The Conversation

When union workers and their families gather this Labor Day, some may ponder Ronald Reagan’s memorable refrain, “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?”

All workers – unionized or not – are dealing with higher prices for food and gasoline.

For America’s unionized workforce, the overall state of the economy is bleak. Threats from AI and robotics abound. Pledges by U.S. and international corporations to invest in new plants remain largely pledges. The roughly 400,000 federal job cuts during President Donald Trump’s second term have disrupted lives. Many of these jobs were previously represented by labor unions....

By Keith Rathbone, Senior Lecturer, Modern European History and Sports History, Macquarie University

By Jennie L. Durant, University of California, Davis

By Jamie Rowen, Associate Professor of Legal Studies and Political Science, UMass Amherst.

Memorial Day is an apt time to reflect on the long-term consequences of war. Among them are substance use, mental health problems, homelessness and jail time for those who served in the military.

By Christopher Niezrecki, Director of the Center for Energy Innovation, UMass Lowell; Ben Link, Deputy Director of the Ralph O’Connor Sustainable Energy Institute, Johns Hopkins University, and Zoe Getman-Pickering, Program Director of the Academic Center for Reliability and Resilience of Offshore Wind, UMass Amherst

The U.S. is in a bizarre situation in 2026: It’s facing a looming energy shortage, yet the Trump administration is making deals to pay offshore wind developers nearly US $2 billion in taxpayer money to walk away from energy projects.