to continue the fight, but here’s the worst.

[00:03:00] S 1006, aka the Federal Workforce Freedom Act, which is anything but. This bill is to prohibit federal employees from organizing, joining, or participating in labor unions for the purposes of collective bargaining or representation, as well as other purposes. Boo! Shame.

[00:03:26] The other purposes they allude to will allow them to instantaneously will allow them to instantaneously cancel collective bargaining agreements, cancel any arbitration, dispute resolution, or grievance proceeding currently in process, which means that anything we are currently bargaining for is now gone on the passing of this bill.

[00:03:50] Boo! This is the end goal, people. They don’t like unions because they know if we exist and we stand together, we’re a force to be reckoned with. And they’ve already laid out the playbook.

[00:04:03] It’s my belief that they will do everything in their power to get unions in general, not just federal ones. It hit me the other day. This fight isn’t just politics, it’s a story as old as time—one that history repeats over and over.

[00:04:22] Mae Bracelin (UAW Local 8121): My name is Mae Bracelin. I’m a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, and I’m the interim president of UAW Local 8121 UO Student Workers, which represents the nearly 4,000 unionized student workers at the University of Oregon.

[00:04:40] Until about a week ago, I was proud to be a leader in my dining hall, but unfortunately alongside at least 57 other dining workers, I was laid off by the university.

[00:04:53] This is not an isolated incident. The university has laid off an unknown amount of student workers as well as targeting both non-tenured and tenured faculty for layoffs. This means a de facto end to tenure at the University of Oregon. Boo. That’s shame. That’s shame. Shame.

UO claims that all of this austerity is necessary due to a drought in funding from the state and federal governments, and I won’t deny that the money is drying up.

[00:05:24] What I will say is that to me, the numbers don’t make sense. How can the UO simultaneously justify paying our University President Karl Scholz over three quarters of a million dollars every year, not to even mention bonuses with no expected cuts, while slashing worker positions, slashing student employment and slashing faculty? Doesn’t make sense. Doesn’t make sense to me.

[00:05:49] To me, paying a massive sum to a bloated administration and refusing to consider pay cuts while slashing employment—it’s a war against its workers. That’s right. And we won’t treat that lightly. Campus labor will not respond to that lightly. Workers on campus demand a fair financial restructure, financial transparency from the university and co-governance between administration and workers. We won’t settle for less.

[00:06:19] Let’s take a closer look at what departments UO is trying to cut. On the cutting block right now is religion, Indigenous race and ethnic studies, women and gender studies, multiple languages, Holocaust studies, Judaic and Arabic studies.

[00:06:33] So let’s call this what it is. It’s not financial readjustment. It’s ideological compliance. That’s right. It’s deference to the state ideology of the Republican party and of President Donald Trump. And that’s f—ing shameful. That’s really shameful.

[00:06:51] UO doesn’t want to stick out and get targeted. It doesn’t want to protect its students. It doesn’t want to protect its workers. It doesn’t want to protect its curriculum. It just wants to protect its administrative salaries.

[00:07:04] But that doesn’t have to be how things are. I believe in a better world. And that’s why I’m a member of the DSA—of the Democratic Socialists of America. To me, that better world is called democratic socialism, a world where working-class people don’t have to fight and die for good education or decent health care. A world where institutions like our university are ran by the workers and not CEOs undemocratically appointed by the governor.

[00:07:37] And this next part, it might be a little hard for some of us to swallow.

[00:07:41] My parents, their parents before them were lifelong Democrats, lifelong union members. They did their duty, they voted blue no matter who. So listen, when I tell you that’s not how I feel, and it’s not how an increasing amount of young people like me are feeling across this country.

[00:07:59] Gavin Newsom doesn’t believe that trans women should be able to use the women’s bathroom. Kamala Harris said that we should leave trans rights up to the state. I have trans comrades in DSA across the south. I have heard their horror stories. I understand deeply that the Republicans would just like us all executed, but it seems that the Democrats look at our struggle with indifference.

[00:08:23] I’m proud to join the 100,000 dues-paying socialists across the country in the DSA who are fighting for a new party that believes unflinchingly in trans liberation, working-class power, and independent political action.

[00:08:41] So wherever you fall on the political spectrum, whether you’re a socialist, a progressive, or you just don’t really like Trump, you need to understand we have a war to win. It’s a war in our own backyard. It’s a war on our shop floors, and we must, we must demand an end to the illegal and violent deportations that the federal government is pursuing through its Gestapo—through ICE—we must further demand an end to the targeted austerity impacting our education system and our public employees.

[00:09:17] We know that working people deserve more. We know that working people deserve the world.

[00:09:29] Daniel Cortez (APWU, Portland): My name is Daniel Cortez. I am proud to represent the postal workers of Oregon.

[00:09:32] I come from a long line of union activists. My great-grandmother was a Teamster in the Bay Area in the 1950s. My grandmother was a staff member at the York Oregon Education Association up in Portland in the ‘60s. My father and stepmother members of the Utah Education Association and my mom was an APWU member and my stepdad, a longtime machinist. Labor’s in my blood.

