What Did Workers Have to Say in 2025?
Michigan’s Labor Legacy sculpture (detail), Hart Plaza, Detroit. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.
Despite experiencing the harm of corporate greed and our collapsing social safety net firsthand, workers remain underrepresented in mainstream media. Here at Inequality.org we do our best to counteract that blind spot by publishing pieces with worker voices front and center. Not only do we give workers a platform to voice their perspectives, but we also help disseminate their opinions to newspapers and other media across America through our OtherWords editorial service.
Below is a selection of the worker perspectives we published in 2025. If you’re also a worker interested in sharing your thoughts, don’t hesitate to get in touch with us at inequality@ips-dc.org.
1. Get on the Job and Organize: A Q&A with Jaz Brisack
Jaz Brisack’s 2025 book “Get on the Job and Organize” traces the labor organizer’s experience from Nissan plants in the South to forming part of the nucleus taking on Starbucks to fighting for a union at Tesla. Inequality.org managing editor Chris Mills Rodrigo spoke with Brisack to discuss key takeaways from those hugely important campaigns and the path forward for the labor movement.
2. Fighting for Fair and Fast Contracts
The anti-union playbook is well rehearsed at this point: sow uncertainty among workers with propaganda and promises that employers will listen, as long as a union doesn’t get in the way. But even if workers successfully win an election, companies have a trump card in their back pockets: delay a first contract as long as possible. Registered nurses Sarah Johnson and Jason Fratangelo have experienced that tactic firsthand. Since winning an election at Michigan’s Corewell Health East in 2024, the company has used every excuse in the book to delay contract negotiations. That’s why Johnson and Fratangelo wrote a piece supporting the Faster Labor Contracts Act, which would require employers to come to the bargaining table after just 20 days.
3. We Closed JFK8 After a Sewage Pipe Burst, One of Many Victories for Amazon Teamsters This Year
Speaking of delaying contract bargaining, that’s just what Amazon has done since workers at the company’s JFK8 facility in Staten Island shocked the country by voting to unionize in 2021. Despite the company’s intransigence, the union at the warehouse — now affiliated with the Teamsters — has been giving a critical voice to workers. When the bosses refused to do anything about a sewage leak at the facility last August, Yackisha Nebot Lopez and other workers successfully organized to demand to be sent home with pay.
4. Political Gerrymandering Is an Attack on Working Families and Black Voters Like Me
Assaults on worker rights came from all sides in 2025. Fran Marion, a fast food worker and organizer, detailed how a plan from Missouri lawmakers to redistrict the state would suppress working-class participation in elections and facilitate the roll-back of hard-fought labor wins. “We were already living in modern-day economic slavery,” Marion wrote. “Now they’re trying to put us in political slavery too. But we won’t let them.”
5. We Started a Co-op to Empower Workers
When Flequer Vera was thinking about starting a business, he was worried about replicating the same economic system that he’d struggled through as a migrant worker years earlier. Inspired by a trip to Spain’s Basque Country, Vera opted for a cooperative model. The company he helped found, Sustainergy, has helped retrofit thousands of homes in the Cincinnati area to be more energy efficient. But the primary success of Sustainergy for Vera has been the family-sustaining jobs that the work has supported.
6. I’m Unionizing Amazon for My Mom and Other American Families
Janeé Roberts was first introduced to working at Amazon via her mother, who operated a forklift at the company’s MEM6 warehouse in Mississippi. When Roberts’ mom had an aneurysm on the job, Amazon did nothing to support her recovery. Now Janeé is an organizer with the union at Amazon’s DCK6 location in San Francisco fighting for every other worker who has suffered on the job with little to no support from one of the world’s richest companies.
7. Spending Cuts Put Low-Income Coastal Residents at Even Greater Risk of Hurricanes
Federal workers were the canary in the coal mine for the second Trump administration’s full frontal assault on labor rights. Before DOGE eliminated her job, Sabrina Valenti was working on coastal restoration at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to protect communities from hurricanes up until the beginning of 2025. With mass layoffs at her organization and spending cuts across the board, Valenti warns that future hurricane seasons could be even more threatening.
8. I Won’t Resign My Federal Job — And No One Else Should Either
Another federal worker who shared a personal story through Inequality.org this year was Paul Osadebe, an attorney at the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Osadebe pleaded with his fellow federal workers to stay on the job as long as they could because of the critical services they provide to Americans. Later in the year, Osadebe was fired after blowing the whistle on Trump political appointees at HUD who had made it nearly impossible to effectively enforce the Fair Housing Act.
9. At Wells Fargo, I Saw Firsthand How Excessive CEO Pay Harms Workers and Customers
Even after the infamous Wells Fargo “fake accounts” scandal of 2016, Kieran Cuadras continued to observe recklessness aimed at squeezing the bank’s employees and consumers to pump up executive paychecks. In this op-ed, the former Wells Fargo internal misconduct investigator calls for taxes on excessive CEO compensation to encourage more equitable corporate practices. Our nation’s leaders, says Cuadras, need to “do something about a CEO pay system that rewards executives with obscenely large paychecks for practices that harm workers and the broader economy.”
10. We’re Fighting to Become the First Amazon Union in the South. Here’s Our Story.
Organizing Amazon, now America’s second-largest private employer, has been a primary goal of the labor movement. Reverend Ryan Brown was a key figure in an independent campaign to organize a warehouse in North Carolina. Before their union vote, Brown wrote for Inequality.org about the massive anti-union and surveillance campaign that Amazon was waging at his workplace. Despite losing the election this time around, workers at RDU1 outside of Raleigh and across the country are not stepping down.
11. Garment Workers Are Uniting Like Never Before to Take On Nike
Worker struggles are of course not limited to this country. In February, Abiramy Sivalogananthan of the Asia Floor Wage Alliance wrote for us about a new campaign from garment workers in the Global South to improve working conditions and hold the American companies pulling in billions from exploitation accountable. Over 1,000 workers have called on their allies in the U.S. to sign onto their campaign.
12. Child Care Can Be Free and Universal
Child care teacher Rita Bee shared one of the bright spots of the year — New Mexico’s adoption of universal, no-cost child care. Families will save an average of $12,000 per year — a true game-changer for low-income households in one of the country’s poorest states. The state is funding the program through taxes on oil and gas extraction from public lands. “Taking care of our children and setting them up for success is the best thing we can do for our families, our communities, and our nation,” Bee wrote.
This first appeared on Inequality.org.
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