A SEIU rally for security officers in Detroit, July 24, 2019. (Photo by Andrew Roth).
Less than two weeks before President-elect Donald Trump takes office for his second term, two major unions have announced they will reunite to “push back on union-busting and win for working-class families.”
On Wednesday, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) announced that it would reunite with the AFL-CIO, the largest federation of unions in the country. The two groups split in 2005. With the reaffiliation, the AFL-CIO’s membership will expand from 13 to 15 million workers.
“It is damn past time for unions for all,” said SEIU International President April Verrett, speaking at a roundtable discussion Thursday in Austin, Texas. “It is time for working people to be at the center of this economy and this democracy, not victims to its whims. It is beyond time to end union-busting for once and for all. And another thing that it is past time for, and that is to end poverty, wage work, for once and for all.”
AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler expanded on that theme, saying that the “divide-and-conquer strategy” that has been a hallmark of politics, is best addressed through unity at the bargaining table, which the reaffiliation makes possible.
“We just finished an election cycle where one party spent the entire time telling working class people across this country, ‘Look how different you are from each other. He’s an immigrant. She’s transgender or they worship differently than you do’ and it worked to some degree, right? We watched it. The scariest thing in the world to the CEOs, to the billionaires in this country and the folks like Donald Trump who do their bidding, is the idea that we might one day see through that. That there is a barista and an airport services worker and a fast food worker and a home care worker and a teacher and a warehouse worker and a cook and an electrical worker, all of them together saying your fight is my fight. It terrifies them,” said Shuler.
Both unions endorsed the Democratic nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris, in the 2024 race for the White House, with the AFL-CIO referring to Trump’s “devastating anti-worker Project 2025 agenda,” and SEIU saying Trump “seeks to be a dictator from Day One” with a “racist, sexist and anti-worker agenda.”
Trump made no secret of his disdain for union leaders like UAW President Shawn Fain, who he said should be fired, a pronouncement that came three days after Teamsters President Sean O’Brien addressed the Republican National Convention and called Trump “one tough S.O.B” [son a bitch] following an assassination attempt.
Ultimately the Teamsters, which also split from the AFL-CIO in 2005, declined to make an endorsement despite doing so for multiple past Democrats.
The reunification of the AFL-CIO and SEIU also comes as Trump allies Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy plan to lead the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which while having no official status within the federal government, has proposed shrinking the federal workforce by 75%. That’s prompting pushback from union leaders.
“Musk and Ramaswamy simply do not understand how the federal workforce is staffed or operated,” said Randy Erwin, National President of the National Federation of Federal Employees.
Trump is also expected to reverse the pro-worker orientation of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) under the Biden administration, starting with the replacement of General Counsel Jennifer Abbruzzo with a pro-business nominee.
With that as a backdrop, Verrett said they are planning to “unleash a new era of worker power,” across every industry and ZIP code.
“Working people have been organizing our workplaces and communities to build a stronger economy and democracy,” said Verrett. “We are ready to stand up to union-busters at corporations and in government and rewrite the outdated, sexist, racist labor laws that hold us all back. We’re so proud to join together as nearly 15 million members to redouble our commitment to building a thriving, healthy future for working people.”
Also speaking at Thursday’s roundtable was Nina Meyers, a home care worker from Detroit and member of SEIU Healthcare Michigan. Meyers spoke about how the union was instrumental in helping home health care workers organize and lobby for the passage of legislation in 2024 that allowed more than 35,000 of the state’s home care workers to collectively bargain while also standardizing care and training.
“They taught us how to collaborate with the senators and the legislation, to go to the House and we went up there in a sea of purple, so they had to see us,” said Meyers. “I’m so grateful. Detroit is a union town. It has been forever. And to see us come together and care for one another, have hope, hope and faith is what we need to succeed, and with SEIU, we got there.”
In making the announcement, the AFL-CIO noted that 60 million Americans say they’d join a union tomorrow if the laws allowed them to organize. Polling shows that 7 in 10 Americans approve of unions, including 9 in 10 young people.
“The huge gap between workers who want to join a union and those who successfully do so represents a massive failure in law and public policy,” stated a press release. “In response, SEIU and the AFL-CIO are uniting to take on union-busting and secure the right of every worker to safely join with their co-workers in unions to raise wages and improve their jobs.”
This story was originally produced by the Michigan Advance which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network, including the Daily Montanan, supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.