When the summer subsides, 2025 legislative meetings have now postponed in over 40 states. Despite slim prospects for the progressive labor law reform, which was soon passed at the federal level, the political efforts to protect the rights and the work standards of the workers continued to occur on the sub -spring.
Since the start of “construction workers in cities and states: a toolkit for the innovation of state and local labor policy” a year ago, Clje continued to pursue politics and legal developments that aim to build up the power of workers at the state and local level. In the following you will find a summary of remarkable and ongoing developments at the state level in three areas: protection of the right to collective bargaining, defense of work standards and promotion of representation and support of the workers' structures. We recommend that you check the toolkit to get more information and ongoing updates.
Protection of the right to collective bargaining
In this session, Washington and Oregon with New York and New Jersey became the youngest states that extend the authorization to unemployment insurance for strikes. Oregon will also be the first state to extend the UI services for the striking workers of the public sector if the laws come into force on January 1, 2026. The legal challenges were placed against politics, although in May this year a court in New Jersey decided an appellate court to expand the advantages of UI advantages that the national relation behavior before the pant contract did not exist. of the [NLRA]. “”
Last November the bids decided in Amazon.com Services LLC These captivity meetings in captivity are an unfair working practice according to § 8 (a) (1) of the NLRA. But as Ben notes, the states remains a convincing case to lead the books in captivity, given the likely reversal of Amazon services under the Trump card (whenever it can materialize). At the beginning of this year, Rhode Island was the 13th state, the captured public meeting.
When John, Ted and Anjali traced and documented closely, the threats for the NLRB still escalated before the dishes. California, Massachusetts and New York have introduced trigger laws that would enable the state to take over the responsibility for employees of the private sector in the context of existing public sector according to the NLRB (the specifications for which the specifications vary). The New York law passed both chambers of the legislature and is now waiting for the signature of governor Kathy Hochul.
Defend work standards
In accordance with the widespread deregulation agenda of the Trump government, the Ministry of Labor recently suggested over 60 regulations related to health and security at work, minimum wages and overtime protection (or in some cases lifted without further ado).
States consider suggestions for maintaining health and security protection at the workplace in the event of rollbacks at the federal level. In August, Illinois passed the Illinois Workers' Rights and Safety Act to the Law, which the State Department of Labor instructed, to replace all the abolished federal standards in accordance with the law on safety and health of occupational safety (OSHA), the law on Fair Labor Standards (FLSA) and the law on the Health and Security Act (CMHSA) with an equivalent state standard standard.
With 2025 on the right path as one of the hottest summer, the states have occurred in the absence of a federal -osha standard with their own heat safety standards. Currently, heat standards in the books in seven states and 18 states (including New Jersey and Illinois) have been introduced in this session, although no one has yet passed. Although the heat sail proposed as part of the bidea DOL escaped from the deregulation block this summer and continued to penetrate the OSHA rules of control, the federal regulatory process is slow and tedious even in the most supportive administrations. After the historical trends of heat -related injuries and deaths in the workplace, dozens of more workers can be lost while we are waiting.
Promotion of representation and support for employee institutions
In 2022, the Ministry of Labor granted $ 18 million in seven states to work with community and employee organizations, including unions, in order to reduce obstacles to access to unemployment benefits and other public services. The navigator grants of unemployment insurance, a unique federal program that was approved as part of the American Rescue Plan Act, is similar to a gene system of public performance management that includes unions in the provision of state services. The results of a Center for American Progress Study, in which the implementation of the Maine UI navigator is evaluated, show that the program not only improves the recording rates of UI advantages, but also improves the interest of recipients in collective actions in the workplace. In June, the governor of Maine, Janet Mills, signed a constant personal navigator program based in the municipality, which was modeled on the state's three-year-old ARPA-financed pilot program.
The interest in industry -wide work standards such as the California Fast Food Council and the Minnesota Nursing Home Workforce Standards Board is introduced in Oregon for agricultural and long -term care standards. The rights of the domestic workers who pass into the law in New Jersey and Rhode Island last year, and a draft law in the state of Washington passed the Senate this year. In March, Josh Shapiro, Governor of Pennsylvania, announced a pilot program with which the use of generative AI tools can be used in the public sector that contains the supervision of a workers' committee. The Commonwealth works with the SEIU Local 668, which employee for social services and advantages for the implementation of this program.