MINNEAPOLIS—Entering her second full-term as AFL-CIO President, Liz Shuler laid out big plans for the nation’s labor federation over the next five years. For the current midterm elections, the federation plans to put 50,000 “election protectors” in the field.
Accepting her re-election, unopposed, at the AFL-CIO Convention’s opening session in Minneapolis, Shuler also set a target of organizing two million new members over the next five years—the term to which delegates unanimously elected her and Secretary-Treasurer Fred Redmond.
“And that’s a floor, not a ceiling,” Shuler declared.
That may be a tall order, but it’s not impossible. The federal Bureau of Labor Statistics calculated the nation’s unions—in and out of the AFL-CIO—combined to add a net of 410,000 new members in 2025, rising to 14.665 million. It was the biggest increase in the last 11 years.
Starting in 2015, BLS calculations show union members hit 14.82 million in 2017, then declined to 14.012 million in 2021, due to the coronavirus pandemic. The numbers have risen each year since.
AFL-CIO membership has also grown. Eight unions joined last year, led by the two-million-member Service Employees, who left the federation more than two decades ago.
“We are here to ensure we get all the money and all the power and all the respect that we deserve,” said SEIU President April Verrett.
And then Shuler set another goal, this one regarding increased labor participation in the elections. She stated that in the last election,14 million union members and their families voted. She wants to increase that number to 16 million this time around
One big reason: Defending democracy. The Trump-GOP-corporate threat to the nation’s democratic laws and norms was a big theme not just of her speech, but of other speakers who marched to the convention podium.
“We are the only institution with the power to meet any challenge,” she declared. “We defend our democracy….we give people hope, and we get shit done.
“I’m not done with that, and neither is anyone else here. We’re just getting started.”
Interestingly, delegates to the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists convention several weeks before reported that they are interested in more than just “defending democracy” but in jumping full-scale into a fight to “build democracy.”
Redmond also hit those themes in his acceptance address.
“This administration is corrupt to the core,” he said of the Trump regime. “He does not care for Americans—only for himself.
“And his idea of ‘winning’ is deepening inequality and trampling on our rights.” But Redmond also warned that restoring such freedoms and reducing inequality would be a hard road with some bumps and defeats, adding that people should not let that discourage them.
“As Dr. King said in 1967, there is such a time as being late” to respond to force. “This also is one of those times.”
The net 409,000-person union increase brought the overall total to 14.7 million unionists in the U.S., which is far below 17.7 million in 1983, the first year for which figures are available. Still, Shuler said, union membership now “is at its highest in 16 years.”
Public opinion polls show approximately 70% of U.S. workers would unionize if they could. And last year’s numerical gain still left union density at 10%.
That’s the big reason the AFL-CIO has pushed hard for the last several years, regardless of GOP domination of the federal government, to enact the Protect the Right To Organize (PRO) Act.
But that GOP domination of the government led to what Shuler repeatedly calls “the largest single act of union-busting in American history,” Trump’s unilateral erasure of more than 30 contracts, covering a million-plus federal workers, represented by the Government Employees (AFGE). Trump even labels that union an outright “enemy.”
“The last year and a half has been difficult,” AFGE President Everett Kelley admitted. “Trump targeted our members, starting on day 1.”
The PRO Act would make organizing easier by removing many of the corporate and legal obstacles to unionization drives, as well as to achieving first contracts.
Neither the PRO Act nor any other legislation that labor favors to make the economy much fairer than it was before Trump took office can happen unless there is a positive outcome in this fall’s election.
Trump, Shuler said, boasts about a great economy. But it’s great only for Trump and the oligarchs who support him and who he speaks for. Not for workers.
“It’s time to build a new economy,” Shuler declared, by using every bit of that credibility to turn the nation around. Paraphrasing John F. Kennedy, she added: “A rising tide doesn’t lift all people if it only lifts up the yachts” of Trump and the billionaire class.
And noting how many workers are living paycheck to paycheck, or—recent data shows—exhausting their savings and maxing out their credit cards just to survive, she declared, “Life in the richest economy in the world doesn’t have to be like this.”
“But first things first, we have to get the right people in office” to make those changes, Shuler said. And labor’s enemies are “the most powerful people [who] want to silence us.”
To stop them, “we’ll put 50,000 election protectors” in the field and staff hotlines to field reports of voter intimidation and repression. And Shuler promised unionists will “start showing up at every voting place ICE is at” referring to Trump’s army of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents—and their violent and vicious tactics, particularly in Minnesota.
The agents have also been violent elsewhere, notably Los Angeles, Chicago, and D.C., but other Trump troop violence has been reported everywhere from Portland, Ore., to Cape Cod.
The Minnesotans, who are hosting the four-day convention, got their due from the podium and the crowd for their organized resistance to Trump’s violent and vicious ICE and Border Patrol agents. Applause for them was sustained as delegates were overcome with emotion as they praised their heroic actions against unprecedented attacks on democracy.
The agents killed union member Alex Pretti, a Veterans Administration nurse and Government Employees (AFGE) member, and observer Renee Nicole Good.
Both U.S. citizens were observing the agents’ mass sweeps, detentions, and tear-gassing during Operation Metro Surge in January. State officials, though deprived of federal cooperation in their investigations, have labeled both deaths as homicides.
Bottom-up resistance after Pretti’s murder shut down the Twin Cities as more than 100,000 people poured into the streets in minus-20-degree weather in protest. Others who couldn’t join helped out by serving hot food or providing shelter from the chill.
In the meantime, the AFL-CIO will continue to organize, with particular attention paid to organizing so-called “gig economy” workers. Those include two big groups of rideshare drivers in Massachusetts (70,000) and Illinois (100,000).
The Machinists and the Service Employees helped the drivers lobby lawmakers to permit them to organize and bargain under state, not federal, labor law.
The Massachusetts drivers organized and unveiled their plans last month. The Illinois legislature approved its pro-rideshare-driver legislation in early June.
Another facet of the new economy, artificial intelligence (AI), will also mix with politics as labor’s legions hit the streets this year. The Teachers and several other unions are already skeptical of draft legislation being crafted by a bipartisan duo of lawmakers to place few federal reins on AI and its potential to displace humans—while also barring states and cities from regulating AI use and abuse.
That led Shuler, who has declared corporate abuse of AI to eliminate millions of jobs is unacceptable, to warn in her speech that any presidential hopeful—she singled out California Democratic Gov. Newsom and Trump by name—who does not support a workers’ say in AI and its future will not have labor’s backing in 2028.
Electrical Workers (IBEW) President Ken Cooper, nominating his own member, Shuler, for re-election, hit that theme, too. “The billionaire class could have broken us, but because of Liz’s leadership, the American labor movement is stronger than it has been in decades. And because of her leadership, politicians on both sides of the aisle got that message.”
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