Archives for June 2026

Where energy, grit, creativity, resiliency, and solidarity came together for three (3) solid, pulsating days…

Labor Notes is the forty-five (45) year-young, dynamic media and organizing project serving frontline union activists and agitators – self-described troublemakers committed to infusing the movement back into the labor movement. Through the deployment of a news magazine, website, books, pamphlets, conferences, and workshops, Labor Notes promotes and supports aggressive strategies to confront employers, build labor-community solidarity, and cultivate bottom-up, member-driven unions.

Within the context of a labor movement more popular today than at any time since 1965 (68% approval in 2025, see: https://news.gallup.com/poll/12751/labor-unions.aspx), but also a worker organizing crusade more besieged than at any time since the Reagan years, with lower wages, declining job security, and weak or non-existent benefits packages.

So, following an evening of late-night carousing, what would be the turnout at our Sunday 9am workshop: “Fighting for Good Healthcare for Working People”? Fifty-three (53) worker-organizers packed our 50-seat room, ready to engage, share, and prepare for battle. Blew. Us. Away.

My presentation partner, former United Electrical Worker president Carl Rosen, did an incredible job leading off with reality-check facts about rising healthcare premiums being passed on to workers in contract bargaining, in addition to increased out-of-pocket payments for deductibles, co-payments, surprise bills, and hidden “taxes” (auto insurance premiums, workman’s comp, property taxes, emergency transport, etc.), plus skyrocketing pharmaceutical prices, out-of-network restrictions, medical care denials, employment-based insurance “job lock,” shifting provider networks, and the boss’s go-to threat to cut off, or actual cessation of, health insurance coverage as punishment for worker strikes.

Bottom line: employment-based health insurance is a drag on workers’ pockets (whether union or non-union), workplace power, work and social mobility, community cohesion, state and national economies, and the labor movement itself.

My part-2 job, as an AFT Local 9608 member and president of One Payer States (OPS), was to define the healthcare solution for all but the Medical Industrial Complex’s (MIC) “Four Horsemen from Hell” (Big Insurance, Big Pharma, Big Hospitals, Big Medical Device and Supply Manufacturers) and their anti-worker owner-management class allies, especially in non-MIC big industries: national expanded-and-improved Medicare for All (MFA+).

I then updated folks on the tremendous progress being on MFA+ at the state and regional levels, where several states (CA, CO, ME, NY, OR, WA, to name a few) are poised to legislate and implement universal healthcare systems in the next few years – state-based demonstration programs to prove the lower cost, administratively efficient, patient-centered, life enhancing, and job-generating outcomes on the way to national expanded-and-improved Medicare for All. Put another way, think of OPS’ 50-state campaign goal as achieving national MFA+ through the states.  

For part-3, Carl then pivoted and talked about workers and unions using the leverage of contract negotiations to improve healthcare benefits and as an instrument to test the boss’s stated concern about worker health – which it rarely is! – with a firm and specific request that they publicly endorse state and national universal healthcare bill. This two-prong strategy, in addition to the continued job of educating co-workers and neighbors to increase advocacy pressure on state and national legislators to pass one-payer/single-payer/MFA+ legislation, more effectively uses the most potent tool workers possess: workplace power.

Finally, my part-4 portion of our presentation leaned into the discussion of a comprehensive economic strategy to win healthcare and health justice for all. Transformative Justice for All. As with several previous articles here on OpEd News, I referred to the Arc of Justice Alliance (AJA) project to build a secure, web-based infrastructure to connect and coordinate the collective power of all justice organizations and individuals in pursuit of universal justice, across-the-board. I laid out the argument that our shared vision and values, tools and skills training, bolstered by a unified strategic vision and workable plan, executed with discipline and purpose, offers all of us the best chance of lifting the labor movement and all economic and social justice campaigns to victory after victory after victory.

More than half of the worker-organizers in the room signed up to engage with the AJA infrastructure and strategy project. With off-the-charts Labor Notes recruitment coming on the heels of the powerful Netroots Nation connecting the previous week and now, the international, anti-fascist Global Resistance (which I’ll report on next week) networking going extremely well this weekend (18-21 June), the AJA and OPS campaigns are hitting full stride.

As always, radical hope, eyes wide open, strategy forward,

Chuck  

P.S. Special thanks to labor organizing comrades Peter Olney (ILWU), Peter Knowlton (UE), Dan DiMaggio (Labor Notes), Mark Dudzik (LC4SP), Rose Roach (LC4SP) and, of course, Carl Rosen (UE), for their extraordinary help in supporting the creation and launch of this incredible panel.

