HVALF President’s Remarks: Cross-Union Solidarity Rally with AAEA, AFSCME 369, GEO, and TWU

Speech from Ian Robinson, HVALF President, on July 25th, 2026. Given at the cross-union solidarity rally, a press conference that brought together all currently bargaining public sector unions in Huron Valley.

“My name is Ian Robinson. I’m the President of the Huron Valley Area Labor Federation, AFL-CIO. Our federation brings together 40 locals whose 23,000 members work or live in Washtenaw, Livingston, Jackson and Hillsdale Counties. Together, we represent most of the union members in this part of Southeast Michigan. We also stand in solidarity with unions that aren’t affiliated with HVALF when we can. Today, three of the four unions you’ll hear from are HVALF affiliates, but one – the AAEA, representing teachers and support staff – is not.

I want to especially thank the following people for helping us to plan and execute this event: Sharon Simonton, our ALF Field Coordinator; Dave Kastner from the city employees union; Fred Klein and Maya Fields Jacobs from AAEA; Kaitlin Karmen from GEO; Chai Montgomery from TWU; Josh Kaufman from the Yousef campaign; ALF’s Comms Coordinator, Mark Tallents for his social media work; Barb Wetula from our Solidarity Action Network and various Indivisibles for her help with marshalling today; and Nate Manuel from IATSE for setting up and running our sound system today! Apologies if I’ve forgotten anyone who put serious time into today’s event.

We’re here today to support our union siblings’ collective bargaining efforts and our endorsed slate of candidates for AA City Council. All four of the unions we’ll be hearing from today have several things in common: they all represent public sector workers struggling to get decent compensation from employers governed by Boards comprised mainly of elected Democrats or people appointed by elected Democrats.

Why is it so hard to get good contracts from such employers? Several reasons:

We are coming out of a 40-year experiment with corporation-backed free market economics, kicked off by Ronald Reagan. In his first Inaugural Address in 1981, Reagan famously declared: “government is not the solution, government is the problem.” Reagan wasn’t just anti-government; he was anti-union – fired PATCO air traffic controllers, sending a signal to the private sector to do same. Tax cuts for the rich were a big part of the corporate agenda; so was cutting publicly owned housing; so was the anti-worker model of trade embodied in NAFTA. In this anti-government, anti-union, anti-worker climate, government budgets were cut, levels of union organization plummeted, and economic inequality skyrocketed. The new norm for the public sector and its employees was “austerity” – budget cuts, program cuts, and at the bargaining table, a constant refrain of “we can’t afford to compensate you as well as we used to” in the good old days (i.e., before RR)

By the time Bill Clinton became President in 1983, a lot of Democrats, led by him, were on board for much of Reagan’s corporate free market agenda. To make matters worse, every decade or so (1990-91, 2001, 2008-10, most recently COVID), baseline austerity would be intensified by major econ crises => calls for major concessions at the bargaining table. We are coming out of the corporate free market era now, because its results were so disastrous for most Americans that they revolted against the politicians who implemented it. In the Republican Party, the popular revolt took the form of the Tea Party, followed by MAGA and Trump. In the Democratic Party, Occupy Wall St, followed by the Bernie & Elizabeth Warren Presidential primary challenges, the election of AOC and Mamdani in NYC, and – most recently and locally – the campaigns by Abdul El Sayed for U.S. Senate, and Yousef Rabhi and his slate in Ann Arbor.

I would draw four inter-connected lessons of the failure of the corporate free market era to deliver broad-based prosperity to the American people:

First, we need an expanded public sector to do quickly and well what markets dominated by for-profit corporations can’t do well – e.g., health care, housing, power and the green transition

Second, we need strong public sector unions to champion that expanded govt role and respect for the people who do this vital work – our airports should be thanking our teachers and nurses for their public service and sacrifice too! Remember COVID.

Third, we need politicians who understand the first two lessons and will take on those – in their own party and opposing parties – who have not learned these lessons, to push policies that build a stronger public sector and stronger public sector unions

Last but least, we need citizens who believe in the potential of our politics to be much more democratic than they have been in the last 40 years, and are willing to do the work necessary to get pro-worker, pro-democracy candidates elected.

What we can do, right here, right now, is send a clear message from the people to electeds and candidates, especially in the Democratic Party, that we want them to build that pro-worker economy and we want them to do it now! That message will be very clearly conveyed in our part of the world if we elect Yousef Rabhi Mayor of Ann Arbor and his AA City Council slate as the Democratic candidates on the November general election ballot. Another powerful signal would be to elect Abdul El Sayed as the Democratic candidate on the ballot for U.S. Senator.

The most important thing we can do to ensure that those races break our way is to get out and knock doors over the next 11 days.”

The rally continued to with the following union representatives discussing their collective bargaining challenges – what they are demanding for their members, and how public employers have been responding to those demands:

• Yousef Rabhi – Candidate for AA Mayor and Washtenaw County Commissioner;

• Fred Klein – President of AA school district teachers;

• Maya Fields Jacobs – President of union of office professionals in same school district, also part of AAEA but have their own CBA;

• Kaitlin Karmen – UM grad students union, GEO, which is part of AFT-MI;

• Delisa Brown – AAATA bus drivers and the mechanics and others who keep our buses running;

• Dave Kastner – AFSCME 369 – City of Ann Arbor front-line workers.