The Labor Notes conference brought together workers fighting for a better world amidst the threats of AI, attacks on federal workers, and ICE’s terror campaign.
Today’s labor movement faces headwinds both immediate and existential, from the threats posed by AI, to federal attacks on workers’ rights, to assaults on communities by ICE. This past weekend, organizers working to revitalize unions had to contend with another urgent threat: a swarm of 17 tornadoes that touched down across the Midwest on the eve of the Labor Notes conference, a biennial gathering of the “troublemakers” of the labor movement. As 4,700 attendees across the country prepared to convene in Chicago, group chats began lighting up with unfortunate updates: flights delayed, rerouted, or canceled altogether. But just as quickly, organizers mobilized. People volunteered spots in their cars to drive hundreds of miles, hunkered down in storm shelters together mid-journey, and braved eternal layovers.
Xavier Villerol, a worker at Amazon’s JFK 8 warehouse in Staten Island, drove 12 hours with his coworkers to make it to the conference by Friday. When I asked what he was hoping to get out of being here, he told me, “Courage.” He had already met Delta flight attendants fighting for unionization and spoken on a panel with other Amazon workers from across the country. “Meeting people who’ve been in the fight longer than me will help me strive to become a better organizer.”
As Labor Notes’ Barbara Madeloni said at the conference’s opening plenary, the weather was almost “too apt an analogy” for the tumultuous and often dangerous conditions workers are currently organizing under. The last conference was held in spring 2024, before President Trump was elected for a second time and launched a barrage of attacks on the organized left’s funding sources, rights to expression, and physical safety. That year, the conference was enlivened by the recent contract victory of UAW workers who struck the Big Three automakers, and waves of new organizing at Amazon and Starbucks. The workers at Labor Notes have long known that they need to build shop-floor power to guarantee their rights, regardless of who’s in office. But an openly hostile administration creates more obstacles for organizers to overcome, from a neutered NLRB that stalls union elections to the active targeting of union activists by the Department of Homeland Security.
This year’s conference made clear that workers’ responses to this moment of crisis are anything but passive. “It’s about how to defend our rights but not be on the defense,” said Judy Gonzalez, a nurse at Montefiore Hospital in the Bronx and the former president of the New York State Nurses Association, whose members went on a historic 41-day strike this winter. “The very act of coming together, sharing our knowledge, nurturing relationships, and acting toward the world we want—we’re not simply resisting,” said Madeloni. “We are creating the world that bosses and capital try to deny us.”
This year’s conference featured reflections and calls to action from a host of organizers driving victories on the shop floor and in the streets, from federal workers fighting DOGE austerity to Twin Cities teachers defending their students from ICE to immigrant meatpacking workers who recently launched the first major strike in their industry in decades. The fighting spirit of the Labor Notes conference, and its host publication and organizing outlet, long predates the current political moment. Labor Notes has worked to “put the movement back in the labor movement” since 1979, when socialist organizers saw a need to reinvigorate their unions after decades of corrupt or weak leadership that sold out workers. The organization works to build unions led by rank-and-file workers, where decisions are made democratically about how to fight the boss. “If you don’t deal with the shop floor…people are not going to have faith in the union because you’re not resolving their day-to-day misery,” said Gonzalez, adding that she wished the gathering were a month-long.
Over the marathon weekend, workers attended and led nearly 350 workshops and meetups, bringing to life the idea that workers are the experts on their own conditions and how to improve them. Sessions tapped into the trove of knowledge built by worker organizers over campaigns and careers spanning decades, covering topics from contract bargaining “when the boss says they’re broke” to identifying supply chain chokepoints. According to Labor Notes, this year’s event included the largest gathering of Amazon workers in history, from facilities across the United States, Germany, Spain, and beyond. Thirty-eight interpreters provided translation in eight languages to workers from over a dozen countries.
Current Issue
Emily Lumpkin, an electrical worker from West Virginia, said on stage during Sunday’s keynote session that she felt disillusioned with her union, the IBEW, until she attended the last Labor Notes conference. Hearing workers from reform caucuses in other unions like Teamsters for a Democratic Union and UAW Member Action describe how they transformed their unions from the inside to restore power to the members, she realized that rank-and-file leadership can “turn apathy, grief, and anger into action.” Lumpkin is now a leader of the Caucus of Rank-and-File Electrical Workers (CREW), which began organizing in 2023 and has members across 40 IBEW locals in every corner of the United States. “We have the blueprints, and you can build it too.”
At a moment when the federal government is colluding with corporations to scare workers out of taking action, organizers at Labor Notes see their unions as a critical vehicle to exercise their collective power and transform not just their workplaces, but the world. Just as the Covid-19 pandemic laid bare the gulf between the interests of workers and bosses and spurred a wave of organizing by essential workers, the current crisis creates an opportunity to galvanize mass action. “Repression generates militancy,” said Gonzalez, when workers are organized and can help their coworkers overcome their fears. “You have to translate demoralization into militancy.”
More on Labor Notes
Federal workers are currently facing the largest union-busting campaign in American history, with over a million workers losing their collective bargaining rights in 2025 by executive order. The heart of the campaign to fight back is the Federal Unionists Network, which formed at the 2022 Labor Notes conference after federal workers from different agencies met and were inspired to “wake up a lot of the sleepy locals,” said Paul Osadebe, a former HUD attorney who was fired after speaking out about the defanging of the Fair Housing Act. Labor Notes gave them the language and tactics to prepare for the assault on their rights that was to come. “The attack on federal workers is an attack on all working people. They’re doing it to us so that they can get to all of you,” said Osadebe at the opening session. “Being here at this time of crisis is a once in a lifetime opportunity.”
