Brian Bryant serves as international president of the 600,000-member IAM Union (International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers). He is a native of Maine and a member of IAM Local S6, where he began his career as a pipefitter at Bath Iron Works.
I grew up in Maine, in a state built by mill workers, shipbuilders and generations of families who understood that a decent life comes from decent work.
This summer, our IAM Union celebrated the opening of the Maine Museum of Innovation, Learning and Labor (Maine MILL), a new museum in Lewiston built inside a former textile mill, where 10,000 artifacts and hundreds of oral histories preserve the stories of the men and women who powered this state’s economy. Those stories aren’t really about the past. They’re about what we owe the workers doing that same job today, whether it’s on a factory floor, at a paper mill or building some of the U.S. Navy’s most advanced ships at Bath Iron Works.
Ask a shipbuilder at BIW or a millworker anywhere else in the state what’s keeping them up at night, and increasingly, the answer is the price of groceries and gas, and the rising cost of rent or a mortgage.
Here in Maine, you can see the strain that rent is causing working families.
Meanwhile, according to the Harvard study published in the Portland Press Herald, the share of Maine apartments with rent above $2,000 has almost tripled since 2019, going from 6,445 to 17,498 — a 171% increase. At the same time, the number of apartments below $1,000 has declined 22%.
I know machinists and millworkers sitting at their kitchen tables right now doing that math, wondering if the American Dream has been snatched from their grasp.
This Labor Day, working people are asking a simple question: Who is actually fighting for us? The answer shouldn’t depend on party registration. I’ve spent years traveling the country talking with our members — machinists, pipefitters, aerospace workers, airline workers, rail workers and many more. They disagree on plenty.
But on this, they sound the same: They’re tired of an economy built for billionaires and corporations instead of the people doing the work. Wages haven’t kept pace with rent. Wealthy donors buy influence that ordinary workers don’t have. And now AI is showing up in workplaces with no input from the people it affects most.
In 2024, our members at Boeing walked picket lines for nearly two months. When they returned to work, they brought back contract language on artificial intelligence that most people never noticed, and it may prove to be one of the most important things we’ve won in years. The company must tell workers before it brings AI onto the shop floor. Workers get trained on it. And AI cannot be used as an excuse to cut someone’s pay grade or hand them a pink slip. Boeing didn’t agree to that out of goodwill. It agreed because 33,000 people refused to back down.
I’m not against AI. Used right, it can make dangerous jobs safer and hard jobs easier. Left to companies alone, it becomes one more tool to squeeze labor and pad the bottom line.
What we won at Boeing helped shape our approach at Bath Iron Works, where our members in Local S6 recently secured a historic five-year collective bargaining agreement that delivers significant wage increases, stronger workplace protections and no concessions. It’s proof that the same formula works: get workers in the room, require real training and put it in writing that new technology can’t be used to eliminate someone’s job.
Congress should take that same approach nationally. Require employers to notify and bargain with workers before rolling out AI systems that affect their jobs, and you’d protect millions of people who have no union to fight for them.
Working people don’t need a hero. They need results. Show us the money. Let’s see some benefits we don’t have to fight tooth and nail for. Have our backs when automation starts calling the shots on our jobs. You can be the smoothest talker in the room, but if it’s not in the contract, it doesn’t mean a thing to the person on the floor.
Working people built Maine, and labor unions in Maine are still building it. People trust unions more than any other institution in America. More than 70% of Americans and nearly 9 in 10 people younger than 30 support unions. And we know that millions of workers, including many right here in Maine, would join a union tomorrow if they could.
This Labor Day, we’re going to show the billionaires — and now the world’s first trillionaire — who we are and how we fight. We will stand together to speak up. Speak out. Demand better.
That’s not a partisan demand. It’s an American one.