Tom McGrath is a Philadelphia-based journalist and author. His new book,, will be published this spring by Grand Central Publishing.
AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler speaks during a SAG-AFTRA and WGA West Picket in Los Angeles at Fox Studio lot. | Brittany Woodside/AFL-CIO Members of the Writers Guild of America gather prior to joining SAG-AFTRA picketers in solidarity outside the gates of Warner Bros. studios in Burbank, California, on Sep. 26, 2023. | Richard Vogel/AP
Attendees gather at a United Auto Workers convention in 1941 in Detroit. | Marion S. Trikoso/Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Divisionthe labor movement — are entering a new era, Shuler herself is also something new: She’s the first woman ever to lead the AFL-CIO, the consortium of more than 60 unions that represent more than 12.5 million workers across the country. Shuler, who’s 53, has arguably been prepping for the job her entire life.
In one project with CMU, the Technology Institute arranged for union bus drivers to offer their perspectives on self-driving buses. In a subsequent white paper, CMU professors noted that while autonomous buses have the potential to improve safety, they’ll actually make operators’ jobs more complicated. What’s more, the report noted, self-driving technology is no substitute for the more human part of what bus operators do in attending to passenger needs and looking out for passenger safety.
“Instead of saying, OK, we’re going to tell you how the technology is going to be implemented, we need to actually be upstream in the development of the technology and have workers’ voices in those labs shaping what happens,” she says. “Unless you have the ability to come together with your co-workers and shape , put guardrails around it, negotiate what your role is in it, then it’s not going to benefit us all in the way that it needs to.
At the same time, the once-thriving U.S. economy began to struggle with high inflation and low productivity, and unions — with their demands for ever-fatter contracts — were blamed for hurting corporate competitiveness. By the time Ronald Reagan famously fired members of the federal air traffic controllers union in the summer of 1981 , the ground had shifted. Nearly 7 in 10 Americans supported Reagan’s actions, and unions were on the outs.