WHEREAS:
States across the country were battlegrounds for anti-worker legislation in 2025 and 2026, as anti-union organizations sought to dismantle collective bargaining rights and silence workers’ voices on the job. In Utah, AFSCME members and our allies beat back a new law stripping public employees’ collective bargaining rights with a ballot initiative before lawmakers backed down and repealed the measure. Legislators in Arizona, Louisiana and Tennessee targeted union dues deduction, with Arizona lawmakers trying to write that prohibition and other anti-union measures into the state constitution. Florida put new obstacles in place against workers who want to form a union. Some Kentucky lawmakers attempted to prohibit any new collective bargaining agreements in the public sector, and Louisiana is attempting to gut civil service protections for state workers; and
WHEREAS:
These legislative attacks are often pushed by billionaires and big businesses through their special interest groups like the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), Americans for Prosperity and the Freedom Foundation; and
WHEREAS:
The anti-union attacks in 2026 are nothing new. In 2011, anti-union state lawmakers, including Gov. Scott Walker, dismantled decades of public sector unionism in Wisconsin by passing Act 10 as a fake budget-balancing measure. In Ohio in that same year, Republican statehouse leaders pushed through union-busting Senate Bill 5 over the protests of hundreds of thousands of union members and their supporters. The union busters were defeated, however, by a citizen initiative, Issue 2, in which Ohioans voted by an overwhelming margin to overturn the law and save public sector collective bargaining in the state; and
WHEREAS:
After the Janus v. AFSCME Supreme Court decision in 2018, which made state and local government right-to-work nationwide, many of those same special interest groups thought they could kill the public sector labor movement. Anti-union operatives tried to convince union members to stop paying dues, sometimes falsely posing as union representatives and even hoping to appeal to narrow self-interest in telling members they could keep their union but avoid paying for it. Those efforts have failed because union members didn’t fall for their trap, and AFSCME is stronger than ever; and
WHEREAS:
Anti-union billionaires and business interests are desperate to weaken the power of workers and made their intentions clear with the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 that called for the total abolition of collective bargaining among state and local government workers. One of the architects of Project 2025, Russ Vought, now commands federal policy from the White House as director of the Office of Management and Budget; and
WHEREAS:
Despite these legislative attacks, working people are still coming together to demand a voice on the job, and as a result, AFSCME continues to grow and our members continue to win historic expansions of collective bargaining rights in states such as Colorado, Maryland and Texas, proving that public workers are the backbone of our democracy.
THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED:
That AFSCME will fight state-level anti-union legislation, including restrictions on union recognition, dues deduction, needless recertification votes, rigged voting rules requiring a majority of potential voters to certify a union, minimum dues-paying membership requirements and limits on union activity in the workplace; and
BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED:
That AFSCME will work with state attorneys general to take action against anti-worker groups like the Freedom Foundation who target our members with false and misleading communications purporting to come from AFSCME that encourage them to drop their union membership; and
BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED:
That AFSCME will champion state legislation to formally codify civil service protections into law, blocking attempts to reclassify career professional public service workers as ‘at-will’ employees; and
BE IT FINALLY RESOLVED:
That we will hold every public official accountable for their stance on labor rights, ensuring that those who seek to weaken our movement understand that an attack on one public service worker is an attack on all of us and the entire community we serve.
SUBMITTED BY:
Lois Carson, President and Delegate
Sheila Dawkins-Flinn, Secretary and Delegate
Ohio Association of Public School Employees (OAPSE)/AFSCME Local 4
Ohio