Janeé Roberts was first introduced to working at Amazon via her mother, who operated a forklift at the company’s MEM6 warehouse in Mississippi. When Roberts’ mom had an aneurysm on the job, Amazon did nothing to support her recovery. Now Janeé is an organizer with the union at Amazon’s DCK6 location in San Francisco fighting for every other worker who has suffered on the job with little to no support from one of the world’s richest companies.
Federal workers were the canary in the coal mine for the second Trump administration’s full frontal assault on labor rights. Before DOGE eliminated her job, Sabrina Valenti was working on coastal restoration at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to protect communities from hurricanes up until the beginning of 2025. With mass layoffs at her organization and spending cuts across the board, Valenti warns that future hurricane seasons could be even more threatening.
Another federal worker who shared a personal story through Inequality.org this year was Paul Osadebe, an attorney at the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Osadebe pleaded with his fellow federal workers to stay on the job as long as they could because of the critical services they provide to Americans. Later in the year, Osadebe was fired after blowing the whistle on Trump political appointees at HUD who had made it nearly impossible to effectively enforce the Fair Housing Act.
Even after the infamous Wells Fargo “fake accounts” scandal of 2016, Kieran Cuadras continued to observe recklessness aimed at squeezing the bank’s employees and consumers to pump up executive paychecks. In this op-ed, the former Wells Fargo internal misconduct investigator calls for taxes on excessive CEO compensation to encourage more equitable corporate practices. Our nation’s leaders, says Cuadras, need to “do something about a CEO pay system that rewards executives with obscenely large paychecks for practices that harm workers and the broader economy.”
Organizing Amazon, now America’s second-largest private employer, has been a primary goal of the labor movement. Reverend Ryan Brown was a key figure in an independent campaign to organize a warehouse in North Carolina. Before their union vote, Brown wrote for Inequality.org about the massive anti-union and surveillance campaign that Amazon was waging at his workplace. Despite losing the election this time around, workers at RDU1 outside of Raleigh and across the country are not stepping down.
Worker struggles are of course not limited to this country. In February, Abiramy Sivalogananthan of the Asia Floor Wage Alliance wrote for us about a new campaign from garment workers in the Global South to improve working conditions and hold the American companies pulling in billions from exploitation accountable. Over 1,000 workers have called on their allies in the U.S. to sign onto their campaign.
Child care teacher Rita Bee shared one of the bright spots of the year — New Mexico’s adoption of universal, no-cost child care. Families will save an average of $12,000 per year — a true game-changer for low-income households in one of the country’s poorest states. The state is funding the program through taxes on oil and gas extraction from public lands. “Taking care of our children and setting them up for success is the best thing we can do for our families, our communities, and our nation,” Bee wrote.