[00:10:04] Traveling here this morning from Portland, I just happened on a station that was doing an acoustic set and there were three great labor songs in a row that they played in honor of Labor Day Weekend. And I want to just read the lyrics for a moment from one of them.

[00:10:20] ‘This one’s for the workers who toil night and day, by hand and by brain to earn your pay, who for centuries long past for no more than your bread, have bled for your countries and counted your dead.’

[00:10:36] We are facing an existential crisis like never before. We are on the verge of looking at the same anti-union anti-worker propaganda and tools that our union forebearers had to endure at the turn of the last century.

[00:10:57] We must engage. We must. Yes. Right now we are seeing the dismantling of our federal institutions, hundreds of thousands of federal workers stripped of their union protections. (Boo!)

[00:11:12] At the beginning of the year, Trump tried to illegally move the post office into the Commerce Department.

[00:11:23] We fought with the Great Postal Strike in 1970 to pull the post office out of direct presidential involvement and out of the Cabinet. Trying to put us back under his direct authority is nothing more or less than union busting. And when he couldn’t do that, he turned his eyes on the rest of the federal workforce.

[00:11:46] We are hanging on by a thread because the law gives us as postal workers specific collective bargaining rights that the rest of the federal workers are seeing stripped day in and day out, left and right. Because not only do they want to bust the unions, but they want to deny those services to the American people, race to the bottom so that they can then privatize those services and sell it off to their billionaire cronies to make a profit.

[00:12:18] Yeah, it’s unconscionable. (Boo!)

[00:12:21] I love to see the Uncle Sam costume here. It reminds me that the U.S. Postal Service is the second-oldest federal institution. When rebellion was being considered, they recognized that they needed an army. Can’t fight what then was the greatest army on the planet if we don’t have an army of our own.

[00:12:45] A month later, a year before the Declaration of Independence was signed, the post office was created because binding the nation together and allowing free and fair and equitable communication they knew then that it was essential. They know now that it’s essential.

[00:13:05] The postal service delivers medicine to seniors, people on Medicare and Medicaid, and to our veterans. I think of my father-in-law who, before he passed, lived in Southern Oregon, remote, out on BLM land. Vietnam Vet. All of his medication came to his PO Box in Wolf Creek, Oregon. They wanted to shut that office down.

[00:13:33] What’s going to happen to the hundreds of thousands, the millions of people that rely on medication via the mail when they privatize? Sure, urban areas like Eugene, like Portland will probably continue to have delivery because they’re profitable. Rural communities are going to be gutted and devastated. We cannot allow this trend to continue.

[00:14:01] We must fight back against all of the nonsense that’s coming out of the White House. But when we stand together as working class, as working families, and we recognize that workers’ rights are essential human rights, then we have a chance. Yeah.

[00:14:27] I want to thank everybody so much for coming out today. It’s great to see my larger union family here and all of our community and neighborhood allies. We must continue to put pressure on the oligarchs.

[00:14:41] We also need to talk to our union members who may not see it yet. I know in our own union we have people that somehow think that DOGE coming into the post office could be a good thing. No, it’s insanity. We must take the time to reach to those people to have those conversations, even if they’re tough conversations, and make sure that we all recognize that what unites us is so much greater and stronger than what divides us.

[00:15:17] Adrienne Mitchell (Lane Community College Education Association): Hi, everyone. My name’s Adrienne Mitchell and I’m the president of the Lane Community College Education Association, speaking today to share our grave concerns about attacks on higher ed by the Trump administration and policy parallels affecting LCC and our faculty in our very own community locally.

[00:15:36] A quintessential purpose of higher education is to encourage the vibrant, free exchange of ideas; to not only welcome but to celebrate divergent viewpoints; to provide space and a platform for debate and protest. Higher ed is a sector that is a catalyst for social movements and systemic change for the common good, where academic freedom, a most precious gem, forms the very bedrock for our democracy.

[00:16:05] But higher ed is under attack. The Trump administration’s cuts to grant funding, to quash protest, and efforts to reduce options and protections for student borrowers and to limit public service loan forgiveness put higher education further and further out of reach, especially for working people.

[00:16:27] Travel bans, restrictive visa policies and mass deportation of immigrants dramatically impact international student enrollment and leave immigrant students, workers, and families in fear.

[00:16:40] Federal funding cuts like mass layoffs at the Department of Education weaken public education at all levels and threats against sanctuary states and institutions that promote DEI policies and curriculum strike at the heart of academic freedom, pushing our nation dangerously closer to autocracy and ideological tyranny.

[00:17:03] Here in our community at LCC, we’re seeing a decrease in international students. Our immigrant students, colleagues, and families live in fear of deportation. At the same time, corporate interests and relatively large donations flooded our recent Board of Education elections promoting anti-worker, anti-DEI candidates.

[00:17:23] The impacts on our faculty at LCC and the broader community have been significant. In our little microcosm of Lane Community College, we are witnessing a crisis of democracy with an administration that is removing authority from the publicly elected Board of Education members who represent the people of our community.

