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10 Wins Against Inequality to Celebrate in 2024
Champions in the fight against inequality face formidable challenges in 2025. But by working together at all levels—from the shop floor to state houses to the halls of Congress—we can still find ways to build power.
Dec 31, 2024
In dark times like these, shining a light on successful efforts to reverse our country’s extreme inequality is more important than ever. As we looked back on 2024, we actually found plenty to celebrate. Here are 10 inspiring wins that deserve more attention.
1. Labor Breakthrough in the South
Volkswagen workers in Chattanooga, Tennessee voted overwhelmingly in April to join the United Auto Workers (UAW), a landmark win for labor organizing in the South. The region has suffered deeply because of its low-road, anti-union economic model. Seven out of ten states with the highest levels of poverty are in the South, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
Whatever happens on the national political stage over the next four years, local communities can still win important fights for a more just society.
Another UAW election, at a Mercedes-Benz facility in Vance, Alabama, where management was more aggressively anti-union, went the other way in May. But the union has vowed to continue organizing in the region. “This is a David and Goliath fight,” UAW President Shawn Fain said after the Mercedes loss. “Sometimes Goliath wins a battle. But David wins the war.”
2. Union Momentum at Amazon
Organizing workers at Amazon—now the nation’s second largest private employer—has been a white whale of the labor movement for years. Aside from a breakthrough union election win in Staten Island, puncturing the e-commerce giant’s anti-labor strategy has been challenging. That is, until this year, when the Teamsters made sizable gains.
The National Labor Relations Board ruled this summer that Amazon should be considered a joint employer of the delivery drivers it subcontracts, opening up that class of workers to organize. And organize they did—according to the Teamsters, over 5,000 drivers have joined the union at nine Amazon locations. Warehouse workers have made advances as well. In California, Amazon employees in San Francisco and at the company’s air hub in San Bernardino are now demanding union recognition.
3. Grocery Mega-Merger Blocked
For the past two years, the United Food and Commercial Workers union has led a coalition of more than 100 organizations against the proposed merger of grocery giants Kroger and Albertsons. The union predicted the mega-merger would result in “lost jobs, closed stores, food deserts, and higher prices.”
By contrast, corporate executives stood to make a killing. At Albertsons alone, the proposed merger agreement would’ve delivered as much as $146 million to the firm’s top 10 officials.
On December 10, one federal court judge and another in Washington state sided with the Federal Trade Commission and issued temporary injunctions against the deal. The following day, Albertsons threw in the towel on what would’ve been the biggest grocery store merger in U.S. history. “This is the first time the FTC has ever sought to block a merger not just because it’s gonna be bad for consumers, but also for workers,” FTC chair Lina Khan said shortly after the decision.
4. Ballot Wins on Taxes, Wages, Paid Leave
Despite the red wave on November 5, voters in several states passed ballot initiatives to adopt inequality-fighting policies that most Republican politicians oppose.
In the red states of Nebraska, Missouri, and Alaska, voters approved guaranteed paid leave, while Missouri and Alaska also passed state minimum wage hikes.
Washington state voters rejected a hedge fund-financed ballot proposal to repeal the state’s path-breaking capital gains tax on the rich. They also beat back an effort to gut a state-operated long-term care insurance program. In Illinois, voters adopted a nonbinding measure expressing support for an extra 3% tax on income of over $1 million.
5. TurboTax Got Turbo-Trounced
In 2024, for the first time ever, over 100,000 Americans filed their tax returns digitally directly to the IRS. The agency’s Direct File system went live in 12 pilot states, breaking the dominance that for-profit tax preparation companies have enjoyed for years.
“This is an important fight to ensure greedy tax prep companies don’t continue to rake in money from filers who are simply doing their civic duty,” wrote Public Citizen’s Susan Harley for Inequality.org.
Direct file also advances racial justice. Color of Change and the Groundwork Collaborative exposed how Intuit’s TurboTax and H&R Block target Black and low-income communities for costly and unnecessary services.
Unfortunately, this fight is not over. House Republicans are urging President-elect Donald Trump to kill the IRS’s free direct file service on day one of his second administration.
6. Biden’s Worker Protection Spree
President Joe Biden adopted a range of pathbreaking executive actions to protect U.S. workers—including safeguards against toiling in extreme heat, broader overtime pay coverage, and new measures protecting organizing rights. He also authorized rules to crack down on bosses who misclassify employees as independent contractors or force them to sign noncompete agreements.
The beauty of executive actions: no need for Congressional approval. The downside: The next president has the power to roll them back.
Will that happen under Trump, a self-declared but dubious champion of the working class? We shall see. In the meantime, the National Employment Law Project and several other organizations have put together a guide on how state policymakers could enact similar standards at the subfederal level.
