Calling it one of President Biden’s “most significant actions to date,” AFGE hailed Friday’s announcement that the Biden administration is implementing an executive order to establish a $15 per hour minimum wage for federal government work. “Because 85% of federal workers live outside the DC area, it is hard to imagine a single action that could have a more significant positive impact on all American workers’ paychecks beyond raising the federal minimum wage itself, which would take an act of Congress,” said AFGE president Everett Kelley. Kelley said Biden’s move will raise the pay of nearly 70,000 American workers. “President Biden promised to be the most pro-union, pro-worker president in American history. Actions like these show he is delivering on that promise.”

“This fight isn’t over,” said AFL-CIO president Liz Shuler after the Senate’s 50 Republicans sent the two big voting rights bills down the drain again on Wednesday. “Anti-worker politicians will continue trying to rig our democracy, and America’s union members will do everything in our power to defend it.” Led by labor and the Poor People’s Campaign, progressive groups lobbied, by voice, e-mail and phone right through the end of the debate and votes this week. “It’s not just a Black issue,” warned the Rev. William Barber II, founder and co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign. “Fifty-five million people will lose their access to the polls they used in 2020, if we allow what’s going on to continue. It’s a democracy issue. Dr. King never framed this issue as just a Black issue. He always framed it as an economic issue and a race issue, and we should be doing the same.” The dual defeat “will not deter Senate Democrats from continuing our fight against voter suppression, partisan gerrymandering and dark money,” despite no GOP support, defiantly declared Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-NY) after the roll call. “We will not quit.”
by Mark Gruenberg, PAI Staff Writer

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Missed this week’s Your Rights At Work radio show? Catch the podcast here. Longtime union organizer Bob Muehlenkamp has written an introduction to a new “activist” edition of Confessions of a Union Buster, Jim Russell on The Labor Guide to Retirement Plans, and a brand-new song from “the singing elevator constructor.”