Inside the First-Ever Young Worker March on Washington

Organizers say they spent years preparing for this moment — researching issues and talking to workers facing untenable and unsustainable working conditions. They came up with five core demands that they believe can garner bipartisan support: a raise in the federal minimum wage, affordable healthcare and childcare, affordable housing, the restoration of workers’ and union rights, and education without crushing debt. 

The first-ever young workers march was organized and led by federal workers in Y.O.U.N.G. — Young Organizing Unionists for the Next Generation. Under the Trump administration, Y.O.U.N.G. and other members of the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) have been facing what educators and organizers have called the biggest act of union-busting in U.S. history. The Trump administration’s campaign against federal workers has included stripping their union rights, unilaterally ending collective bargaining agreements, weakening protections for whistleblowers, using them as political pawns during the longest government shutdown in U.S. history and pushing more than 300,000 workers out of public service in the past year through mass firings, reductions in force and buyouts.

The labor movement has always been under attack, but these young worker leaders say they are more committed than ever to leading a multigenerational fight to take government out of the hands of corporations and billionaires and place it into the hands of the public.

“We’re in a war, and we’re fighting as hard as we can to make sure the movement doesn’t stop,” says Aaron Barker, national chair of the Y.O.U.N.G. Committee.

Dr. Kendrick Roberson, former Y.O.U.N.G. Committee chair and AFGE’s current national vice president for the Women and Fair Practices division, was also at the rally. ​“The billionaires and the oligarchs are the primary beneficiaries of hopelessness within the workforce,” he said. ​“We’ve had to fight for every single right that we’ve achieved. These corporations didn’t just hand those rights to us.”

The Y.O.U.N.G. committee was created through a resolution passed at the AFGE national convention in 2012 and has helped win benefits like paid parental leave for federal workers.

Barker, who is president of AFGE Local 554 representing Transportation Security Administration (TSA) workers in Georgia, says that organizers want this march to be the beginning of a movement of young workers across the United States who have been sold the broken promise of the so-called American dream. ​“The generations before us, they had the opportunity to at least try to save and make life-changing purchases and investments,” he says. ​“We don’t have that opportunity.”

The Y.O.U.N.G. Committee’s demands impact not just union members or federal workers, but all working people in the United States. 

Workers are also demanding affordable healthcare and childcare. Polling has shown that there is growing public support for Medicare for All as well as support for funding universal childcare. 

“What good is a job, what good is a skill, if one injury or one illness can wipe all your savings away?” said Josh Charlier, chair of the IAM District 142 Young Workers Committee, at the rally. ​“The promise that hard work leads to a stable life is broken.”

One of the sharpest edges of this broken promise offered to workers is felt in the need for affordable healthcare. President of NNU Jamie Brown spoke at the rally about how healthcare workers have been seeing the consequences of a healthcare system that puts profits over patients, and that cuts to Medicaid will strain an overburdened system. ​“We see patients coming in sicker because they couldn’t afford preventative care,” she said. ​“Thousands of unnecessary deaths will occur, not because we don’t know how to save lives, but because politicians choose billionaire tax breaks and ICE funding over healthcare.” 

Workers also want affordable housing. ​“No one can save up for a house when they rely on hustles, side jobs, and gigs to pay rent,” said Chornoby at the rally. ​“I would love to start a family, but I refuse to bring a child into this world when I cannot guarantee they will have a better life than I have.”

On top of the increased cost of living, workers are in mountains of debt from healthcare costs and college tuition loans. Programs like Public Service Loan Forgiveness, which offers relief for some public workers, are extremely backlogged. So they are demanding more forgiveness and cancellation of student debt.

“Degrees are no longer a promise of stability and the American dream,” said Ricardo Humberto Miranda from the United States Student Association, at the rally. ​“They’re another cog in America’s machine of indentured servitude.”

Polling shows that 77% of workers aged 18 to 34 support unions, making Gen Z and millenials the most pro-union generations. Although young workers have led a renaissance of labor organizing in recent years at Amazon, Starbucks and Trader Joe’s, the number of workers who are union members has been in decline, and labor law hasn’t been substantially updated in decades. Federal workers are demanding passage of the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act, which would expand union and collective bargaining rights, as well as the Protecting America’s Workforce Act, which would restore collective bargaining rights for federal workers whose rights have been stripped by the Trump administration.

Kenny Lewis is the president of United Steelworkers (USW) Local 8888. He marched alongside members of the USW’s Next Generation program, which he says represents young workers who are often working in hazardous conditions. According to Lewis, many people start working in the shipyard at 18, and getting them to be aware of their union rights and representation takes a lot of work. ​“When it comes to labor laws, it’s up to us to educate them and let them know, like, yo, if we don’t fix this now, it can be taken away,” he says. 

Gilbert Galam is on the Y.O.U.N.G. Committee and is legislative director for AFGE Local 1260, representing TSA workers in California, Arizona, and Nevada. He says the five demands should be the bare minimum. ​“I want to see bargaining for the common good, in the same vein as teachers in Chicago. When they negotiate their contracts, they put some portions in there for the public,” he says. ​“I think that’s a route that AFGE should take, especially with the legislative program. We have unlimited potential.”

