More than 4,500 union organizers, union members, and non-union workers across virtually every sector of employment imaginable packed into a Hyatt Regency hotel in Chicago last weekend for a conference to strategize around the concept of putting the “movement” back in the labor movement.
Attendees of the three-day biennial conference, hosted by the nonprofit Labor Notes, included several union activists from Tampa Bay, including Adam Shils, a former middle-school teacher from Illinois who retired to St. Petersburg. He’s been attending Labor Notes conferences since the 1980s.
“I taught sixth grade for 41 years,” he told Creative Loafing Tampa Bay. “All that time, I was active in the teachers union, and we fought for better contracts to represent members who are being mistreated to improve wages, hours, and working conditions.”
He said, while many of the issues that workers have discussed at these conferences are similar—fighting back against anti-union forces and mistreatment on the job—what’s different is the sheer surge in attendees, particularly younger people, who are agitating for stronger workers’ rights.
While just over 11% of U.S. workers have a union today—compared to 33% of workers in 1945—a majority of Americans view unions favorably and believe that unions’ decline is bad for working people.
The enthusiasm for a bigger, stronger organized labor movement was reflected last weekend in Chicago. Thousands of workers from 23 countries were in attendance.
“It’s so big, there’s not even a quiet place to talk in the hotel,” Shils remarked during an interview just outside on Saturday afternoon.
“We should tell some Creative Loafing readers that we’re having to stand in the parking lot”—on a shady median of grass, specifically—“because your journalist and I can’t enter the hotel.”
At least, we couldn’t find a quiet corner inside.
Indeed, an ocean of attendees wearing colorful labor swag—representing unions like Starbucks Workers United, the American Federation of Government Employees, the Teamsters, teachers unions and others—milled between dozens of rooms inside the Hyatt for workshop sessions to network, strategize, and build their skill-sets for cultivating a strong union.
The state of Florida labor unions
Unionists young, old, new to the labor movement or not, strategize over how to form and build fighting unions. The energy is much different than what you would generally find in Florida, where fewer than 7% of workers even have union representation—and where, in the private sector, fewer than 4% of workers are unionized.
“It’s great to come up here and see all the solidarity among union workers and non-union workers,” said Norwood Orrick, a telecommunications worker for Frontier and IBEW Local 824 member from Tampa. “It’s something we rarely get in Florida.”
Part of the challenge, and explanation for this low number, is decades of Florida lawmakers instituting policies that discourage unionization and weaken the power of unions to form and survive. Florida is relatively unique in that it is one of six states to have collective bargaining rights enshrined in its state Constitution.
However, also in the state Constitution is a ban on public employee strikes—with fines and other consequences for violations—and a policy known as “right to work” that makes paying dues to a union voluntary, even if you’re represented by one. In practice, this starves unions of resources they need to be stronger, fighting unions rather than weaker ones surviving on scraps.
More pointedly in recent years, Florida Republicans—at the urging of Gov. Ron DeSantis ahead of his failed bid for U.S. President—have gone after government worker unions. That is, unions representing librarians, public utility workers, bus drivers, code enforcement officers, public nurses, and teachers.
In 2023, Florida passed SB 256, a law modeled after a similar proposal in Wisconsin, backed by right-wing think tanks, that required more public employees to voluntarily pay union dues in order for their union to remain certified by the state, while simultaneously implementing a ban on the most convenient way to pay dues: through a paycheck deduction.
More than 120 unions across the state have been decertified since, according to state records, including all of the state’s adjunct faculty unions that first organized through a flurry of union drives about a decade ago.
This year, another law (SB 1296) targeting public employee unions also passed. It bans most public employees (with exceptions for public safety unions) from forming a union through a process known as voluntary recognition, rather than going through a union election. It also raises the threshold for the percentage of public sector workers that have to vote in a union election for the results to even matter.
Under the 2023 law, public sector unions with a dues-paying membership of less than 60% have to go through annual recertification elections, unless the union represents majority cops, firefighters, or correctional officers. And currently, just a simple majority of workers who vote need to vote in favor of unionizing or recertifying their union for the union to prevail—similar to any electoral election.
Effective July 1, however, under the new law,at least 50% of workers will have to vote, and at least 50% of those who do vote have to vote in favor.
