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In early January, before most people in the U.S. had even heard of Covid-19, Bonnie Castillo called a meeting with two trusted health care deputies at the country’s largest union of registered nurses.

As an African American man who lived through the 1960s and now has two sons and three very young grandsons, the specter of systemic racism keeps me up at night.

Workers across America reacted with horror to the murder of George Floyd by a white police officer in Minneapolis. The same taxpayers who pay the police to protect and defend us watched an unforgivable abuse of power, as an officer knelt on a man’s neck, depriving him of life-giving air.

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka discusses the George Floyd protests, police unions and unemployment on "Bloomberg: Balance of Power."

NPR's David Greene talks to NPR's Scott Horsley and William Spriggs, chief economist for the AFL-CIO, about the pandemic's effect on joblessness — especially on minority employees. SPRIGGS: Well, in this case, it's, for the Hispanic community, the industries in which they dominate.

Declaring that working people are saying, “We’ve had enough,” AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said unions will continue the fight to root out systemic racism in the U.S.