WASHINGTON, D.C. - In an op-ed published this week, Pennsylvania AFL-CIO President Rick Bloomingdale called upon the working class to fight for what he calls “economic justice.”

“Being a part of the labor movement, to me, means fighting injustice, fighting for equality,” Bloomingdale said during an interview this week.

To start, he sees economic justice is a higher minimum wage, set at $15 an hour. Right now, Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf supports a minimum wage hike up to $12 an hour; Wolf’s opponent in the November general election, Republican Scott Wagner, supports a hike up to $9.75 an hour.

But better wages and working conditions have always been at the core of unions. So Bloomingdale is also focused on what he’s calling, the ‘modern labor movement.’

 “We’ve been working with Carnegie Mellon (University) and PennDOT talking about autonomous vehicles and the disruption that’s going to bring to the trucking industry, probably mass transit,” Bloomingdale said in the interview.

This year has been a mixed bag for labor unions. The good: membership is up by more 262,000 new members nationwide, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The bad: a Supreme Court ruling this summer in the Janus v. AFSCME case, which gave public sector employees the right not to pay dues if they felt unions violate their right to free speech – even if they still receive benefits.

All of this has Bloomingdale keeping a close eye on this week’s confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh.

 “I think it’s going to be bad news for labor,” Bloomingdale said. “It’s really a pretty activist court in favor of corporations rather than workers and consumers.”

All of this as new jobs numbers from the U.S. Labor Department show 201,000 jobs were added last month, the 95thconsecutive month of job growth. Wages increased by an average of 0.4 percent, according to the report. Republicans and business leaders cite not only the tax cuts package Congress passed last year, but also deregulation.

“Regulations, while maybe well-intended in the beginning, really had a dampening effect on our economy,” said U.S. Rep. Mike Kelly during a Labor Day event in Erie, Pa. “It was really making it hard for us to compete not only locally but globally.”

The news comes as Republicans are working on a spinoff of that 2017 legislation, what they are calling Tax Cuts 2.0. A formal vote on the new proposal could happen in just a few weeks, sources say.