AFL-CIO President: ‘The State of Our Unions Is Under Attack and Fighting Back’
The leader of the nation’s largest labor federation emphasized, ‘Working people are going to save ourselves,’ in third annual address
(Washington, D.C.)—Liz Shuler, president of the AFL-CIO—which represents 63 unions and nearly 15 million working people—delivered her third annual State of the Unions address today highlighting the resilience and strength of workers who are under constant threat from the Trump administration’s assaults on their jobs, their communities and their unions.
President Shuler shared stories from the AFL-CIO’s 40-plus-city “It’s Better in a Union: Fighting for Freedom, Fairness and Security” bus tour. Her speech included accounts from veterans fired from their federal government jobs and immigrant workers living under the mass deportation agenda, as well as the historic union organizing and contract fights across the country. She described the Trump administration as “government of, by, and for the billionaires,” and stressed that “Republicans aren’t going to save us. Democrats aren’t going to save us. Working people are going to save ourselves.”
The speech also debuted new polling, conducted by the AFL-CIO and David Binder Research, that found:
- Trust for unions is 20 points higher than trust for either the Democratic or Republican party.
- Nearly two-thirds of workers trust unions, while every other major institution—including political parties, the Supreme Court, religions institutions—is under water with working people.
- Among those “on-the-edge” voters who are most worried about their ability to make ends meet, raise their families and retire securely, 75% see unions as their best shot at a decent life and a retirement with dignity.
President Shuler’s address also kicks off the Workers’ Labor Day week of action, during which the labor movement and allies will host nearly 1,000 events across the country in the fight for what workers deserve.
Full remarks, as delivered, are below.
2025 State of the Unions Address
AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler
Washington, D.C.
Good morning, brothers and sisters, union family, and everyone in this country who works for a living.
I’m Liz Shuler, President of the AFL-CIO.
We are America’s Unions: 63 — representing nearly 15 million workers across every industry and every type of job.
If you wake up every morning thinking about how to make it in this economy — how to find a good job; build a career; pay the bills, put food on the table for your family, and live and retire with dignity — We’re fighting for you, every day.
This time each year, we come together to remind this country: Labor Day is our day. It belongs to all working people.
It’s not about back-to-school specials and mattress sales. It’s about the people who will show up to work on Monday, even though it’s a holiday, long before the doors open, cleaning the floors and stocking the shelves.
The teachers who will use their “day off” to put together lesson plans for the new school year. The nurses, and first responders, and restaurant servers, and flight attendants, and fast food workers who won’t get a holiday come Monday morning. Who will put on their uniforms for just another day on the job because they know their communities and their families need them.
Labor Day is about what those workers, and what all workers deserve.
I travel the country a lot. And everywhere I go people ask me: How are workers feeling out there? Where do we stand on things? So two years ago, we started a new tradition: To come together, every year, for a real and honest talk about the State of our Unions.
This is a moment unlike those past two years. Because this is a moment unlike any, in the history of our labor movement and our country.
I’m here at AFL-CIO Headquarters in Washington, D.C., what we proudly call the House of Labor, two blocks from the White House.
Outside this building, there are 2,000 federal troops on the ground: blocking peaceful streets; harassing working people. Costing American workers, as taxpayers, tens of millions of dollars. Money that could be expanding health care, funding our schools, or housing those on our streets. And it’s just one more example of what I have heard from workers again and again these past six months.
Where is the common sense? Where are the lower costs on my groceries, my rent, my medicine? Why are my job, my family, my future, my community, the services I count on suddenly being threatened and ripped away?
Every year we think about a word that captures the State of the Unions at this given moment: Strong, rising, whatever it may be. This year there is only one possible answer.
The State of the Unions — the State of Working People in this country — is under attack.
We’ve seen greedy CEOs and billionaires before, haven’t we? What we’ve never seen is those same CEOs and billionaires being handed full control of our government; our democracy; our lives.
13 billionaires in one picture. 4 of whom now run agencies of our federal government.
If you ever meet someone who says that the word “oligarchy” is too confusing or too complicated — well, you can explain it in that one photo. This is a government of, by, and for the CEOs and the billionaires.
But we also need to recognize: It’s been that way for a long time now. These struggles — the precarity people are living with, when it comes to their rent, their health care, their fears about A.I. and the future — it didn’t start with Donald Trump.
It started with a system that has left people behind for a long time now. That has put CEOs over construction workers, Billionaires over baristas. That has gutted labor rights over the past 40 years — and not a coincidence, saw income inequality rise to its highest level ever.
FDR once reminded us: Democracies have gone away in other great nations. Not because people hated democracy. But because people gave up liberty in the hopes of getting something to eat.
If we push people to the edge — to the point where they can’t afford groceries, or health insurance, or a place to call home — we can’t be surprised when they turn against the system they’re living in.
This is the choice working Americans have been given: Chaos or the same broken status quo.
An authoritarian who tells us only he can make things great again, or convincing ourselves everything is already great — while Black women make 64 cents on the dollar, young people struggle to pay rent, and a CEO that makes 7,000 TIMES what his workers make. That has led us to this moment.
We wanted cheaper groceries and we got tanks in our streets. We wanted affordable health care. We got 16 million Americans who are about to be kicked off their coverage. We wanted jobs you could raise a family on. But that’s not what we got. We got more American workers laid off last month than any month since the start of the pandemic.
The American people said loud and clear: Unions are the one thing we agree on. Instead this Administration attacked us — and the workers who keep this country going.
