News

Latest Releases

On Labor Day, Working Families Gird for Election of a Lifetime

Our movement’s accomplishments remain relevant, but this is not a normal Labor Day. We are not in a normal time in history. This may be the last moment voters can repair the damage before we are too far gone.

Texas AFL-CIO to U.S Senators: Renew the $600 - Pass the Heroes Act Now

Texas AFL-CIO President Rick Levy, joined by a group of unemployed Texans on the eve of the cancellation of the $600 per week in unemployment coronavirus federal aid, pushed for the US Senate to pass the HEROES Act.

Texas AFL-CIO Congratulates Hegar, Hails West, Aims to Take Down Cornyn on Nov. 3

The Texas AFL-CIO today congratulated M.J. Hegar on winning the Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate seat, calling on Texans to vote on Nov. 3 for a new national path on issues that matter to working families.

Texas AFL-CIO and Every Texan Propose 10-Point Unemployment Insurance Reform Plan

 The Texas AFL-CIO and Every Texan (formerly known as the Center for Public Policy Priorities) today proposed a 10-point plan for reforming the Unemployment Insurance system in Texas.

Related Webform

Press Inquiries

Press Kits

René Lara

Legislative Director

Jeff Rotkoff

Campaigns Director

Ed Sills

Communications Director

Rick Levy

President

Montserrat Garibay

Secretary-Treasurer

Recent Press Releses

How Big Unions Smooth the Way for Amazon Protests

AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Elizabeth Shuler said the union is using the pandemic to galvanize Amazon workers at company headquarters and enlist support from elected officials. Amazon had over 53,000 employees in Seattle in 2019. “Amazon’s backyard is Seattle, and that’s a major focus for us in terms of how to take the energy, the courage, the activism that we are already seeing there and build that into a real movement,” she said.

AFL-CIO Sues Feds Over Coronavirus Workplace Safety

With states reopening for business and millions of people heading back to work, the nation's largest labor organization is demanding the federal government do more to protect workers from contracting the coronavirus on the job.

What's happening: The AFL-CIO, a collection of 55 unions representing 12.5 million workers, says it is suing the federal agency in charge of workplace safety to compel them to create a set of emergency temporary standards for infectious diseases.

How States and Cities Can Protect Workers During the Pandemic

Even Labor Secretary Eugene Scalia’s recent letter to AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, intended to defend his agency’s performance, offers little in terms of real enforcement. The word “guidance” and its variant “guidelines” appear nine times, as well as the observation that “employers are implementing measures to protect workers” (emphasis in original). Absent from the letter: the word “citation.” The word “penalty.”

As Businesses Look to Reopen, Democrats and Advocates Want More Rules to Protect Workers

“This isn’t just about infection control, which is how the CDC looks at it, this is about exposure assessment,” said Rebecca Reindel, safety and health specialist with the labor organization AFL-CIO. “You look at how people are exposed. Your main source of exposure is other people and so where you’re mainly running into other people right now is the workplace.”

Crisis Communications Case Study: AFGE

Every labor communicator is responding to minute-by-minute changes in policies and practices affecting workers’ livelihoods. ILCA members are challenged to process, manage, and disseminate essential information to both internal and external audiences. Just by doing our work, labor communicators are producing real-time, textbook examples of crisis communications case studies. In this new series, we’ll profile national newsmakers who are amplifying labor’s call to protect the physical and economic health of workers.

Trumka Proposes Universal Federal Jobs Payments

Sticking to a here-and-now solution to coronavirus-caused joblessness, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka proposed the federal government guarantee paid employment – by actually shelling out the money – for all workers. Employers would be a pass-through, nothing more. In a 13-minute speech posted on the federation’s Facebook page, Trumka said that with unemployment at highs unseen since the Great Depression and with the future clouded by millions of jobless people, now is not the time for partisan politics. Instead he declared, lawmakers should unite, as some already have, behind federal subsidies straight into workers’ pockets, and not to CEOs or Wall Street. Trumka also warned, as public health specialists have, against reopening the economy too soon. Right-wing pressure has forced some states to yield and start reopening businesses, even without enough coronavirus testing, a lack Trumka pointed out. Doing so, he declared, could put us right back down again. “If we reopen before we’re ready, if we reopen because we’re impatient, if you send workers into unsafe workplaces, if you send consumers into an unsafe community, we’ll be reopening an economic wound that will make it much harder to heal down the road."