7. Grounding Private Jets
Did you know that private jets pollute 10 to 20 times more per passenger than commercial airplanes? And the typical private jet owner, with a net worth of nearly $200 million, actually pays a far smaller share of air safety fees than commercial coach passengers, according to Institute for Policy Studies research.
In 2024, Stop Private Jet Expansion, a 100-organization coalition, won two major victories in their campaign to block the expansion of New England’s largest private jet airport, Hanscom Field outside Boston. Massachusetts state rejected the developer’s environmental impact submission, demanding supplemental information. As part of a comprehensive climate bill, the state legislature also updated the charter of Massport, the agency that will decide the future of the airport, to require them to consider carbon emissions and climate change in their decision-making.
8. Arming Millions of Davids Against Wall Street Goliaths
Elon Musk has called for “deleting” the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. What’s his problem with this federal agency? For Musk and his finance bro buddies, it appears the CFPB has been overly effective in helping ordinary Americans stand up to big money interests.
Recently the agency announced it’s forcing shady “credit repair” companies to return $1.8 billion in illegal junk fees to 4.3 million Americans. The agency also just issued new limits on overdraft fees that will save consumers billions more. During its nearly 14-year history, the CFPB has won nearly $21 billion in compensation for victims of fraud, racial discrimination in lending, and other financial abuse.
“Weakening the CFPB, slowing its work, or steering it to favor industry over the public interest,” explains the advocacy group Americans for Financial Reform, “would give bad actors a green light to do their worst and further deepen this country’s racial wealth gap.”
9. Public Money for the Public Good
For four decades, procurement rules made it difficult for local and state policymakers to ensure that federally funded projects create good jobs. With megabillions in new public investment about to flow into infrastructure and clean energy projects, a labor-community alliance known as the Local Opportunities Coalition led the charge to get rid of these anti-worker vestiges of the conservative Reagan era.
Finally, in 2024, the Biden administration got the job done. Now state and local governments can give companies a leg up in bidding competitions if they commit to creating specific numbers of jobs with minimum levels of pay and benefits. They can also require hiring preferences for local workers and disadvantaged communities, ban the use of contract funds for union-busting, and prohibit employers from misclassifying workers as “independent contractors” to skirt labor laws.
10. Communities Standing up for Quality Care
Whatever happens on the national political stage over the next four years, local communities can still win important fights for a more just society.
One particularly inspiring example from 2024: the battles to protect county-owned nursing homes in rural Wisconsin against privatization. Study after study has shown that private equity-owned facilities have lower-quality care and higher mortality rates. And yet many Republican lawmakers are backing for-profit corporations’ efforts to take over this critical service.
As veteran community organizer George Goehl has reported, Wisconsin seniors put up a strong fight this year. They succeeded in ousting pro-privatization members of at least three county boards and are continuing to organize to protect their healthcare from corporate greed.
Champions in the fight against inequality face formidable challenges. But by working together at all levels—from the shop floor to state houses to the halls of Congress—we can still find ways to build power and move our country towards a just economy that works for everyone.
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Record 88 US Jurisdictions to Raise Minimum Wages in 2025 as Federal Pay Floor Remains Stagnant
"It's time for Congress to deliver for workers on the federal level," said one advocate.
Dec 24, 2024
While the federal minimum wage hasn't budged from a paltry $7.25 an hour since the last time it was raised in 2009, states and local governments are taking action to boost wages in the face of rising costs.
A record 88 jurisdictions will raise their minimum wage floors by the end of the coming year, according to a report from the National Employment Law Project (NELP), a nonprofit advocacy organization. The 88 jurisdictions include 23 states and 65 cities and counties—of those, 70 jurisdictions are enacting wages that will reach or exceed $15 an hour for some or all employees, and 53 jurisdictions will enact a wage floor that reaches or exceeds $17 an hour for all or some workers.
The states enacting increases on January 1, 2025 include Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Vermont, Virginia, and Washington, per NELP.
"Next year, Illinois's workers are getting another raise," Illinois Governor JB Pritzker announced proudly on X. Workers will be getting a minimum wage increase of $1 per hour in Illinois in 2025, from $14 to $15.
"In the absence of progress at the federal level, workers and advocates are continuing to take action at the ballot box, statehouses, and in their city councils. Thanks to years-long worker-led campaigns, these victories will help workers keep up with the rising cost of living, especially Black and brown workers who are disproportionately affected by low wages and economic insecurity," said Rebecca Dixon, president and CEO of the NELP in a statement.
"Now it's time for Congress to deliver for workers on the federal level," she added.