[00:17:47] For example, in May, the administration decided not to offer the Licensed Practical Nurse Program next year—which is a pathway out of poverty for our students and a lifeline for our community’s health care needs—without any vote of the board of education, without notice to the public or prospective students, without any hearing or opportunity for public comment at open meetings.

[00:18:09] Also, in July, the state Oregon Employment Relations Board found that LCC violated the law by engaging in multiple unfair labor practices, including surveillance of union emails and other violations.

[00:18:28] In addition, we’re seeing draconian anti-worker, anti-union bargaining proposals and contract negotiations with faculty where the LCC administration is proposing to cut health care benefits and shift cuts to workers; implement mandatory overloads for full-time faculty, which result in job cuts for part-time faculty; strike the language that ensures our students have access to the health clinic and provides funding for curriculum that reflects the needs of marginalized communities; significantly reduce faculty privacy rights to their email mailboxes, electronic files and even personal material. They want to slash job security by converting full-time positions to part-time contingent work.

[00:19:16] And the LCC administration proposes that part-time faculty would be subject to removal from their already precarious, underpaid jobs that they would not be protected from removal for exercising their rights to non-discrimination, privacy, free expression of divergent viewpoints, academic freedom, union activity, and participation in civic life outside LCC, free from institutional censorship like we are all doing right here today.

[00:19:49] What can you do to support faculty? We’ve got faculty all around with these blue T-shirts asking for your support to sign our petition. There’s a rally this Wednesday at 5 p.m. at LCC outside the cafeteria and a board meeting at 6 p.m. This is not just about wages and benefits. The LCC administration’s proposal is like what we see happening in the legislatures in red states, in Trump’s policies, in Project 2025.

[00:20:15] It is not only anti-union and anti-worker. These changes seek to fundamentally undermine public sector service for the common good, which in higher education is foundational to our broader democracy.

[00:20:28] Our higher education institutions are a public good. Our colleges are by the people and for the people. As a union, as workers, we will stand in solidarity for our students, for our community. As a labor movement, we must stand steadfast shoulder to shoulder for the future of our democracy.

[00:20:55] Lonnie Douglas (Eugene Springfield Solidarity Network): Hello. My name is Lonnie Douglas with Eugene Springfield Solidarity Network / Jobs With Justice. That’s a mouthful. And yeah, I’m here today with all of you because you know, workers’ rights are under attack. Workers are under attack. Everyday Americans are under attack, not just from the current administration, but from the billionaires that are out there, from corrupt politicians, and it’s imperative that we all stand up and fight back.

[00:21:29] We haven’t seen this kind of unprecedented attacks on labor in years. I mean, in the last six months since Trump took office, we’re seeing our unions are being told that they no longer have collective bargaining rights.

[00:21:44] They’ve just come out and said that the National Labor Relations Board, the NLRB, is unconstitutional. Very soon our unions will not even be able to get, if something happens and they go to the NLRB, they’re not going to be able to get their issues addressed.

[00:22:04] So what are we going to need to do? We need to take and come together as communities, whether we’re on the right, whether we’re on the left, whatever our ideologies or politics are, it doesn’t matter because what matters is we’re all workers, we’re all citizens, and the people that are attacking us are the corrupt corporations, the billionaires and the corrupt, and they’re corrupt politicians that they own, and honestly, they own ’em all.

[00:22:33] Does anybody here disagree? No. They own ’em all. They do. And so what we need to do is we need to build, we need to build coalition, we need to build networks. If you belong to an organization, one of the biggest problems that we have in our movement is that we unintentionally silo. We don’t reach out to each other.

[00:22:56] We only reach out to the people in our small circles. If we do that, we will lose. We are fighting a class war. Regardless of what you’re passionate about, whether it’s the environment, whether it’s the issues that are happening, the genocide in Palestine, whether it’s ending war, whether it’s workers’ rights, we all have to stand together and support each other in our fights. Even if you don’t necessarily agree with everything that somebody next to you is pushing, find the things that you do agree on and work together on those.

[00:23:33] If you don’t, the enemy that we fight, the enemy that we are facing, they are well-funded, they’re well-organized, and they’ve been waging a war on us for decades. We’re in the situation that we are in because we allowed ourself as a nation and as a people to get to this situation.

[00:23:54] For year after year, we voted for the lesser of two evils, and every time we get worse and worse evils. So we need to start finding our power as workers. We need to start disrupting the status quo, and if we do that, we have a chance to win. We have a chance at a revolution.

[00:24:18] I’ve been all around the world in the service. I have seen real bloody revolutions. We don’t want that in our country. We don’t need that in our country. We still have the ability to fight back and have a revolution that our children won’t have to suffer. We won’t have to watch people die en masse.

[00:24:44] Will it be easy? It won’t be easy. Will people get hurt? They will get hurt. But if we don’t have the courage to do it, your children, your grandchildren, your great-grandchildren, they will suffer.  So we need to stand up and fight back.

[00:25:00] Presenter: A grim message for Labor Day 2025, as the Trump administration and Congress continue to roll back hard-won protections for workers. Field recordings from the Park Blocks Aug. 31 by Todd Boyle for KEPW 97.3, Eugene’s PeaceWorks Community Radio. You can watch the entire rally on Todd’s YouTube channel.