The cornerstone of the labor movement is improving the lives of working families, bringing fairness and dignity to the workplace and securing social equity today and for generations to come. We must stand up for one another to build a strong, vibrant, free and democratic labor movement to meet the challenges before us. Our power is made stronger in solidarity. We share the fundamental belief that winning economic justice for all working people requires winning racial and gender justice.
Racism, sexism, misogyny, xenophobia, homophobia, transphobia, religious intolerance, ageism, ableism and other bigotries turn working people against one another. It weakens our collective fight for a better deal at work, a better life at home and a better world to live in. It is incumbent upon the labor movement to confront hate and bigotry wherever they are and to uproot bias in all of its forms to prevail in our fight for economic justice for all workers. The commitment to rooting out bias must be central to our work to promote dignity, respect, inclusion and solidarity.
As the largest organization of working women in the country, representing more than 7 million women across every state, race, ethnicity and job sector, the AFL-CIO knows that when women thrive, working families thrive, communities thrive and the broader economy thrives. We recognize that the strength of our unions and the health of our economy are fundamentally inseparable from the full participation, leadership and power of women in every sector of the workforce.
Labor rights and civil rights are deeply intertwined. The fundamental civil rights legal infrastructure that protects equal treatment and ensures freedom from discrimination also protects workers from exploitation, and leads to fair wages, safe conditions and the right to organize. Our movements are up against an unprecedented barrage of threats characterized by an erosion of fundamental legal protections. Our communities continue to face simultaneous and interconnected attacks, requiring solidarity and a shared strategy to overcome. The labor movement must stand up for all of our civil rights and fight back against these attacks.
It must be stated plainly: the hard-fought victories of decades that created civil rights laws and protections to benefit working people are being systematically dismantled through deliberate and coordinated action: breaking union rights, weakening and politicizing the civil service, reversing federal agency civil rights enforcement and ending disparate impact law.
No institution should have the authority to decide who counts—whether at the ballot box, the workplace, in health care, whose bodies deserve dignity, or which identities merit protection under law. The same power used to deny trans women safety, health care, employment protections or full participation in public life has always been used to narrow the boundaries of womanhood more broadly by policing bodies, appearance, reproductive choices, and the terms under which women may live and work freely. Attacks on trans women are rooted in a world view that seeks to enforce rigid expectations about gender and punish those who do not conform. That same world view has long limited women’s economic freedom, access to opportunity and bodily autonomy. For that reason, protecting trans women is inseparable from protecting all women’s right to move through workplaces and public life without discrimination or exclusion.
These challenges are compounded for women of color and immigrant workers especially, who serve as vital contributors to our social and economic fabric yet face exploitation, unsafe conditions and language barriers that impede an ability to advocate for fundamental rights. Our communities face simultaneous and intersectional attacks, requiring solidarity and a shared strategy to overcome. The labor movement must stand up for all of our civil rights and fight back against these attacks.
From the very first days of this administration, President Trump made his attack on civil rights and equal opportunity clear. Through a series of executive orders and the weaponization of government agencies against historically oppressed groups, his administration has made workplaces less safe for everyone, especially women, people of color and LGBTQ workers. It unleashed the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) on a mission that targeted our union siblings, including pushing an estimated 300,000 Black women out of their jobs.
Meanwhile, the scourge of mass incarceration, filling 33% capacity of the nation’s prisons with African Americans who make up only 14% of our overall population and costing families of incarcerated people nearly $350 billion each year, deepens economic precarity, perpetuates the racial wealth gap and locks generations out of the American Dream.
As we recommit ourselves today to our shared mission of justice, fairness and opportunity for all people, and recognizing that our workforce is defined by intersectional identities where race, gender, orientation and immigration status overlap, we resolve to:
● Deepen our commitment to the pursuit of legal workplace protections for all workers to fight for more equitable workplaces, to fight for a more just society rooted in the universal human right to earn a living free from fear and prejudice, and to champion the proactive implementation of anti-racist support systems, fair wages, affordable care, paid family leave and clear pathways to citizenship.
