The Labor Notes conference brought together workers fighting for a better world amid threats from AI, attacks on federal workers, and ICE’s terrorist campaign.
A group of Minnesota organizers and union members take the stage at the Labor Notes 2026 conference in Chicago.(Ella Fanger) Today’s labor movement faces headwinds both immediate and existential, from the threats posed by AI to federal attacks on workers’ rights to attacks on communities by ICE. Last weekend, organizers working to revitalize unions faced another urgent threat: a swarm of 17 tornadoes that hit the Midwest on the eve of the Labor Notes conference, a biennial gathering of the labor movement’s “troublemakers.” As 4,700 participants across the country prepared to gather in Chicago, group chats began to light up with unfortunate updates: Flights delayed, rerouted or canceled altogether. But just as quickly, the organizers mobilized. People offered seats in their cars to travel hundreds of miles, settled into storm shelters together halfway, and braved the eternal layovers.
Xavier Villerol, an employee at Amazon’s JFK 8 warehouse on Staten Island, drove 12 hours with his colleagues to get to the conference Friday. When I asked him what he hoped to gain from being here, he replied: “Courage.” He had previously met with Delta flight attendants who were fighting for unionization and spoke on a panel with other Amazon workers from around the country. “Meeting people who have been fighting longer than I have will help me strive to become a better organizer.”
As Barbara Madeloni of Labor Notes said during the conference’s opening plenary session, the weather was almost “too apt an analogy” for the tumultuous and often dangerous conditions under which workers are currently organizing. The last conference was held in the spring of 2024, before President Trump was elected for a second time and launched a barrage of attacks on the funding sources, speech rights, and physical security of the organized left. The conference that year was enlivened by the recent contract victory of UAW workers striking against the Big Three automakers, as well as waves of new unionization at Amazon and Starbucks. Labor Notes workers have long known that they must build power within factories to secure their rights, regardless of who is in power. But an openly hostile administration creates more obstacles for organizers to overcome, from a neutered NLRB that blocks union elections to the Department of Homeland Security’s active targeting of union activists.
This year’s conference made clear that workers’ response to this moment of crisis is anything but passive. “It’s about how to defend our rights without being on the defensive,” said Judy Gonzalez, a nurse at Montefiore Hospital in the Bronx and former president of the New York State Nurses Association, whose members led a historic 41-day strike this winter. “The very act of coming together, sharing knowledge, nurturing relationships and taking action for the world we want – we don’t just resist,” Madeloni said. “We create the world that bosses and capital try to deny us. »
Plus de : Ella Fanger This year’s conference featured thoughts and calls to action from a host of organizers leading victories on the shop floor and in the streets, from federal workers fighting DOGE austerity to Twin Cities teachers defending their ICE students to immigrant meatpacking workers who recently launched the first major strike in their industry in decades. The fighting spirit of the Labor Notes conference, as well as its host publication and organizing media, long predates the current political moment. Labor Notes has been working to “put the movement back into the labor movement” since 1979, when socialist organizers saw the need to reinvigorate their unions after decades of corrupt or weak leaders who betrayed workers. The organization strives to build unions led by rank-and-file workers, where decisions are made democratically on how to fight the boss. “If you don’t take care of the workers… people won’t have confidence in the union because you don’t solve their daily misery,” Gonzalez said, adding that she would have liked the rally to last a month.
Over the marathon weekend, workers attended and facilitated nearly 350 workshops and meetings, bringing to life the idea that workers are the experts on their own conditions and how to improve them. The sessions tapped into the treasure trove of knowledge accumulated by worker organizers over campaigns and careers spanning decades, covering topics from contract negotiation “when the boss says they’re broke” to identifying supply chain choke points. According to Labor Notes, this year’s event included the largest gathering of Amazon workers in history, from facilities across the United States, Germany, Spain and beyond. Thirty-eight interpreters provided translations in eight languages to workers from more than a dozen countries.
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Emily Lumpkin, a West Virginia electrician, said on stage during Sunday’s opening session that she felt let down by her union, the IBEW, until she attended the latest Labor Notes conference. Hearing workers in other union reform groups like the Teamsters for a Democratic Union and UAW Member Action describe how they transformed their unions from the inside out to put power back in the hands of members, she realized that rank-and-file leaders can “turn apathy, grief and anger into action.” Lumpkin is now a leader in the Caucus of Rank-and-File Electrical Workers (CREW), which began organizing in 2023 and has members in 40 IBEW locals across the United States. “We have the plans, and you can build them too.”
At a time when the federal government is colluding with corporations to dissuade workers from taking action, Labor Notes organizers see their unions as a critical vehicle to exercise their collective power and transform not only their workplaces, but the world. Just as the Covid-19 pandemic exposed the divide between the interests of workers and bosses and sparked a wave of unionization of essential workers, the current crisis creates an opportunity to galvanize mass action. “Repression generates activism,” Gonzalez said, when workers are organized and can help their colleagues overcome their fears. “We must translate demoralization into activism. »
Learn more about work notes Federal workers are currently facing the largest anti-union campaign in American history, with more than a million workers losing their collective bargaining rights in 2025 by executive order. The heart of the fightback campaign is the Federal Unionist Network, which formed at the 2022 Labor Notes conference after federal workers from different agencies met and were inspired to “wake up a large portion of the sleeping residents,” said Paul Osadebe, a former HUD attorney who was fired after denouncing the degradation of the Fair Housing Act. The Labor Notes gave them the language and tactics to prepare for the assault on their rights that was coming. “The attack on federal workers is an attack on all workers. They are doing this to us so they can get to all of you,” Osadebe said during the opening session. “Being here during this time of crisis is a unique opportunity. »
The federal workers’ struggle is just one example of how workers at this year’s conference are strategizing around the central role of the labor movement in the fight against fascism. “When Renée Good was murdered by an ICE agent on January 7, our community was spurred into action,” said Mara Solis, a teacher with the St. Paul Federation of Educators (SPFE). “We modeled our ICE Out work the same way we structure a strike.” Teachers unions used a tiered communications structure developed for strike communications to organize school patrols, grocery delivery, travel to medical appointments and immigration court, and other services for members of their immigrant community sheltering in their homes as part of Operation Metro Surge.
