It’s Better in a Union

USW Hosts AFL-CIO Bus Tour Promoting Unions, Fighting Trump

USW members helped the AFL-CIO kick off a pro-union bus tour in July with rallies in Pittsburgh and Newport News, Va., denouncing the Trump administration’s attacks on labor rights, safety, Medicaid and veterans’ services.

The 26-state bus tour—“It’s Better in a Union: Fighting for Freedom, Fairness & Security”—marshaled the power of solidarity while sending a clear message to Trump and his Republican lackeys in Congress: Working people are fed up and fighting back.

Speakers noted that unions not only afford workers freedom to organize and ensure fairness in the workplace but provide security amid Trump’s onslaughts.

“It’s easy to get discouraged,” Kayla Flowers, a Local 3657 member who works in the USW’s Health, Safety and Environment Department, told hundreds of workers who turned out for the Pittsburgh rally July 21.

“But we have something they don’t,” she added. “We have each other. We have the labor movement. We have a strong union.”

The AFL-CIO launched the bus tour just as Republicans passed a federal spending bill that cuts Medicaid so deeply it’s expected to cost about 12 million Americans their health insurance and imperil hundreds of health facilities.

“This bill isn’t about balancing the budget or helping workers. It’s about giving more tax handouts to the wealthy at the expense of everyone else,” International President David McCall said at the Pittsburgh event, noting the cuts to Medicaid, food support programs and other lifelines will fund a massive redistribution of wealth benefiting billionaires.

Erin Gurley, a physician’s assistant at the Squirrel Hill Health Center in Pittsburgh, told the crowd that a quarter of her patients rely on Medicaid.

“They won’t just stop getting sick,” observed Gurley, who voted along with 40 co-workers to join the USW last year. “Isn’t access to medical care a human right?”

That harmful spending bill represents just one part of Trump’s wide-ranging assault on working families.

He fired a member of the National Labor Relations Board, paralyzing the agency’s efforts to hold employers accountable.

He gutted the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health and revealed plans to abolish the Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board. He even slashed fines issued by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, where Flowers once worked, inviting bosses to cut corners and put workers’ lives at risk.

“The attacks on worker health and safety have been constant over the past six months, with more to come,” International Vice President at Large Roxanne Brown warned July 12 in Newport News, the first stop on the bus tour.

Newport News is home to 10,000 members of Local 8888 who perform critical but hazardous work making aircraft carriers and submarines for the Navy. Trump’s decimation of safety agencies makes the union members’ jobs all the more dangerous, Brown and Local 8888 members told the gathering.

“The sad truth, as we all know, is that Trump doesn’t like us,” said Local 8888 Vice President Kenny Lewis, a third-generation shipbuilder, urging workers to step up and defend their rights like previous generations of union members.

“My grandfather did what he had to do. My father did what he had to do. Now, it’s up to us to do what we have to do,” he said.

AFL-CIO leaders, pro-worker officials and members of various other unions joined the rallies, where speakers also lambasted Trump for stripping federal workers of their collective bargaining rights, decimating veterans’ services and cutting research funding to universities.

“What an incredibly powerful statement we are making together here,” said AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler, who accompanied the bus to Pittsburgh. “Working people have had enough.”

Brown steeled union members for the tough work ahead.

“You punch back,” she said. “You kick back.”