It has been a challenging year for immigrants, working people, and unions. ICE agents are detaining and/or kidnapping primarily nonwhite people, warehousing them in detention centers under brutal conditions, and even deporting them to third countries. Meanwhile the administration has deployed plain-clothes federal agents to arrest people who are at work or who show up for check-ins, court hearings, and naturalization ceremonies. They are executing protestors and detaining 5 year old children. They fired many immigration judges and advertised their positions as those of “deportation judges.”
Retaliation and employers’ threats to call ICE are on the uptick. ICE’s actions have incentivized employers to exploit undocumented workers. I have seen recent examples of employer threats to call ICE. In one case, workers were told to retract their wage claims or the employer would call ICE. In another case, the employer threatened to call l ICE if the worker did not follow an order.
This administration is following the Project 2025 playbook and has accomplished 50% of its goals according to the Project 2025 tracker.
The administration is decimating protections for workers. The national origin section of the EEOC’s web page asks workers to report undocumented co-workers to ICE and includes ICE’s number.
The Ninth Circuit has delayed a ruling on the transformative Cemex Construction Materials Pacific, LLC v. NLRB case since October 2024 when oral arguments were held. Cemex allows judges to set aside union election results and issue remedial bargaining orders without a new election where employers commit unfair labor practices during organizing campaigns. In November 2025, the NLRB urged the court to issue a ruling.
The NLRB, which regained a quorum on December 18, 2025 and now has a Republican-majority NLRB has begun to rescind Biden-era labor policies, including specific guidance related to the Cemex doctrine. The administration’s goal is to weaken unions.
However, there is a ray of hope. Workers, unions, and community members in this County are organizing, mobilizing, and advocating, and lower courts are upholding constitutional rights.
We now have ordinances that require the County to close down certain businesses and cities to withhold Certificates of Occupancy and deny business licenses and permits for unpaid wage theft judgments, a wage theft dashboard at the County, an OLSE, a free legal advice line in multiple languages (866-870-7725), a Fair Workplace Collaborative, a retail food advisory council, a residential care facility advisory council, a Human Trafficking Commission, and a unit in the County Counsel’s office that is filing cases to vindicate workers’ and immigrant rights.
However, there is still work to do. Wage theft continues to be prevalent. Only 12% of workers with wage theft judgments ever collect according to the May 2024 California State Auditor’s Report of the Labor Commission.
Since 1949 California has had an equal pay ordinance. Yet in San Jose, Sunnyvale, and Santa Clara, Latinas earn 33 cents for every dollar a white man earns, and Black workers earn 63 cents.
Fast food workers have organized and mobilized and now have a Fast Food Council and $20 an hour pay, but the County still needs to enact an ordinance that requires Know Your Rights training for fast food workers. A recent report reveals that 93% of workers had not heard about or did not know basic workplace rights or how to access benefits. The Fast Food Council ground to a half since it has lacked a permanent chair since May 2025 and has not met as a full body in 2025.
Care home workers are some of the most exploited workers because the state refuses to shut care homes down as required by law if care home owners don’t pay wage theft judgments. Care home workers are not provided with Hoyer lifts and the mostly elderly workers sustain back injuries that could be prevented.
We need more paid sick leave. San Jose is an outlier in the Bay Area since it only provides the 5 days that the State of California mandates. By contrast, Berkeley, Emeryville, Oakland, San Francisco, LA, San Diego, and Santa Monica provide much more paid sick.
In South Bay cities and in the state, we need to enact just cause termination (termination only for a good reason) instead of at will termination. By organizing and mobilizing effectively, fast food workers in New York and parking attendants in Philadelphia were able to obtain just cause termination.
In these times where every day brings a new challenge, we can derive hope from the power of the people and their unions to organize and mobilize as generations have done before us.
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