Veterans like Shernice Mundell. Who served this country in the Air Force, came home and kept serving in our government for years, to make sure retired post office workers got their benefits. Until an email one night in March, at 11pm, telling her she was fired, along with thousands of others.
Lumber mill workers like Luis Gomez Garcia, in upstate New York, who did everything he was supposed to do. Got a work permit. Got a job, supporting his family and his two young daughters. Until immigration officers showed up at the mill and arrested him, without cause, and pulled his daughters out of school.
Federal workers like Derek Copeland, in Georgia, at the Department of Agriculture, who made sure food being imported into the country was safe to eat. Until one morning in February, when he got a letter saying his employment wasn’t in the “public interest.”
This Administration wants us to look at stories like these and say: It’s not my job, my livelihood. Maybe there will be more for me if someone else loses. They want to convince working people that we are each other’s enemies. That we need to fight one other to land a good job; to find a home in a safe neighborhood. That only so many of us can live with dignity at the same time.
We are not each other’s enemies. We are each other’s neighbors. Friends. Co-workers. We are each other’s brothers, sisters, and family.
Whether we work for the public sector or private sector, whether we are immigrants or fourth-generation, whether we are gay, straight, trans, Black, white, blue state, red state — we are all suffering under this same broken system.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Things can be different if we build real, sustained power that shows up every day — not just once every four years.
Politics alone won’t fix what’s wrong with this country. Not when there are members of Congress on both sides of the aisle more worried about their re-election than they are helping working families. Who would happily let you get automated out of a job, if it meant they got another campaign check from the CEO doing it.
Republicans aren’t going to save us. Democrats aren’t going to save us. Working people are going to save ourselves.
For the past few months we’ve been in the field, conducting our annual poll of working people.
We asked workers of every age, political background, sector of the economy how they feel about their lives right now. Who they trust and believe in and who they don’t.
Here’s what we heard: People have lost faith in every institution in this country. Our Political Parties. Our Supreme Court. Our Religious Institutions. Corporations. Our Media. Every single one of them is underwater right now, in terms of trust. Yet nearly two-thirds of this country believes in unions.
And when you ask the most vulnerable workers in this country — workers who say: “I’m living on the edge, I don’t have time for politics, because I’m too busy trying to get by, I just want someone, somewhere to help me build a better life” — those workers still have faith in one single thing.
75% of those workers say they believe in unions. They believe that joining a union is their best shot — to build a better life, a more secure life, a brighter future for themselves and their families.
They believe because they have seen us deliver, again and again. When this Administration ripped away the collective bargaining rights of one million of our brothers and sisters in the federal workforce — jobs that families and communities count on — we organized. We took them to court. We rallied outside our elected officials’ offices.
We shaped legislation that politicians from both sides of the aisle rallied around, the Protect America’s Workforce Act, that would restore those rights. We are one step away from passing that legislation, and to every member of Congress watching out there: Let’s get it done!
When this Administration fired Federal workers who have made up our civil service for decades — disproportionately hurting Black workers and communities of color — cutting the programs so many working families depend on, telling our educators, don’t talk about Harriet Tubman and the Tuskegee Airmen in our schools, our teachers, our civil servants, our members all over this country stood up and said: “Hell no!”
And when this Administration came for immigrant workers — when our brothers and sisters who have contributed to this country, contributed to our communities, were snatched off the streets, disappeared and detained in for-profit prisons without charges or due process — we rallied around them. We trained an entire grassroots army of union activists, organizers, and members so we could exercise our constitutional rights, and fight for their release, and keep them here with their families, where they belong.
That ability to take on power, to create and build power of our own — it’s what unions do. It’s in our blood. It’s how we won the weekend, and paid vacation, and the 8-hour work day, and Social Security. It’s why, in states with the most unionized workers, all workers make more money, more people have health care, and there are greater investments in our schools.
It’s why workers all over this country know: It’s better in a union.
And it’s why, right now, we’re the ones to lay out the vision for where this country needs to go. To rally people around common-sense values we can all agree on. To unite working people around the freedom, fairness, and security that we all deserve.
Next Monday is not just Labor Day. It’s the start of Labor Week. Marches and rallies and trainings, hundreds of thousands of working people coming together, from this coming weekend to next. Kicking off the single biggest year of action, from now until next Labor Day, in the history of this movement.
Every single thing working people have won for ourselves in this country’s history — it’s not because we asked those in power. It’s not because they were handed to us. It’s because we fought for them relentlessly — by organizing, and mobilizing, and using our collective power.
The standard at the turn of the 20th century was a 60-hour workweek until workers in Chicago refused to bow down to the greed of their bosses. Discrimination was the norm until the labor movement and civil rights movement came together, and fought for the Civil Rights Act and Fair Labor Standards Act. They told immigrants and women workers we had to choose between liberty and getting something to eat. Until in 1912, up in Lawrence, Massachusetts, textile workers said: “We refuse to make that choice.” And the Bread and Roses movement was born.
That same spirit is alive today, now more than ever.
I see it in working people all over this country — in the workers this past year who have fought and won their own, and seized their power: Whole Foods workers in Philadelphia, public school educators in Virginia, Wells Fargo branch workers in Florida, EV battery workers in Tennessee, nursing home workers in Alabama, and thousands more.
There will always, always be those who try to divide us, who tell us we’re up against too much money, too much power.
They may be right if we go it alone. But when we come together, incredible things happen.
So if you believe in common-sense, no matter what political party you belong to, if you’re ready to stand up to the CEOs and the billionaires, if you’re ready to fight for your sister, your brother beside you, if you’re ready to build the kind of country that workers deserve, come join us.
Happy Labor Day. Thank you.