Redmond: ‘We Know the Way Forward’ 

Longtime USW leader Fred Redmond urged union members on Monday to meet the growing challenges they now face with a new commitment to organizing and mobilizing workers. 

The current environment can make workers feel discouraged about the future, but labor leaders understand how to create the future they want, because they’ve done it before, said Redmond, the secretary-treasurer of the AFL-CIO who served as USW international vice president from 2006 to 2022. 

“Attacks on everything that we stand for have been relentless,” Redmond said as he ticked off a long list of ways in which the Trump administration has made life more difficult for working people in recent weeks, from firing vast swaths of workers to gutting essential federal agencies. “We are the voice of those who, today, feel hopeless.” 

The answer to that feeling, he said, is to organize and energize a new generation of workers across North America to grow the labor movement and build a future that prioritizes the rights of workers and allows them to exercise their collective strength. 

“If we are leading with our values, there isn’t a more core value than the right to collectively bargain,” he said, noting that workers across the United States, Canada and Mexico must stand together against growing anti-union attacks that are meant to divide them. “It all starts with solidarity. Real solidarity that crosses borders.” 

Unions like the USW have always faced threats to their very existence from greedy corporate leaders and anti-union politicians, Redmond said, but they have persevered, through the decades, because of their unwavering unity and solidarity, and they can do it again. 

“Every time they try to knock us down, we get back up, stronger,” Redmond said. “The future is ours to shape. We know the way forward.”