‘This is what you built’: Kansas workers rally in solidarity at the Statehouse

Jake Lowen, executive secretary-treasurer of the Kansas State AFL-CIO, delivers a "solidarity day" speech on Jan. 14, 2026, at the Statehouse in Topeka. (Photo by Sherman Smith/Kansas Reflector)

TOPEKA — Union leader Jake Lowen told the hundreds of workers who gathered Wednesday in the first floor rotunda of the Statehouse to look around and take in “the house that labor built.”

He referenced the stonemasons who cut every piece of limestone in the walls. The iron and steel workers who raised the dome, with the help of operating engineers who ran the hoists built by machinists. Plumbers, boilermakers and electricians brought light, heat and water.

Lowen, the executive secretary-treasurer of the Kansas State AFL-CIO, said some of the workers who started building the Statehouse, which took 37 years to construct, never saw it finished. At least seven gave their lives in the process, he said.

“The work was hard and the price was high, and yet they persevered,” he told the crowd that was gathered for an annual “solidarity day” labor rally.

He said the workers were building a Statehouse by day and a movement by night. In 1890, the year they raised the Statehouse dome, workers formed the Kansas State Federation of Labor, he said.

It wasn’t just the building, he said. Kansas itself was built by working people: farmers who broke open the prairie, railroad workers who connected the state to the rest of the country, teachers who educated generations, nurses who healed, firefighters who kept people safe, construction workers who raised cities from the plains, and machinists who made the state a powerhouse of aviation.

The work, he said, is never finished.

“Every right we have, from the weekend to the eight-hour workday to the safety standards that bring you home alive at the end of your shift, somebody built that brick by brick, contract by contract and fight by fight. This is what you built,” Lowen said.

Sometimes, he said, the Statehouse can feel like a building for “other people, fancy people, people in suits.”

“But you know what? This is your house. This is your state,” he said.

Right now, he added, there are people “in offices upstairs” who want to tear down what they have built. They want to rig congressional maps to silence voices, drain money from public schools to subsidize private ones, and “they’re coming for what’s left of our right to organize,” he said.

“They think that we forgot how to build,” Lowen said. “They think that we’re too divided, too tired and too beaten down. But here’s what they don’t understand. We’re still here in the same building that our people raised with their hands, doing the same work that our founders started, and we will be here long after these walls have crumbled.”

 

Gov. Laura Kelly addresses a crowd of union workers during their “solidarity day” rally on Jan. 14, 2026, at the Statehouse in Topeka. (Photo by Sherman Smith/Kansas Reflector)

‘I didn’t give you the finger’

Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly told the crowd that organized labor was instrumental to the state’s economic growth under her administration, which included 1,600 new development projects that total more than $30 billion in new capital investment and created 82,000 new jobs.

She said her administration invested in workers, prioritized economic opportunities and ensured that labor had a seat at the table. She created an apprenticeship office and signed an overhaul of the workers compensation system, which included raising benefit caps.

“I walked the picket line with UAW workers,” Kelly said, pausing for applause before ad-libbing, “and I didn’t give you the finger, either.”

She was referring to President Trump’s gesture at a union autoworker at a Ford Motor Co. plant Tuesday in Dearborn, Michigan.

The line was met by howls from the audience, but her biggest applause came when she promised to fight for raising the minimum wage. The state’s minimum wage is $7.25 per hour.

“Kansas is stronger when workers are respected,” Kelly said. “Kansas thrives when labor has a seat at the table. And Kansas succeeds when we never forget that behind every project, every investment and every milestone are the workers who make it possible.”