AFL-CIO message for workers: ‘It’s easy to get discouraged, but we have something they don’t’

People with money and power have now fixed things so that if you get killed at work and want the benefit of a proper and timely investigation into your demise, you must die during normal office hours. We learned this on Monday while attending a rally of union folks at the courtyard beside the United Steelworkers Building in Downtown Pittsburgh.

One of the speakers, Kayla Flowers, talked about budget cuts at the Occupational Safety and Health Administration where, until recently, she was employed. Flowers mentioned a fatality that occurred one weekend at a manufacturing facility.

“The OSHA compliance officer was not allowed to respond to this accident until Monday simply because the agency didn’t want to pay them overtime,” Flowers said. “Not only was this a blatant sign of disrespect, but it gave the employer time to make any changes they wanted prior to OSHA doing their response.”

Remember that video of a giddy Elon Musk parading onstage with a chainsaw several months ago as he celebrated the mindless slashing conducted by his “DOGE” team of tech bros? This is their work.

Due to staffing cuts, Flowers said, employees who should have been conducting workplace inspections and investigating accidents and deaths were instead tied up with bureaucratic tedium – timekeeping, personnel paperwork, travel approvals, scheduling informal conferences. Such distractions put the lives of American workers on the line, Flowers said. Some of the cutbacks posed less danger but frustrated workers. For example, the office spending limit dropped to $1. (Managers responded by declaring the printer off-limits unless absolutely necessary.)

Flowers’ stories were just the beginning of a long list of disturbing revelations about the threats facing workers in the era of President Donald Trump. We heard them all during Monday’s hourlong rally, which was part of an AFL-CIO bus tour called “It’s Better in a Union: Fighting for Freedom, Fairness & Security.” The tour launched earlier this month in Washington, D.C., and is traveling to 26 states to amplify worker voices.

A physician assistantt talked about a construction worker struggling with diabetes after losing his health insurance – he had to scamper down scaffolding every hour to urinate as his body struggled to purge sugar from his body. 

A union organizer and professor discussed university faculty members’ worries about their futures and their jobs, and about the fate of American education. As Trump eviscerates grants, unionized faculty members contemplate a future without the benefit of cutting-edge, life-saving advances in health care.

It all sounds like a recipe for despair, but the stories and speeches always ended with a call for workers to fight back, to not take the destruction of hard-earned workers benefits and protections lying down. For those of us who’ve been on strike at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette for more than 1,000 days, this message resonates. One of our own, John Santa, stepped up to the microphone and spoke of the necessity of standing together. That’s the only way to fight back. We fight alone and we’ll get crushed.

And who are the villains causing or enabling all this mayhem and chaos in working-class communities? Well, they’re a familiar lot: billionaires (and unscrupulous rich folks in general) who value profits more than lives, and elected leaders who openly declare their love and admiration for working people yet do nothing to protect those same people from legislation and executive orders crafted to do them harm.

“Unfortunately, some of our elected officials have lost sight of what matters to working Americans,” said Bernie Hall, director of USW District 10. “They view us as nothing more than a means for the rich to get richer.”

Some, but not all, said Amber Miller, director of rapid response for the USW. Legislative allies do exist.

“We also need to remember to thank our friends who always stand beside us.” She named two from the Pittsburgh area — U.S. Reps. Summer Lee, D-Swissvale, and Chris Deluzio D-Fox Chapel — and noted their support for the Protect America’s Workforce Act, aimed at restoring collective bargaining rights for unionized federal employees.

Miller provided an example of worker action by urging those in attendance to pull out their cellphones and send a message to U.S. representatives waffling in their support. Miller provided a phone number.

“We all know the people in the cheap seats who love to offer up lip service, but as one of my favorite people, Brené Brown, said, ‘If you’re not in the arena getting your ass kicked on occasion, I’m not interested in your feedback,'” Miller said. “Well, we’re in the arena. We fight. We organize. We show up for each other. And now we need to tell every lawmaker sitting in those cheap seats, ‘Get in this fight with us.'”

(Brown, by the way, is a writer and research professor who has studied courage and empathy.)

Speakers bashed the GOP’s Big Beautiful Bill for all the damage it’s going to do to workers, veterans and Medicare recipients, among others. The solution? Pushing back.

“Our fight is the same as the entire working class,” said Angela Ferritto, Pennsylvania AFL-CIO president. “We are all fighting for dignity, equality, fair schedules, safe conditions, health care. We are labor. It is time for union members to come together like never before. Lean in.”

Roxanne Brown, USW vice president at-large, pointed out that 70% of Americans say they support unions.

“There is no political party today in the United States that has 70% approval ratings,” She said. “But we do.”

That translates into power, which needs to be leveraged.

“If you have a union, it’s time to build your union,” Ferritto said. “You know someone who doesn’t have a union? Tell them it’s time to build a union. Our power lies in our solidarity. In our voices, in our activism and in our hearts. The power is always in the people.”

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We caught up with AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler shortly after the event and asked her what the organization hopes to accomplish with the tour.

“People feel kind of powerless right now,” she said. That’s a direct result of GOP attacks on the laws and structures that have long provided some protections to workers. “We’re trying to uplift the impacts on working people, make them real, because we’re bringing the human face to what’s happening out there, and then channeling workers’ frustrations and anger into action.”

