This Labor Day, working people across the country are marking the holiday not just with parades and picnics, but with a hard reckoning: The ground beneath them is shifting fast, and the 2026 midterms are the best chance to push back.
Start with the paycheck. The official unemployment rate seems stuck at around 4%, but that doesn’t include the people whose benefits have run out or who’ve given up looking after being unable to find a job. It’s part of a longer slide—job creation collapsed in 2025 to just 181,000 for the entire year, a fraction of what’s needed to keep pace with a growing workforce. Meanwhile the cost of groceries, rent, and everyday goods keeps climbing, with tariffs pushing prices higher still.
Federal workers have been hit hardest of all. The Trump administration has terminated well over 100,000 federal employees since taking office, gutting agencies and canceling union contracts along the way. Black workers, who make up an outsized share of the federal workforce and for generations relied on government jobs as a pathway to better incomes, are bearing the brunt: Black unemployment climbed to 6.9% in 2025, and for Black women it jumped to 6.7%, both sharp increases over the year before.
Add in the human cost of ICE raids tearing through workplaces from meatpacking plants to warehouses, uprooting immigrant workers and their coworkers alike. “Just because you’re not seeing violent conflict does not mean there is not a significant impact on the members and the communities,” said UFCW Local 1189 President Adam Evenstad, whose members have organized to protect coworkers targeted by raids. Fellow UFCW Local 663 President Rena Wong put it simply: “This is what it means to be a union, this solidarity. It should be the core of who we are—that none of us are alone.”
Meanwhile, National Guard troops remain deployed in Washington, D.C.—a “temporary” occupation now extended through 2029—as well as in Memphis and New Orleans, both majority-Black cities, at a cost of roughly $3 million a day—money critics say could instead house every unhoused person in the capital.
And this year’s war against Iran, with billions of dollars already spent and Trump still asking for more money for weapons, shows where Washington’s priorities lie.
Republican legislatures are also moving just as aggressively when it comes to voting rights. They’re redrawing congressional maps in states around the country to erase Black representation ahead of November, aided by a Supreme Court ruling that weakened protections against racial gerrymandering. In Congress, meanwhile, they continue to push the so-called “SAVE Act,” which is another effort to strip people of their right to cast a ballot.
Labor isn’t standing still. “We want to make sure our elected officials are answering to workers in this midterm election and beyond,” AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler said recently. “We have to build the coalitions to fight Big Tech and the billionaires.”
This Labor Day, unity is the assignment, and November is the test.
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