This past October, Los Angeles City Council President Nury Martinez resigned over racist remarks she made during an October 2021 meeting with other Latino leaders. Alberto Retana, the president of Community Coalition in southern Los Angeles, called out the council members who “participate[d] in a back door deal to aggrandize the careers of 3 at the expense of Black erasure and Black voter suppression.” As a bulwark of the Los Angeles labor movement, Martinez’s remarks dealt an especially painful blow to labor leaders by demonstrating how pervasive anti-Blackness remains within the larger struggle for workers’ rights.
Addressing anti-Blackness in the labor movement is more vital than ever. Unions have seen a fierce resurgence of unions in the U.S. in 2022. In the first half of the year alone, unions won 641 elections—the most in nearly 20 years, according to data from the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). But as unions fight for fair pay and better working conditions, advocates say that it’s past time for a critical reckoning with a long history of anti-Black sentiment within unionization efforts and the greater workers’ rights movement.