By Jake Johnson
"CEOs and billionaires want nothing more than to see workers divided, but we're standing here today with greater solidarity than ever to reach the 60 million Americans who say they'd join a union tomorrow if the laws allowed and to unrig our labor laws to guarantee every worker in America the basic right to organize on the job," AFL-CIO president Liz Shuler said in a statement.
With SEIU included, the unions that make up the AFL-CIO represent roughly 15 million workers across the nation.
April Verrett, SEIU's international president, said union members "are ready to unleash a new era of worker power, as millions of service and care workers unite with workers at the AFL-CIO to build our unions in every industry and every ZIP code."
"Working people have been organizing our workplaces and communities to build a stronger economy and democracy," Verrett added. "We are ready to stand up to union-busters at corporations and in government and rewrite the outdated, sexist, racist labor laws that hold us all back."
"By standing together, SEIU and the AFL-CIO are sending a powerful message to President-elect Trump and his allies who are trying to pit working people against one another."
While neither the SEIU nor the AFL-CIO mentioned President-elect Donald Trump by name in their statements announcing the move, Shuler acknowledged during an MSNBC appearance late Wednesday that organized labor is "going to be on defense, probably right away," as the Republican leader takes office and moves to stack his cabinet with lobbyists and others with deep corporate ties.
"We know that we've got to play a good defense game, but we also, as April and I have been talking about, we've got to be on offense," the AFL-CIO's president added. "Coming together is how we're more powerful and we rebalance the scales of this economy."
This article originally appeared in Common Dreams on January 8th, 2025
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