In coalition with other local unions and community groups, Solis and his colleagues organized a day of massive disruption, when a estimated 100,000 people across the state marched in the streets and refrained from working, going to school or shopping. “January 23 wouldn’t have happened without work,” she told me. This year’s conference gave organizers the opportunity to share tactics with workers in other cities and strategize on how to coordinate action across the country in the future. “What we’ve seen in the Twin Cities and the incredible overreach of federal agents and the violation of local and state laws … we think we haven’t seen the end of this,” said Greg Nammacher, president of SEIU Local 26, a union for maintenance and security workers. “We, both in the labor movement and in communities, must be prepared to defend our rights. » Just a few days after the conference, SPFE and the Minneapolis Federation of Educators reported that the Justice Department had arrested union members they believed to be connected to their organization during Operation Metro Surge.
A striking image of defiance of ICE’s terrorist campaign emerged from the JBS meatpacking plant in Greeley, Colorado, where workers launched the industry’s first major project. strike in four decades in March over pay and safety equipment issues. Employees speak more than 50 languages, originating from Mexico, Somalia, Myanmar and beyond. “They are using vulnerable workers to keep the system going,” said Tchelly Moise, a representative for UFCW Local 7, which represents workers at the Greeley plant. Workers overcame their fears of retaliation from management and initiated a historic work stoppage led by more than 90 strike captains. “A strike is not just about people standing outside and waving signs,” Dec Laré Moise. “A strike is a school. It teaches workers who they are. It teaches them that the company has lawyers, money, managers, but that the workers also have something. What we have is each other.”
Nathaniel Mann, who works on the JBS cleaning crew, said he has seen the factory transformed since the strike. The workers won a new contract with wage increases 33 percent higher than JBS’s initial offer and guarantees that the company will pay for personal protective equipment that employees said they previously had their wages garnished for. “It’s the first time I’ve seen people smile there,” he told me. Just months after first hearing about his union during the strike, Mann made his first trip to a major city for the conference. “I always have something to say and I can usually express what I feel pretty well,” he said. “But I’ve never had such an eye-opening experience.” After meeting with meat and grocery industry workers from other states, Mann is already thinking about the next contract campaign and how to coordinate bargaining deadlines among different locals. “It would be huge,” he said. “You could paralyze the country if everyone was coordinated enough to make deals at around the same time. »
Workers came together this year at the dawn of a new industrial revolution driven by AI. The working class is vulnerable in this moment of disruption, but it also has the opportunity to galvanize collective action across both blue- and white-collar sectors, given how universal the destabilizing effects of automation are likely to be. At the conference, Amazon warehouse associates, software engineers, and facilitators spoke about how automation is used by their managers as a threat to demobilize and disorganize workers. During panels focused on workplace surveillance and the threat of job replacement, workers insisted they can’t wait for legislative action around AI: They need contract language to address these issues now. “This is the burning issue in the labor movement,” said Juan Mereles, an employee at Amazon’s KSBD airline hub in the Inland Empire. Amazon has already begun testing and deploying AI-based machines to sort packages and algorithmic management systems to move workers around the warehouse. Workers discussed how to use AI as a hot topic in discussions with colleagues, highlighting how it accentuates the integration gap. rests between workers and management. Mereles said workers must learn the lessons of the 19th century industrial revolution, which “led to a concentration of wealth and hyperexploitation of workers,” and fight for democratic control of the labor process.
Beyond a single workshop lesson, workers come to Labor Notes to be strengthened by a sense of community and solidarity, reaffirming their collective values to prepare for the struggles ahead. “We don’t always win,” said NYSNA’s Gonzalez. “[But it’s about] give workers the mentality that they are obliged to engage in the struggle to survive. The packed ballroom at the conference’s closing ceremony on Sunday indicates that, despite the bad weather, the fighting wing of the labor movement appears to be outgrowing its current space.
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Mann said he did not fully realize the impact of the JBS strike until joining Labor Notes. “It really gave a lot of people hope,” he said. Talking to them, he realized, “I’m not just a worker at JBS. I’m part of something that spans the entire country and the entire world.” At Labor Notes, workers have a platform to share how they are fighting – and winning – reminding them of their collective potential. Alfonso Martínez Valero, an organizer for Amazon workers in Spain, said he learned something from last year’s series of worker strikes. “The most powerful company in the world still has a problem: It needs us,” he said. “And while they need us, we have the power.” Naming this power helps workers face the fierceness of their struggle with fierceness of spirit. As CREW’s Lumpkin said to a standing ovation at the closing ceremony: “There are no permanent victories and no permanent defeats, but there is always a path forward.” »
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Ella Fanger Ella Fanger is a writer, researcher, and labor organizer based in Brooklyn.