Federal workers’ fight is just one example of how workers at this year’s conference are strategizing around the central role of the labor movement in fighting fascism. “When Renée Good was murdered by an ICE agent on January 7th, our community was galvanized into action,” said Mara Solis, a teacher with the Saint Paul Federation of Educators (SPFE). “We modeled our ICE Out work similarly to how we structure a strike.” Teachers unions used a tiered communication structure developed for strike communications to organize school patrols, grocery delivery, rides to medical appointments and immigration court, and other services for their immigrant community members sheltering at home amid Operation Metro Surge.
In coalition with other local unions and community groups, Solis and her coworkers organized a day of mass disruption, when an estimated 100,000 people across the state marched in the street and abstained from work, school, or shopping. “January 23rd would not have happened without labor,” she told me. This year’s conference gave organizers the opportunity to share tactics with workers from other cities, and strategize about how to coordinate action across the country in the future. “What we saw in the Twin Cities and the incredible overreach of federal agents and violating local and national laws…we believe we have not seen the last of that,” said Greg Nammacher, president of SEIU Local 26, a union of janitorial and security workers. “We, both in the labor movement and in communities, need to be ready to defend our rights.” Just days after the conference, SPFE and the Minneapolis Federation of Educators reported that the Department of Justice had arrested union members, which they believed to be in connection with their organizing during Operation Metro Surge.
One image of striking defiance to ICE’s terror campaign came out of the JBS meatpacking plant in Greeley, Colorado, where workers launched the industry’s first major strike in four decades in March over pay and safety-equipment issues. Employees there speak over 50 languages, hailing from Mexico, Somalia, Myanmar, and elsewhere. “They use the vulnerable workers to keep the system going,” said Tchelly Moise, a representative for UFCW Local 7, which represents workers at the Greeley plant. Workers overcame fears of retaliation from management to launch a historic work stoppage led by over 90 strike captains. “A strike is not just people standing outside holding picket signs,” said Moise. “A strike is a school. It teaches workers who they are. It teaches workers that the company has lawyers, money, managers, but workers have something too. What we have is each other.”
Nathaniel Mann, who works on the cleaning team at JBS, said he’s seen the plant transformed since the strike. Workers won a new contract with wage increases 33 percent higher than JBS’s initial offer, and guarantees that the company will pay for personal protective equipment that employees said they had their wages garnished to cover previously. “It’s the first time I’ve seen people smile there,” he told me. Just a few months after learning about his union for the first time during the strike, Mann made his first trip to a major city for the conference. “I’ve always got something to say, and I usually can articulate what I’m feeling pretty well,” he said. “But I’ve never had such an eye-opening experience.” After meeting meatpacking and grocery workers from other states, Mann is already thinking ahead to the next contract campaign and how to coordinate bargaining timelines across different locals. “That would be huge,” he said. “You could shut down the country if you got everyone coordinated enough to have contracts in around the same time.”
Workers gathered this year at the dawn of a new industrial revolution driven by AI. The working class is vulnerable at this moment of rupture, but it also has an opportunity to galvanize collective action across both blue- and white-collar industries, given how universal the destabilizing effects of automation are likely to be. At the conference, Amazon warehouse associates, software engineers, and entertainment crew members discussed how automation is being used by their managers as a threat to demobilize and disorganize workers. On panels focused on workplace surveillance and the threat of job replacement, workers insisted that they cannot wait for legislative action around AI—they need contract language to address these issues now. “This is the burning question of the labor movement,” said Juan Mereles, a worker at Amazon’s KSBD air hub in the Inland Empire. Amazon has already begun testing and deploying AI-powered machinery to sort packages and algorithmic management systems to move workers throughout the warehouse. Workers discussed how to use AI as an agitational issue in discussions with coworkers, pointing out how it sharpens the difference in interests between workers and management. Mereles said workers have to learn from the industrial revolution of the 19th century, which “led to a concentration of wealth and worker hyper-exploitation,” and fight for democratic control of the work process.
Beyond any one lesson from a workshop, workers come to Labor Notes to be fortified by the sense of community and solidarity, reaffirming their collective values to steel themselves for the fights ahead. “We don’t always win,” said NYSNA’s Gonzalez. “[But it’s about] getting that mentality for workers that they’re obligated to be committed to the struggle in order to survive.” The packed ballroom at the conference’s Sunday closing ceremony indicates that, despite weather woes, the fighting wing of the labor movement appears to be outgrowing its current space.
Popular
“swipe left below to view more authors”Swipe →
Mann said he didn’t fully realize the impact the JBS strike had until he came to Labor Notes. “It really gave hope to a lot of people,” he said. Talking to them, he realized, “I’m not just a worker at JBS. I’m part of something that spans the whole country and across the whole world.” At Labor Notes, workers have a platform to share how they’re fighting—and winning—providing a critical reminder of their collective potential. Alfonso Martínez Valero, an Amazon worker from Spain, said he learned something from his warehouse’s series of strikes in the past year. “The most powerful company in the world still has a problem: They need us,” he said. “And while they need us, we have power.” Naming this power helps workers meet the relentlessness of their struggle with a relentlessness of spirit. As CREW’s Lumpkin declared to a standing ovation at the closing ceremony, “There are no permanent victories and there are no permanent defeats, but there is always a way forward.”
More from The Nation
New work requirements and restrictions on SNAP have kicked millions off the benefit rolls, with more reductions to come.
The gap between what the numbers say and how people are feeling has only grown wider.
Artificial had a roster of premier talent and a topical subject—but it no longer fit in with Jeff Bezos’s financial ambitions.
Greenspan enthusiastically promoted the deregulation that characterized the era of high neoliberalism.
A case for reimagining plantations—the engines of centuries of oppression—as laboratories for economic justice.
The tech mogul will leverage the initial public offering of SpaceX into more sociopathic wealth-hoarding.