Still, retired teacher Shils isn’t ready to give up the fight—and he doesn’t think others in Florida should either. “Even though the labor movement is weak in Florida, we still have a labor movement.”
At the University of South Florida, for instance, hundreds of blue-collar maintenance workers who saw their union decertified — then, their jobs privatized unilaterally by the university — after the passage of SB 256, have since reorganized new unions.
Starbucks workers in Tampa, Clearwater, and across Florida have also joined a flurry of Starbucks worker organizing efforts in red and blue states across the country for better scheduling and pay, as truck drivers employed by companies like 10 Roads Express in Tampa Bay have similarly flexed their muscles to secure union contracts to deliver higher wages and working conditions to care for themselves and their families.
Most recently, at the Tampa International Airport, nearly 200 food service workers at restaurants operated by contractor SSP, such as the Hard Rock and Ducky’s, just unionized with Unite Here Local 362, a hospitality workers union that also represents thousands of workers at Walt Disney World and Orlando International Airport.
“Many other trade unionists fight under difficult circumstances. We aren’t alone in Florida,” he added. In Utah for example, a coalition of 21 unions organized last year to repeal a law their Republican-controlled legislature passed to ban collective bargaining rights completely.
Union members got more than 250,000 people in Utah to sign a petition to get the repeal on the ballot, before Republicans just decided to scrap the controversial ban themselves.
“I just came from a meeting on organizing in right-to-work states, and Florida workers aren’t alone in defeating anti-labor measures like 1296,” Shils told CL. “We’ll get some help from our brothers and sisters here in Chicago.”
Working family
These workshops and panels, featuring rank-and–file workers and union officials from around the world, zeroed in on issues ranging from school privatization efforts around the globe—and the subsequent starvation effects on public school funding—to how to effectively organize a “march on the boss,” organizing a union in the U.S. South (where workers face greater challenges), and even how to continue organizing when your union “breaks your heart.”
Emily Lumpkin, an electrical worker from West Virginia and member of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) Local 968, said during a speech Sunday that joining a union changed her life.
“I joined the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers in 2016 after years of struggling with unemployment and minimum wage or below jobs,” she recalled. “I was young, and I was filled with so much hope about what the union would be like.”
But Labor Notes isn’t a union propaganda conference. It’s also a place where disgruntled union activists can discuss how the labor movement can do better.
“In so many ways, my union delivered,” Lumpkin acknowledged during her speech. “A college dropout with few prospects, the IBEW gave me skills that will sustain me for a lifetime. It gave me wages higher than I ever imagined that I could make, health insurance, a pension, and the closest friends that I will ever have,” she said. “And despite all these gains, I found that I was functionally as powerless as I had ever been.”
When Lumpkin attended the Labor Notes Conference in 2024—where attendance was half the size—she recalled feeling “disheartened and frustrated.” She felt her voice wasn’t valued by union leadership and that important decisions made at union meetings were simply “rubber-stamped” rather than opened up to meaningful discussion.
Then, at the 2024 conference, a fellow IBEW member gave Lumpkin a one-page flyer promoting a new rank-and-file caucus of IBEW members, dubbed the Caucus of Rank and File Electrical Workers (CREW). Finally, she felt empowered to help improve her union.
“How many of us have found ourselves desperately wishing that there was some machine that could just turn all of this apathy and anger and grief into action? I have good news: That machine exists. It is the rank and file caucus,” she told an audience of hundreds Sunday.
While some frustrated, apathetic, or kicked-out union members have turned to the lucrative union avoidance industry—where they can make $400 an hour to persuade workers against forming a union—Lumpkin is one of many union members across the IBEW, Teamsters, United Auto Workers, and other unions who are organizing to make their unions more democratic, inclusive, and appealing to the estimated 60 million Americans who would vote to join a union if they had the chance.
And she said they’ve already had demonstrative success.
“We have been instrumental in passing resolutions for Palestinian ceasefire and in defense of immigrants,” Lumpkin said of her caucus.
“CREW members have spearheaded the aggressive organizing of workers many of our locals have traditionally ignored, like women and monolingual Spanish speakers,” she added, as one of the only women in Local 968. “In support of this, our members have fought for and have won Spanish translations of our contracts.”
