As the highest-ranking African American in the history of the United States’ labor movement, Fred Redmond has come a long way from his early days working in a Chicago-area steel mill. But he remains “a hard-charging, working-class warrior,” according to Terry O’Sullivan, general president of the Laborers’ International Union of North America (LIUNA).
O’Sullivan represents more than half a million construction workers and public employees who are part of the combined American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) where Redmond has served as secretary-treasurer since 2022.
“It’s very rewarding work,” Redmond says of his half-century of union activism, many of those years with the United Steelworkers Union (USW), where he rose from being a shop steward to the 850,000-member organization’s vice president before joining the AFL-CIO.
It’s also an even more challenging role in the wake of President Trump’s early days in office and his sweeping budget and government staffing cuts. “This administration has proven itself to be hostile to our workers,” Redmond says, noting that the impact is not only on government workers but the public that relies on their services.
Redmond makes it clear that he’s not against looking to reduce waste, but believes there needs to be a commonsense approach. “Coming in with these blanket orders to reduce the workforce puts the consumers and the American public at risk.” For example, Department of Education employees are responsible for programs that help low-income students, while those at the Food and Drug Administration ensure food and water safety. “When you cut those vital services, our community suffers.”
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An alarmed Redmond sees the Trump administration seeking to establish an autocracy. “We’re seeing a society built by the billionaire for the billionaire,” he says. “Elon Musk and his cronies are building a society and a government that works for them.” And the first target of autocratic regimes is always the working people, he adds.
Redmond isn’t universally opposed to tariffs: they have been used well in the past to protect the American automobile and steel industries from being swamped by imports from overseas countries dumping into the U.S. market to the harm of workers here, he acknowledges. But President Trump’s blanket tariff policy “is going to cause severe hardship on the American consumer”—and in turn the workers.
Among the impacts he fears: higher housing costs and rising food prices. “We think tariffs could be a tool to stop dumping foreign products into this country,” he says. “But to use them recklessly is not productive for the American worker.”
A better life
When Redmond extols the ways in which unions have improved the lives of working people, he speaks from deeply felt personal experience. His parents were Mississippi sharecroppers who made their way to Chicago as part of The Great Migration in the 1950s. “We were poor,” he says, “but we didn’t know it.”
Mom and Dad did everything they could to give their four boys a better life. She worked as a domestic, taking three buses out to the wealthy Cook County community of Winneck, where she cleaned and cooked. The family survived on food stamps and frequented free clinics for health care. But “we were happy,” Redmond recalls. “My parents did everything they could . . . they wanted their boys to have a better life than they had.”
The family’s fortunes changed when Redmond’s father got his first union job in an aluminum mill in McCook, just outside Chicago. Redmond would join him there from high school in 1973. He served as a shop steward and three-time president in his local union before joining the USW staff in 1998.
Appointed the union’s international vice president for human affairs, he led its civil and human rights department’s efforts to protect voting rights and fight economic inequality. Since 2020 he has chaired the AFL-CIO’s Task Force on Racial Justice, addressing racism and police violence.
Protecting workers is only part of Redmond’s role. He also spends a lot of time promoting career opportunities in underserved communities. He visits schools with businessman and motivational speaker Chris Gardner (whose success story is told in The Pursuit of Happyness) and pro sports figures to “help give kids legitimate options on what they want to do in their life.”
The union movement’s roots may be in the factories and the fields, but today its representation extends much further. The 63 unions under the AFL-CIO umbrella, accounting for 15 million people, include those working in everything from education and medicine to transportation and pro sports. “We represent every type of profession you could think of.”
Organized labor offers the largest job training program in the country, second only to the U.S. military, Redmond points out. “Now, these [apprenticeship] programs have not always been friendly to folks that look like you and me, but the labor movement has changed.” Many programs now actively encourage greater diversity, equity and inclusion. “More and more young students of color, regardless of what zip code they live in, are having the opportunity to go through these programs and become ready to go on job sites and create a career for themselves.”
Democracy in danger
The current economic crisis should be enough to challenge the notion that unions have had their day and are no longer as necessary, but Redmond has more to say about that. “Take an African American worker and pick any industry,” he says. “A union member in that same industry makes up to 30% more than that individual.” Women, who comprise half the total AFL-CIO membership, make 35% more than their nonunion peers.
“The unions built the middle class in this country.” —Fred Redmond
“The unions built the middle class in this country,” Redmond continues, delivering collective bargaining agreements with guaranteed wages, guaranteed benefits, retirement security and a guaranteed retirement. “Unions are still providing those same benefits and it’s still raising the standards of living for workers throughout this country, particularly workers of color and women,” he says.
“So, to say that unions have outlived their livelihood . . . if people feel that the boss is just going to give you good wages or benefits, I think that misnomer has been proven wrong over the years . . . I think unions really bring value . . .” By way of evidence, Redmond notes that one AFL-CIO member group, the American Federation of Government Employees, has signed up more than 20,000 members since President Trump took office. “Because workers are realizing that our best line of defense is to stand shoulder to shoulder with other workers through the labor movement to make sure that our voices are heard.”
Redmond is sobered by what’s happening. Having seen the way his family was able to get ahead, and having believed that if people worked hard, paid their taxes and contributed to their community they could live the American dream, he is concerned by what he sees now.
“What we’re seeing today is the destruction of our democracy in America.”
“I would never have guessed and told my 17- or 18-year-old self that we will literally be fighting to save the democracy that has worked for so many of us and our ancestors,” he tells WayMaker Journal. He fears that all the advances those like Rosa Parks and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. sacrificed for “will be destroyed by a neocon named Donald J. Trump and the richest man in the world, Elon Musk. Because what we’re seeing today is the destruction of our democracy in America. And it’s up to us, people who love freedom and democracy, to stop this.”
From an interview with Louis Carr
