In Dark Times Like These, Lifting Up Signs of Hope Is More Important Than Ever |
Ooph. What a year. We were tempted to skip our annual tradition of tallying up top inequality victories and pretend like 2025 never happened.
Instead we decided that in dark times like these, lifting up signs of hope is more important than ever. In 2025, we found those signs outside Washington. In fact, federal-level tax giveaways for the rich and the gutting of public services and labor rights seem to have invigorated efforts to “Trump-proof” local economies and workplaces.
Hopefully we’ll continue to see innovative inequality-fighting solutions bubble up from the base to the national level in the coming years.
In 2025, we also saw remarkable pushback from the people against authoritarian and billionaire class forces bent on capturing our economy and our democracy. We saw this resistance by the millions in the streets, by the tens of thousands at “Fight the Oligarchy” rallies, by the hundreds at Tesla dealerships, and by brave individuals of conscience.
May the pushback continue to grow — and deliver many more wins — in 2026.
Zohran Mamdani’s ascent from a little-known Democratic Socialist Assemblymember to the Mayor-elect of New York City was one of the biggest inequality storylines of 2025.
Mamdani’s promises to make one of the most expensive cities in the world affordable captured a deep desire for egalitarian politics. His most popular proposals include freezing the rent for stabilized units and raising taxes on the rich and corporations to help pay for fast and free buses and expanded universal childcare.
Wall Street CEOs and other billionaires spent more than $40 million trying to defeat this agenda. On the other hand of the equation, Mamdani’s campaign was able to marshal tens of thousands of volunteers to knock on doors across the city. This success should be a model for people-powered anti-inequality efforts nationwide.
An underrated aspect of Mamdani’s successful mayoral campaign was the role that democracy-reform initiatives played in his victory. Mamdani was partially able to withstand the billionaire spending spree because New York City has an 8-to-1 small contribution match program that helps level the campaign spending field for average New Yorkers.
The ranked-choice format of the mayoral primary, which allows voters to list five candidates in preference order, also helped avoid splitting the progressive vote and built coalitions in real time.
Similar reforms aimed at curbing the influence of the wealthy on politics helped eke out a victory for Katie Wilson in Seattle’s mayor race this year as well. Since 2015, Seattle residents have received $100 in “Democracy Vouchers” to donate to local candidates. That boost to the election spending power of residents helped Wilson defeat an incumbent backed by a real estate industry PAC.
One of the biggest labor organizing stories of the 2020s — Starbucks baristas — continued to generate headlines in 2025. On “Red Cup Day,” November 13, members of Starbucks Workers United went on strike demanding that the coffee chain come to the table and negotiate a first contract. A little over a month later, the strike has now expanded to 130 cities and nearly 4,000 participating workers. To learn more about the last five years of Starbucks labor fights, check out our Q&A with founding organizer Jaz Brisack on their new book.
While the national Starbucks fight rages on, baristas in New York City notched a major win this year when the company agreed to pay out $38 million after the city’s labor and consumer agency found the coffee giant committed systemic violations of local scheduling laws. The payment is the largest single worker protection settlement in New York City history.
Mega-events tend to exacerbate inequality in host cities. In Atlanta, for example, tens of thousands of low-income residents were displaced by the demolition of public housing in the lead-up to the 1996 Olympics and the rapid gentrification that followed.
With the Olympics coming to Los Angeles, unions and other advocates are fighting to reverse this trend with demands for affordable housing investment and wage hikes. In May 2025, they won approval of an “Olympic Wage” for hotel and airport employees. By the time the games kick off in July 2028, the city’s minimum wage for these workers is scheduled to rise to $30 – the highest in the country.
In the face of efforts to water down the wage ordinance, unions countered with a ballot initiative to raise the minimum to $30 for all workers in the city.
The Utah legislature adopted one of the most restrictive labor laws in the country........