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Tag: voting rights act of 1965

  • The Voting Rights Act Is Under Threat. So Are Workers’ Rights.

    Fred Redmond, AFL-CIO Secretary – Treasurer

    In our workplaces, in our communities and in our government, the right to vote is how working people make our voices heard. The late Rep. John Lewis (Georgia) proclaimed, “Your vote is precious, almost sacred.” The Supreme Court’s recent decision allowing Texas to use a racially discriminatory congressional map threatens that precious right once again—and with it, the foundation of worker power itself.

    A challenge out of Louisiana may soon make matters worse, threatening to further limit the strength of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) of 1965—the nation’s most powerful tool for correcting historical racial discrimination in voting, including the violence and suppression once used to keep Black voters from the polls.

    The VRA was brought to life by courageous civil rights and labor leaders who risked everything to end racial discrimination at the ballot box. The law transformed American democracy by dramatically increasing Black political participation, expanding representation at every level of government and giving working people a real chance to shape the decisions that affect their lives.

    This fight is part of the labor movement’s history too. In 1963, labor leaders were key architects of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, and labor unions mobilized 40,000 union members and provided resources. We offered critical lobbying support and testimony in support of the Civil Rights Act and the VRA—the passage of which in 1965 led to the filing of thousands of successful cases against workplace discrimination and eliminated many of the racist voting restrictions in the South. When Black voter turnout surged, so did worker power, especially in the South, where the VRA helped create a diverse coalition of working-class voters. 

    According to research from the University of California San Diego, the VRA narrowed the wage gap between Black and White workers by 5.5% between 1950 and 1980. Another study found that high-turnout communities saw more paved roads and streetlights; better access to city and county resources; and easier entry into public sector jobs such as police, firefighters and teachers.

    The lesson is clear: A strong democracy gives working people space to thrive. When democracy is weakened, workers pay the price.

    In 2013, the Supreme Court issued its Shelby County v. Holder decision and gutted the VRA, ruling that states with histories of racial discrimination no longer needed federal approval to change voting laws. Almost immediately, a race to the bottom began. States wasted no time closing polling places, shortening early voting hours and passing restrictive ID laws. The targets were clear: young people, shift workers and communities of color—the same groups driving today’s organizing momentum. In the years since Shelby, wages for Black teachers, city workers and health care aides have fallen, while corporate power has only grown stronger.

    The Texas congressional map offers a glimpse of a future without the VRA: diluted working-class voices in a system that answers only to the wealthy few. These attempts to roll back the clock on racial progress should sound an alarm. When politicians get a green light to manipulate voting maps and take intentional steps to block representation on the basis of race, they can use that power to dismantle protections for union power, fair wages and retirement security.

    Democracy depends on rules that keep it fair. Those in power understand this—and some are working overtime to erase the rules entirely. But America’s unions have never accepted a world where working people are silenced. We fought for the Voting Rights Act because this movement knows our fight for fair pay, safe jobs and dignity at work is the same fight as the struggle for the ballot box.

    Workers built this democracy, and we will defend it. We will continue to push Congress to do its job and pass the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act to fully restore and permanently protect voting rights and ensure access to free and fair elections. 

    Voting rights are a labor issue—because when democracy breaks down, worker power breaks down with it.

    Fred Redmond, the highest-ranking African American labor official in history, is the secretary-treasurer of the AFL-CIO, the nation’s largest labor federation, representing 64 unions and nearly 15 million workers.

    Fred Redmond AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer and NNPA Newswire

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  • Only the Supreme Court Can Save Trump’s Gerrymandering Drive

    Where the midterms may be decided.
    Photo: Pete Kiehart/Bloomberg/Getty Images

    You’d need a 3-D bingo card to keep up with all the gerrymandering decisions that have been made around the country since Donald Trump began a drive this summer to rig midterm-election maps for 2026. But at the moment, it’s increasingly clear the big GOP advantage Trump envisioned when he pushed Texas into an abrupt gerrymander in July has faded and perhaps even disappeared. The New York Times’ Nate Cohn took stock of the situation:

    This week, Republicans encountered yet another round of roadblocks in Texas and Indiana. The two states once seemed likely to help the Republicans flip as many as seven Democratic-held districts combined, but after a federal court ruled against the new Texas map and Indiana failed to redraw its map, it suddenly seems possible that Republicans might not gain even a single district in these states.

    Without those seats, it’s now imaginable that the Democrats — not the Republicans — will narrowly win this year’s redistricting wars, and net the most seats heading into the 2026 midterm elections.

    Cohn estimated that before all this activity, Republicans could lose the national House popular vote by 0.2 percent and still retain control of the House. With new maps in place in California, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, Texas, and Utah, that cushion increased to 0.9 percent — enough to really matter in a close national midterm election. If the adverse judicial decision earlier this week nukes the new Texas map, the GOP advantage would turn into a Democratic advantage of 0.6 percent. Add in the expected offsetting gerrymanders on tap in Republican-controlled Florida and Democratic-controlled Virginia, and you wind up with a Democratic advantage of 0.5 percent.

    All this back-and-forth maneuvering more or less leaves in place a national landscape in which the historically indicated Democratic midterm wave, even if it’s just a ripple, will be enough to flip the House and destroy the GOP trifecta that has made it so easy for Trump to implement his radical 2025 agenda. But there are two potentially big shoes that could still drop in Washington from the Supreme Court.

    First of all, Texas has appealed the federal-district-court decision dismissing the new gerrymandered House map adopted this summer to SCOTUS, which could set aside the lower-court order and let the good times roll for the Texas GOP. Cohn estimates that development would change the bottom line if everything else happens as expected from a 0.5 percent Democratic advantage to a one percent Republican advantage, a potentially significant shift.

    But second of all, the really large intervention could come from the pending SCOTUS decision in Louisiana v. Callais. Many observers fear or hope the Court will all but kill the Voting Rights Act of 1965 in that decision, eliminating the powerful impetus many states (especially in the South) had to adopt maps that gave nonwhite voters a good shot at winning or influencing the outcome. That it turn could lead Republican-controlled state governments in the South to conduct last-minute gerrymanders to eliminate nearly all majority-Black or plurality-Black Democratic U.S. House districts before the midterms (19 of them, according to one estimate). It would be a real bloodbath. But even if they choose to move in that fateful direction, SCOTUS might not act in time to let the blood flow in 2026. And of all the arcane mysteries surrounding Supreme Court decisions, the timing is among the most mysterious.

    Suffice it to say that the outcome of Trump’s bid to rig the midterm landscape is in the hands of exactly those black-robed lifetime appointees who may also determine the fate of Trump’s power grabs on tariffs, domestic deployment of military units, the rights of federal employees, control of federal agencies, election rules, and many other areas of political and civic life. If you’re involved in politics or political journalism, don’t plan any vacations for next June or July when SCOTUS traditionally drops its bigger decisions.

    Ed Kilgore

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