Ruddy Pimentel, an electrician and executive board member of the IBEW Local 915 in Tampa, attended the Labor Notes Conference this year for the first time through a scholarship provided by the West Central Florida Labor Council. He described the conference to CL Saturday night, even ahead of Lumpkin’s speech, as “inspirational.”
Like Lumpkin, Pimentel spent years working low-wage jobs for companies like McDonald’s, before finding a union apprenticeship program about 25 years ago that secured him gainful employment in the electrical trades.
His career as a union electrician, today, has offered him an affordable health insurance plan that covers himself and his wife—a retired nurse with a disability—and a retirement plan that will allow him to retire with dignity, without having to rely on Social Security income just to get by.
Research has found that union members make 10% to 20% more on average, compared to their non-union, similarly-educated counterparts. Union membership is also associated with stronger job protections, such as protection from getting fired for no justifiable reason, as well as greater access to paid leave and stronger retirement benefits.
Shils, the retired teacher and a member of the Pinellas Educational Employees Retired (PEER), said that he sees the Labor Notes conference as a critical tool in the fight against efforts by the union-hostile Florida government and federal Trump administration to crush unions—and by extension, the power of working people.
“I believe that Labor Notes is one of the central ways we can rebuild the American labor movement, and I believe that rebuilding the American labor movement is the best way we can stop Trump and [Governor Ron] DeSantis—is by building strong unions,” Shils argued. “And this is the best place to learn how to do that.”
Scores of federal employees and union officials attended the conference as well, reflecting on the last year-and-a-half of unfriendly attacks on their collective bargaining rights.
The Trump administration’s “union busting” campaign, efforts to intimidate and purge immigrant workers from the U.S., and the strategies that workers have taken to fight back and build up stronger was a notable theme for this year’s gathering, with photos of “Labor Protest in the Trump Era” stationed near vendor tables throughout the duration of the weekend.
In 2022, the conference was energized by the electric victory of Amazon workers in Staten Island, New York—who had just unionized an Amazon warehouse for the first time in U.S. history—and the rapid-fire organizing efforts of Starbucks baristas.
In 2024, the United Auto Workers—fresh off their 2023 strike against the Big Three automakers and a major organizing victory at a Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee—stole the show, with a featured speech by UAW President Shawn Fain.
Fain, a new union president at the time who had campaigned as a reform candidate for union leadership, had gone viral for shooting a video ahead of the 2023 strike of himself literally dumping the automakers’ best and final offer for the union in the trash.
During the 2024 conference itself, the UAW announced the results of the Volkswagen union election in Tennessee—a highly-anticipiated affair, based in part on the decision by the union to invest so deeply in an organizing campaign in the U.S. South (where union membership rates are low) and the fact that workers at the same plant had voted against unionizing twice before.
Not this time.
Out of more than 3,600 votes cast, the union announced on April 19, 2024 that 73% of workers had voted in favor of joining the UAW, generating a purely electric moment hundreds of miles away from the victory itself at the Hyatt Regency O’Hare in Chicago.
“Just like Martin Luther King had a dream, we have a dream at Volkswagen that we will be UAW one day,” said Renee Berry, a 14-year Volkswagen worker, speaking to Labor Notes editor and organizer Luis Feliz Leon after the win.
The biennial conference isn’t without a little razzle dazzle. It’s peppered with arts and culture activities, including labor song jams, after-programming dance parties, Scabby the Rat puppetry, and documentary film screenings that uplift organizing campaigns, like the movement of unionizing Starbucks baristas depicted in the film “Partners.”
There’s also a reliable crowd of people chain-smoking outside the hotel between workshops, finding camaraderie in the casual conversations between puffs of cigarette smoke and the odd sheepish request from an overstimulated introvert to bum a cigarette (read: me).
Orrick, the telecom technician from Tampa, installs fiber internet in homes for Frontier. He found comfort in sharing stories with other workers in his industry from other parts of the country, who are similarly facing pressures such as higher rates of subcontracting that are reducing unions’ numbers and weakening workers’ ability to join together as a collective to improve their working conditions.
Orrick’s been attending Labor Notes conferences for years, like Shils, and said that, these days, he feels a greater responsibility to help welcome new unionists to the movement. “I feel like I’m here to help out, and to help smooth the way for the people that haven’t been here yet,” — like Pimentel — “or who are just discovering it for the first time.”
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This article appears in June 18 – 24, 2026.