● Dismantle the systemic racial- and gender-based barriers to employment, including discriminatory hiring practices to workplace harassment, that continue to disproportionately impact women, people of color and the LGBTQIA+ community, fundamentally undermining economic security and personal dignity.
● Prioritize the fight for pay equity, especially for women of color, who continue to face larger pay gaps across the board.
● Refuse to allow billionaires and the politicians they fund to distract and divide the labor movement with attacks on transgender and nonbinary workers.
● Strengthen and deepen solidarity with civil rights movements to chart a new path toward social equality by recommitting to racial justice principles, including ending the mass incarceration crisis. This requires deepening our understanding of racial justice to build upon strategies that advance our collective power and reverse the generational harms caused by the exploitation of labor and violating civil rights.
● Support policies that expand access to full participation in the workforce by protecting our siblings who have historically been shut out. This includes protection against discrimination in hiring and promotion, and ensuring workplaces provide support such as access to supports like paid leave, child care and long-term care for seniors and people with disabilities.
Specifically, we will:
● Support the restoration and expansion of civil rights legal protections, including for workers, through state and local laws.
● Expand efforts in our year-round mobilization that center communities of color and women to turn out and vote for politicians who will protect and advance our rights on the issues that matter most to us.
● Develop and implement strategies to confront the disenfranchisement of communities of color and immigrant communities through election protection efforts to preserve the right to vote and access to the ballot box.
● Center the voices of often-excluded workers—especially Black, Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander, Latino, LGBTQIA+, indigenous, immigrant and women workers—in our organizing and contract campaign initiatives, and use the bargaining process to win nondiscrimination protections and ensure the safety, respect, freedom, and access to care and family leave for our LGBTQIA+ siblings.
● Stand in solidarity with our civil rights partners and working families to call out the social undermining of civil rights and the intentional destruction of civil rights protection infrastructure.
● Pursue political and legal reform through coalition-building, advocacy, and campaigns for the restoration of independence and enforcement capacity of federal civil rights infrastructure, including compelling the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to resume enforcement of federal nondiscrimination rights for transgender, nonbinary, intersex and queer workers.
● Support safe and effective reforms that reduce prison and jail populations and oppose policies that increase criminalization and incarceration; support reforms—including adequate staffing of our criminal justice system—that accelerate the justice process and eliminate unnecessary pretrial detention time; support efforts to alleviate prison overcrowding by advocating for adequate staffing for correctional institutions; support policies that ensure Americans with criminal convictions can successfully reintegrate, contribute to their communities and take care of their families through the effective use and full funding of training, education, probation and parole strategies, as well as through reforms to probation and parole, shortening lengthy supervision terms, reducing or eliminating fines and fees, and clearing records through expungement and clean slate policies; and promote federal, state and local policies and practices to end the for-profit prison pipeline, a system that incentivizes mass incarceration with prison privatization, and convert privately operated prisons to public operation.
● Work for recognition of the Equal Rights Amendment as the 28th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which provides the strongest protections against discrimination based on gender.
● Reaffirm our support for the Equality Act, a bill to ensure comprehensive federal nondiscrimination protections for LGBTQIA+ people across employment, housing, credit, public accommodations and education, and for equivalent state bills; and never be silent when our LGBTQIA+ members are targeted for erasure.
● Increase economic opportunity for all workers, especially in sectors dominated by women and people of color, such as health care, education, social work and nonprofit work by:
○ Ensuring they have access to federal student loans they may need to achieve the education required by these careers, and access to federal loan forgiveness programs to make this investment in their careers and our communities more affordable.
○ Fighting for targeted workforce development and education as foundational strategies for economic equality, including moving women and people of color into high-paying, traditionally male- and white-dominated sectors and making sure jobs historically dominated by women or people of color are no longer underpaid and become good jobs as well.
● Support access to gender-affirming health care, legal protections against discrimination in hiring, pay and working conditions, and the right of every worker to present themselves as they are. We will fight to protect the life-saving gender-affirming health care that is being eliminated from the health care plans of federal workers. We reject any effort to use law, policy or workplace practice to narrow who is entitled to dignity, safety and equal treatment.