This being the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, it was only appropriate that the 21y.o. Netroots Nation (shorthand for ‘Internet Grassroots Nation’) came back to Philly, the cradle of our republic’s birth in 1776.
The conference, unsurprisingly, had a mixed vibe and a mixed message, which accurately reflects the angst, hope, fear, strategic, non-strategic, connectedness and disconnectedness so many of us have witnessed and experienced, inside and outside our economic and social justice organizations over the last seventeen months of Trumpism/Fascism 2.0, in particular, with accumulated frustrations (win some wins) over the preceding decades.

https://www.opednews.com/populum/page.php?f=Fighting-Fascism-101-See-Fascism_Fascism-Has-Happened-Here_Fascism-Cant-Happen-Here_Fighting-Fascism-250311-460.html

Indeed, the flood-the-zone, Steve Bannon-inspired, “Firehose Fascism” has sent, organizers, leaders and builders in one, two, or both directions simultaneously:
1. Looking inward, anxious, and scrambling for resources – mostly competitive, territorial, tactical, and uncreative;
2. Looking outward, hopeful, and sharing limited resources – mostly collaborative, cooperative, strategic, and creative.

My unscientific study, based on clipped and extensive conversations with three dozen builders, leaders and staffers, found 67% leaning into #1 (angst-ridden and stuck in conventional thinking), with a distinct but significant minority, roughly 33%, aligning with #2 (open, intentionally listening, connecting, and practicing unconventional politics).
However, after sharing with everyone the good news of the Arc of Justice Alliance (AJA) project – a secure, on-line utility for social justice organizations to plan, build and execute strategic campaigns together – the negative number flipped from 33% to 67% and the 67% number jumped to 92%. Hearing about the rapid development of AJA – a visionary, connective infrastructure that has never, previously existed on the left – at least not since the Civil Rights/Second Reconstruction Era (1954-1968) – progressive anxiety quickly turns into relief, and hope converts into action. Bottom line: we now have a growing list of new partners, across most sectors, in the ‘justice for all,’ anti-fascist, and pro-democracy fight.

Full disclosure: I’ve been working with Rob Kall on the Arc of Justice Alliance (AJA) project, with input from several seasoned thinkers and strategists, since January 20, 2025, the day 47 (Trumpism/Fascism 2.0) was sworn in as POTUS, the Epstein-Billionaire class collectively beat their chests at the inaugural, and the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 went full throttle.

I now write to you from the Chicago-based Labor Notes convention, where I’m courting a far-more-energized, unified, and radically hopeful (with eyes wide open) gathering of workers, organizers, and builders to become partners with the visionary, strategic, and infrastructure-connecting AJA project. When I explained the vision, mission, and purpose of AJA to one of the Chicago-based labor organizers, she asked: “Did God send you?”
I am also flying the flag for my longer-standing One Payer States (.org) affiliation of seventeen (17) years, where we champion the concept of ‘Universal/One-payer/Single-payer/Medicare for All healthcare through the STATES: a 50-state strategy intent on launching MFA+ bills in every state and every territory in the U.S. orbit.

So, it is here, at the bi-annual Labor Notes conference in the Windy City, where I will co-present “Fighting for Good Health Care for Working People” with my new friend and partner, former United Electrical Workers president Carl Rosen, Sunday at 9am Central Time. Thinking good thoughts, strategic thoughts, intersectional and winning thoughts at a time of crisis and opportunity.

(Looking forward: I will file a separate report following Labor Notes, going deeper into the workplace-leveraging strategy to expose the boss’s hypocrisy on healthcare benefits in contract negotiations – hint: the boss does not care about their workers! – and the deepening crisis in public healthcare via draconian cuts in Medicaid and Medicare from last year’s passage of HR1. To the positive, the passage of state-based universal healthcare models will fuel the adoption of national Medicare for All in the next few years. The net effect will be multifold: first, it will supercharge economic growth and workplace benefits for all workers, union and non-union; second, it will generate high-paying jobs with underserved and under-valued healthcare professions [primary docs, nurses, dentists, etc.]; and it will help lift communities, and all intersectional “health justice” issues, from housing to climate to global peace, as values and resources shift to human needs and away from Billionaire-Epstein greed and destruction.)