The bus tour is intended to “really bring to light the impacts, whether it’s veterans, whether it’s government employees who’ve lost their jobs, the services that we count on, rural hospitals. You know, it’s an interesting way to pull people together, because we roll into a place like Davenport, Iowa, where you have small businesses, you have farmers, you have workers and labor unions all shining a light on what’s happening out there.”

Below are some of the highlights from the rally.

Erin Gurley, physician assistant at Squirrel Hill Health Clinic and USW member:

“I was taught to screen for long-term smokers with a CT scan to detect early lung cancer. But in practice, I can’t even remember the last time an uninsured patient was actually able to get this scan done. It’s simply unaffordable. So instead of catching disease early, I’m left watching for signs of late-stage lung cancer: weight loss, coughing up blood, shortness of breath, persistent cough.

“It seems blatantly obvious to say, but when over 11 million Americans lose their Medicaid, they won’t just stop getting sick. Instead, they’ll show up even sicker to my clinic, often with complications that are irreversible.

“Primary care isn’t suffering from simple burnout. It’s moral distress, the deep anguish of knowing precisely what my patients need, but being unable to provide it because the system won’t allow us to. Gutting this critical funding will only drive more providers away from a field that is already in crisis.”

Rich Schiavoni, president of USW Local 1088, representing faculty members at University of Pittsburgh as well as part-time faculty at Point Park University and Robert Morris University:

“When I was 8 years old, my mom and dad sat me down to explain to me that my mom had cancer. We had that conversation again when I was 21. We had that conversation again when I was 25. We had that conversation five more times.

“Since 1986, my mom has beaten cancer eight times. The last time, just three years ago. Every time my mom beat cancer, she did it because of the research, the discoveries and the advancements in medicine here in Pittsburgh.

“She’s going to be 77 in October. She still runs her own business. Because of the work of the doctors and the researchers in this area, she’s still here.

 “Can you imagine if Jonas Salk had been told, ‘Sorry, your funding for the polio vaccine was cut because the president said it’s a hoax and is giving your funding to billionaires instead?’ This administration is wiping out a whole generation of scientists.”

Liz Shuler, AFL-CIO president:

“When we say freedom, what do we mean? It means the freedom to organize and stand together and collectively bargain. The freedom to have control over our own lives, to be like Alex Perkins and Patrick Watkins and Dee Thomas and their co-workers down at Blue Bird.”

(Blue Bird Bus Co. is the second-largest bus manufacturer in the country.)

“A few years ago, they did not have freedom at their workplace. They didn’t have the freedom to know their own schedules, to earn a living wage, to work in safe conditions, to just have some free time to spend with their families. So what did they do? They stood together with our USW family and their co-workers. They stood up against every union-busting trick in the book, and they fought and organized and formed one of the largest unions in the South. They won those freedoms that we’re talking about today.”

Darrin Kelly, president of the Allegheny-Fayette Central Labor Council:

“When you take this American flag and you say that you stand behind it, you stand for what this symbol is … you have a duty to protect those that can’t protect themselves. You have a duty to stand up, to see to it that all Americans retire with dignity, have access to good health care, protections on the job. This isn’t something you wave without having it deep in your heart. And there’s a lot of people in D.C. that forgot what this symbol is. You say you stand with veterans? Then how can you cut like you have at the VA?”

Roxanne Brown, USW vice president at-large:

“Every single country whose democracy has failed, the bulk of those countries that have come back and restored their democracies were able to do that with one movement. What movement? Labor. Because we have what? Power. So when those days get hard and when you take those punches in your face, in your gut, in your back, because so many of these hits are to our backs, you remember that you have power. We are the movement of the now. We fight.”

Dave McCall, USW international president:

“This bill isn’t about balancing a budget or helping workers. It’s about giving massive tax handouts to the wealthiest at the expense of everyone else. Instead of incentivizing job creation, building the tax base in our communities with good-paying union jobs, which in turn is really the pathway to reducing the national debt, this bill does exactly the opposite. It eliminates much-needed social services. We see through all this.

“It’s dangerous. And unions across this country are together. We’re united because we know who’s really paying the price — the folks clocking in steel mills and paper mills and tire plants and oil refineries, the nurses working double shifts and families trying to keep the lights on and food on the table as our paychecks go down.

“We need to stay focused and hold those accountable who have sided with the billionaires against the middle class. And those who have now lost an opportunity to grow into the middle class. We need to stand together.”

Kayla Flowers, former OSHA worker now with the USW health, safety and environment department:

“The attack on government agencies is a firing squad on workplace protections for our members. It’s easy to get discouraged. But we have something they don’t. We have each other, we have a labor movement, and we have a strong union.”

John Santa, member of the Newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh who’s been on strike at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette for more than 1,0000 days:

“All of the support that we can get is critically important to keeping us going. … I was raised in a union family. Both of my grandfathers were union men. My dad was a laborer, a union laborer for years, he’s retired now. I heard the stories about what being in a union meant. I never really understood it until the last 1,000 days. And that’s because of the brothers and sisters that I stood with on the picket line and worked with at the Pittsburgh Union Progress. And it’s because of all of you.”

Angela Ferritto, president of Pennsylvania AFL-CIO:

“Let’s continue to do what we do best. Push for policy that helps working people. Organize and stand up to injustice and peacefully protest when there is an attempt to violate our rights or silence our voices. We cannot tire. We cannot retreat. We must organize, mobilize and continue to fight. Keep finding strength in each other. Solidarity is the most potent weapon that the working class has.”