The Frequency

Alabama’s union membership fell to 131,000 workers in 2025 — 6.3 percent of the state’s workforce — down from 140,000 members and 6.6 percent the year before, according to new U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data. The broader count of workers represented by unions, members plus those covered by a contract without joining, dropped from 165,000 (7.8 percent) to 150,000 (7.2 percent) over the same year. Alabama’s total employment slipped too, from 2.11 million to 2.09 million.

The state was near 10 percent unionized as recently as 2015, close to the national rate at the time. The national rate still sits at 10 percent. Alabama’s has fallen to 6.3.

Bren Riley, president of the Alabama AFL-CIO, points to a familiar list of culprits: factory closures, outsourcing to North Carolina and Mexico, an aging workforce (19 percent of Alabamians were 65 or older in 2025), and campaigns that make workers afraid to organize. Goodyear’s Gadsden plant went from 4,000 employees to 400 before it closed in 2020. Mercedes-Benz workers in Vance voted down a UAW push in 2024. “It scares them to death,” Riley said of workers who fear retaliation for organizing. “They’ll fire me for being involved in that kind of stuff.”

Valley is itself a product of the era this data describes. The city was incorporated April 22, 1980, formed by merging four mill villages — Langdale, Riverview, Shawmut, and Fairfax — that the West Point Manufacturing Company built starting in the 1860s. The textile jobs that built those villages are long gone; the trend line in this week’s numbers is the same one that emptied them out.

Alabama’s 2026 regular legislative session is adjourned, and its bills are on the books just as the fall campaign gets underway.

On criminal justice, HB86 lets the parole board weigh an inmate’s employment and education history when considering release. SB240 allows incarcerated people to appear at parole hearings virtually. SB254 makes further changes to the parole process. Paired with SB24, which creates a standardized path for restoring voting rights to Alabamians with felony convictions, the session’s criminal-justice bills moved in the same direction: fewer barriers back into civic life after a sentence is served.

A companion bill, HB486, would have gone further — restoring felon voting rights outright and adding no-excuse absentee voting, pre-election voting, and an Alabama Voting Rights Commission. It advanced out of committee for the first time this session, a genuine first, but did not reach a floor vote.

Not every bill moved toward expansion. SB209, sponsored by Sen. Shay Shelnutt, R-Trussville, replaces comprehensive sex education with a “sexual risk avoidance” curriculum. Shelnutt pointed to Alabama’s teen birth rate, 20.3 per 1,000 females aged 15-19 in 2023, seventh-highest in the country, and said the new standard “uses medically accurate information, is appropriate for students, and encourages parental involvement.” The ACLU of Alabama called the same bill “a troubling step backward” that “prioritizes ideology over information.” A bill that would have let local law enforcement detain and investigate suspected undocumented immigrants, HB13, failed, which the ACLU credited to coalition advocacy against it.

For Chambers and Lee County voters, the practical stakes show up first at the ballot box: this session didn’t expand absentee or early voting, so November’s general election runs under the same rules as the spring primary.

Auburn University’s Board of Trustees approved construction of the BrownKopel Center for Analytical, Innovation and Manufacturing, converting 16,000 square feet of unfinished space inside the BrownKopel Engineering Student Achievement Center into working labs.

The space will host hands-on coursework in electronics manufacturing, materials analysis and testing, and advanced manufacturing, training aimed directly at industry needs. Dean Mario Eden said the labs are meant to deliver “exceptional, real-world experiences for our students.” The project also adds a terraced entrance off the Ginn Concourse for better accessibility and natural light. Funding comes from Alabama’s FY23 supplemental appropriations, money already allocated, now being put to use. Cost and a completion date were not disclosed.

For a region with deep manufacturing roots, from Chambers County’s textile-era plants to Lee County’s newer industrial employers, a lab built around materials testing and electronics manufacturing lines up with the kind of hands-on training those jobs require, assuming enough graduates stay local to fill them.

The Opelika City Council voted unanimously Sept. 1 to revoke the business license of Top Shelf Alternatives, a hemp product store at 510 Geneva Street, after undercover narcotics agents made five controlled buys of what the store marketed as hemp flower.

Search warrants followed, and testing by the Alabama Department of Forensic Sciences confirmed the products were marijuana, a Schedule I controlled substance. Officers recovered more than 2.2 pounds of it from the store. Owner Bradley Haddon and his wife, Kayla, were arrested in July on charges related to the investigation; neither has been convicted.

At a public hearing, OPD Capt. Marty Paulson presented the evidence. Haddon asked whether voluntarily surrendering the license would spare him the restrictions that come with a formal revocation. The council said no, and its resolution bars both Haddons from holding any city business license, or an interest in one, for 36 months.

It’s the second time in eight days East Alabama’s hemp economy has landed in front of a city council. Issue #20 covered the Valley City Council’s rejection of a hemp beverage license over enforcement concerns. That business was selling a legal product through the wrong process; Opelika’s case is a business selling an illegal one under a legal label.

East Alabama Health opened the East Alabama Community Prenatal Clinic on the EAMC-Lanier Rural Emergency Hospital campus in Valley on Sept. 1, open Tuesdays and Fridays from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m.

The clinic offers prenatal check-ups, pregnancy care coordination, pregnancy testing, vaccinations, and treatment for urinary tract infections and other urgent needs, built for the stretch of time between a patient’s regular OB/GYN appointments, not to replace them. Claire Thompson, a certified women’s health nurse practitioner and associate clinical professor at Auburn University’s College of Nursing, will staff the clinic; her background includes neonatal intensive care, high-risk pregnancies, and maternal-fetal medicine.

“We have seen less comprehensive prenatal care in the last two years than ever before,” said Rosemary Cummings, executive director of Women and Children Services at East Alabama Medical Center. “Our goal is to provide local mothers with reliable and convenient access to prenatal care between visits with their OB/GYN.” Greg Nichols, EAMC-Lanier’s administrator, called healthy families “the heartbeat of our community.”

It’s the second expansion at EAMC-Lanier this newsletter has covered in as many months — Issue #17 reported three new emergency department observation beds in August. For rural Chambers County mothers, the plainer stakes are travel time: a clinic that catches problems between OB/GYN visits is one that doesn’t require a drive out of the county to do it.