Arkansas, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, Nevada, New Mexico, and West Virginia, which all have minimum wage laws above the federal rate of $7.25, are not slated to raise their minimum wages in 2025. Currently there 20 states with a minimum wage of $7.25 an hour, either because the state's minimum wage is $7.25 or below, or there is no state-mandated minimum wage, so the federal dollar amount applies, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
The NELP report highlights particularly consequential wage increase victories. For example, voters in the GOP-controlled state of Alaska approved a ballot initiative that raised the minimum wage to $15 by 2027 and also enacted a paid sick leave policy, according to NELP.
"Alaska is one of seven states that do not currently allow employers to subsidize their payroll costs through the use of tip credits, making this victory especially consequential for tipped workers," according to the report.
In Arizona, voters defeated Proposition 138 by a wide margin. The ballot measure was restaurant industry-backed and "would have cut wages for tipped workers by expanding the 'tip credit' from a fixed $3.00 less than the full minimum wage to 25% less than the full minimum wage," according to NELP.
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State Victories Against Inequality to Celebrate Despite Bleak Election Day
Any near-term policy progress will have to start at the city and state levels and work its way up to the federal level. Three progressive tax victories from last night are an encouraging sign.
Nov 06, 2024
If you’ve ever questioned whether our country has an inequality problem, this election should provide all the evidence you need. As billionaires used their financial firepower to throw support their preferred candidates’ way, Americans who’ve been left behind took out their frustrations at the ballot box.
How do we get started on this next chapter in the fight to reverse extreme inequality? With Senate Republicans still short of a filibuster-proof supermajority, next year’s debate over the expiration of the Trump tax cuts could still present one opportunity.
But it’s also likely that any near-term policy progress will have to start at the city and state levels and work its way up to the federal level. Three progressive tax victories from last night are an encouraging sign.
In addition to these fair tax victories, I’m heartened by the passage of pro-worker reforms in several “red” states last night—in sharp contrast to the positions of their Republican representatives in the U.S. Congress.
Washington state’s Initiative 2109 was the most important tax-related ballot measure of the year. Hedge fund executive Brian Heywood bankrolled this campaign, hoping to repeal the state’s innovative capital gains tax on high earners.
With 62% of votes counted, the rollback proposal went down in a 63-37% landslide.
“This victory shows that advocacy in support of creating a more equitable tax code works,” Melinda Young-Flynn, communications director at the Washington State Budget and Policy Center, told Inequality.org.
“So many groups and individuals—including business owners, labor unions, teachers, racial justice advocates, parents, lawmakers, and many more—have worked together for more than a decade to help the public at large in our state make the connection between commonsense progressive taxes and the very real needs of our communities.”
Introduced in 2022, Washington state’s path-breaking policy imposes a 7% excise tax on capital gains from the sale of stocks, bonds, and other assets that exceed $250,000 per year (excluding real estate sales). Who makes that much from their financial investments? Fewer than 1% of the state’s richest resident.
Prior to the introduction of this tax in 2022, Washington’s wealthy had flourished under a state constitution that prohibits income tax. The capital gains tax does an end-run around that ban and the state supreme court has ruled it constitutional.
In its first two years, the capital gains levy has raised $1.3 billion for investments in childcare and early learning, public schools, and school construction.
“The people of Washington have sent a clear message,” says Young-Flynn. “The well-being of kids takes precedence over tax breaks for the ultra-wealthy. All those of us who care about economic justice know it’s well past time to stop giving the ultra-wealthy a special deal in the tax code at the expense of everyone else.”
Washington state voters also beat back an effort to allow employees to opt out of a new payroll tax for long-term care insurance if they waive the benefit of that state-operated program. If this measure had passed, it likely would’ve rendered the insurance program financially unviable. Fortunately, voters rejected the proposal by a 55-45% margin.
In Illinois, voters expressed support for an extra 3% tax on income of over $1 million, with revenue going to property tax relief. With 89% of votes counted, Illinois voters approved the ballot measure by an 89-11% margin. While this measure is nonbinding, organizers hope this victory will stoke efforts to put a constitutional amendment on the ballot in 2026 to authorize the new tax on the rich.
In addition to these fair tax victories, I’m heartened by the passage of pro-worker reforms in several “red” states last night—in sharp contrast to the positions of their Republican representatives in the U.S. Congress. Voters in Nebraska, Missouri, and Alaska approved guaranteed paid leave and Missouri and Alaska also passed state minimum wage hikes.
A friend just wrote to me with this message: “A tree outside my window is nearly bare. Perhaps it is an image of our national life this morning. We have a choice: to focus on the bare branches or to appreciate the colorful leaves.”
These state victories against the scourge of inequality are some of the colorful leaves I’m appreciating today.
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