If we are to defend our rights and overcome the extremist Republicans in Washington D.C., working people will need to come together as one.

It is easy to feel scared and defeated as we learn of each new assault on our national institutions and laws that we thought were set in stone.

Nearly 1,600 people convicted in the wake of the January 6th riots were given pardons or had their sentences commuted on the first day of the new administration. Then the White House ordered a sweeping freeze of all Federal assistance which could impact more than 400 health programs, including those where 1199 members work.

But while the news coming out of Washington since the inauguration is very bad for working people, it is not the whole story.

Union membership continues to surge even as the billionaires seem to be gaining power. The number of union election petitions filed with the National Labor Relations Board in 2024 went up by 27 percent compared with 2023. That trend has continued into 2025. On Monday, January 27, the employees at the flagship Whole Foods Store in Philadelphia’s Center City neighborhood voted to unionize. The grocery chain owned by Amazon, one of the largest corporations in the world. But workers we still able to organize successfully there. In New York, because of recent changes to how the consumer directed home care program is being run in the state, these workers will have the opportunity to join our Union. After April 1, the over 250,000 workers in the Consumer Directed Personal Assistance Program (CDPAP) will be able to form a union with 1199 to negotiate better wages and terms for both themselves and the consumers they serve. (see Protecting In-Home Caregivers p. 20) It is important to remember that the current moves to take both money and rights away from working people at the national level are nothing new. According to a Time Magazine article published in 2020, the top one percent of Americans have taken $50 trillion from the bottom 90 percent over the period between 1974 and 2020. And the gap between the richest and everyone else has continued to grow since then. Nearly all the benefits of growth over the past 50 years have been captured by those at the very top.

We know that the only way we can turn this trend of ever-rising inequality around is to organize in our shops and begin to take back our share of this country’s prosperity. Standing up for fellow members at the workplace is often the first step towards understanding the importance of our elected representatives in securing the money needed for our contracts (see Delegate Profile: Anjelique Huerta, p. 18).

We know how important it is to continue funding Medicaid and Medicare, too. Many of us spend every working day caring for the most vulnerable in society (see The Work We Do: StartCare Methadone Clinic, p. 12). This work would not be possible without Medicaid. Now is not the time to throw up our hands. It is time to roll up our sleeves. As Dr. Martin Luther King once said: “I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. That is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant.”