In 1981, about 13,000 air-traffic controllers represented by the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization went on strike after contract negotiations broke down with the Federal Aviation Administration. At the time, President Reagan called the strike a ​“peril to national safety” and fired the air-traffic controllers, barring them from federal employment. Today, workers rights are still on the chopping block in the name of national security.

Trump began issuing executive orders in March 2025 excluding agencies with ​“national security missions” from the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978, which governs collective bargaining for federal workers. This was intended to remove collective bargaining rights for more than a million workers at more than 30 federal agencies across national defense, border security, foreign relations, energy security, pandemic preparedness, cybersecurity, economic defense, and public safety. Following these executive orders, several agencies have cancelled their collective bargaining agreements. From dismantling entire agencies to attacks on their rights, federal workers say these attacks amount to a war on the entire U.S. workforce.

In a video obtained by ProPublica, the architect of Project 2025 and director of the federal government’s Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought, claimed that the administration’s agenda is to traumatize federal workers. ​“We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” Vought said at an event for the Center for Renewing America, the right-wing think tank he leads. ​“When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains.”

But federal workers take issue with the villainization of their labor. ​“We know that we could get paid more in the private sector, but we stay because we actually want to serve the public in ways that the private sector couldn’t,” says Galam.

In early February, the administration issued a rule that creates new classification around the employment of around 50,000 federal workers, allowing agencies to more ​“quickly remove employees from critical positions who engage in misconduct, perform poorly, or obstruct the democratic process by intentionally subverting Presidential directives.” According to the union, this rule turns employees into political appointees that can be fired ​“at will,” and it will weaken protections from retaliation, especially for whistleblowers reporting waste, fraud, abuse, and public health and safety threats.

“They’re rebranding career public servants as ​‘policy’ employees, silencing whistleblowers and replacing competent professionals with political flunkies without any neutral, independent protections against politicization and arbitrary abuse of power,” said AFGE National President Everett Kelley in a statement. Amid the attacks on workers, AFGE has responded with more than a dozen lawsuits challenging the Trump administration’s policies on collective bargaining rights and contract terminations, staffing cuts, and data breaches and privacy violations involving federal workers. 

During the last government shutdown, which lasted a historic 43 days, workers forwent three million paychecks — $14 billion in wages. One of the pieces of legislation federal workers have been lobbying Congress for would require agencies to pay workers during shutdowns, ensuring workers can make ends meet while preventing politicians from using them as political pawns.

The union also won reinstatement of workers at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, the agency responsible for researching and making recommendations on preventing work-related injury, illness and death. While leaders in AFGE are positioning themselves in opposition to an anti-worker administration that has directly attacked the rights and wellbeing of its members, there has been some hesitation to denounce some of its own members who may have been responsible for the killing of a fellow union member.

After nearly 100,000 Minnesotans participated in a statewide economic shutdown on January 23 demanding the end of the federal occupation by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) after the killing of Renee Good on January 7, border patrol agents shot and killed Alex Pretti, a young federal worker and member of AFGE Local 3669 who worked as an intensive care unit nurse at the Veterans Affairs (VA) Medical Center in Minneapolis, Minn.

“That could have been me,” says Becky Halioua, AFGE Local 217 president representing 1800 workers at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Augusta, Ga.. ​“One of the things that is ingrained in us as healthcare workers is to help people. We’re in a helping profession. It is terrifying to think that no matter what the scenario is, you could be shot trying to help somebody else.”

Jacob Romans, president of AFGE Local 3669, spoke in honor of Pretti at AFGE’s annual legislative conference on February 8 in Washington, D.C.. ​“It is not okay that the federal government is kidnapping and murdering citizens,” he said. ​“It is not okay that billionaires are looting from the bottom 99% of Americans to make themselves more wealthy. Alex lost his life that day because we are not okay. We are living in a pivotal moment that compels us to act and take back this country from authoritarians.”

In AFGE, membership is split up into geographic districts, and agency-wide councils are responsible for bargaining with agency administrators. When I asked a panel of AFGE national council leaders if the union would take any actions, such as separating from the National Border Patrol Council in a similar process that happened with the ICE unit in 2022, there were no clear answers.

“I can’t speak for the discussions taking place on a national level, but I do know if you look at our membership, there are certain groups of membership calling for this. We are not calling for this at a council level,” said executive vice president of AFGE Council 23 Miles Batson, who represents workers at the Environmental Protection Agency. ​“But I believe that conversation is a democratic one and you can find that conversation within ranks. If you look around, there are people within our union who are making that call.”

Federal workers are public workers and are exempt from the National Labor Relations Act. Instead, their working conditions are governed by the Fair Labor Standards Act. Under law, it is a felony for federal workers to strike, or even to belong to a union that advocates striking against the government. Unable to use the strike as a tool, federal workers rely on lobbying Congress to achieve demands.

“When federal workers began their careers, they swore an oath to uphold the Constitution of the U.S. What they did not do is swear an oath to Donald Trump, which makes them an enemy,” said Dr. Roberson at the conference. ​“They can take away our contracts, but they can’t take away our union.”

This article is a joint publication of In These Times and Workday Magazine, a nonprofit newsroom devoted to holding the powerful accountable through the perspective of workers.