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Greetings EARN community,
Inspired in part by the energy, ideas, and hope on full display at this year’s EARNCon, I’ve started updating my menu of mental mantras as the new year approaches. A few top new candidates already in rotation include “Resistance is everywhere,” “Solidarity kills fear,” and “All you (pseudo)fascists are bound to lose.”
End-of-year signs all around us suggest we should approach 2026 as a moment to call for bold state and local action to chart a new path forward by raising wages, strengthening worker rights, fortifying public services, and taxing the rich.
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Last week a bipartisan majority in the House voted to restore federal employee collective bargaining rights, repudiating Trump’s use of executive action to strip union contracts from nearly a million federal workers. It’s the first Congressional attempt to reverse a Trump executive order, an action that just months ago seemed unimaginable amid the darkest days of DOGE’s chaotic reign in the White House.
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Americans are more likely to side with labor and against big business than at any time in the past 60 years. As economist Aaron Sojourner notes, it’s a shift so stark that its implications are mentally difficult to catch up with: “For people whose instincts about economic and political conflicts between unions and big business were honed more than a decade ago, it’s time to update your understanding.”
Some states took initial steps this year to strengthen basic rights under threat from federal attack, build worker power, and tackle economic inequality. And workers and advocates are maintaining this momentum into the final days of 2025 in states across the country: pushing Utah’s legislature to reverse course on their wildly unpopular attempt to strip public employees’ union rights, convincing Ohio’s Republican governor to veto damaging child labor legislation, preparing for a statewide expansion of public-sector collective bargaining in Virginia, and more.
The human, institutional, and economic damage wrought by the authoritarian project unfolding in all three branches of federal government remains devastatingly real. But so is growing hunger for a new; vision to repair and replace it with a more just, equitable world. There’s much more to do in 2026, and we can’t wait to join you there in the struggles ahead. Until then, on behalf of EPI and the EARN team: thank you for all you do, and we wish you a healthy, hope-filled conclusion to 2025.
In solidarity,
Jennifer Sherer
Deputy Director, State Policy & Research / EARN
Director, State Worker Power Initiative
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