Lawrence Wittner

(8/28) The approach of Labor Day provides an appropriate time to reflect upon how Donald Trump and his MAGA Republicans, if restored to power, will deal with the American labor movement.

Much of the evidence on this score is available in Project 2025, a 922-page public policy agenda, produced by the Heritage Foundation, for the first 180 days of a new Republican administration. Ever since 1981, this exceptionally wealthy, conservative, and powerful Washington think tank has been churning out blueprints for incoming Republican administrations. In fact, the Heritage Foundation performed the same service for the first Trump administration, bragging after only a year that the Trump White House had implemented nearly two-thirds of its proposals.

The Project 2025 policy agenda is far-ranging and includes many of the nostrums advanced by rightwing Republicans, including abolishing the U.S. Department of Education, slashing taxes for the wealthiest Americans and corporations, building a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border, further restricting abortion, increasing oil and gas production, maintaining a "biblically based" definition of marriage and family, and ending diversity, equity, and inclusion programs.

But few of the project’s recommendations are as extreme as those dealing with America’s unions and the workers they represent.

For example, Project 2025 calls for banning public employee unions unions representing teachers, librarians, firefighters, postal workers, police, clerks, trash collectors, and other public sector workers. As 32.5 percent of public sector employees belong to unions, they constitute the most highly unionized portion of the American workforce. Thus, the abolition of their unions would eliminate nearly half the union membership in the United States.

Nor would the rest of the nation’s union members, composed of private sector workers (only 6 percent of whom belong to unions), fare much better under this Heritage Foundation scheme. Most notably, Project 2025 advocates empowering the states to ban labor unions. Even partway through existing contracts, unions could be terminated. Furthermore, it would become illegal for employers to voluntarily recognize unions, while businesses would be allowed to create their own sham company unions.

Stripped of their access to union representation and the benefits unions bring, American workers would face still further losses of long-standing rights. Project 2025 calls for allowing the states to ignore the federal minimum wage and overtime pay laws, as well as for eliminating child labor rules that protect children from working in mines, meatpacking plants, and other hazardous workplaces. In these and other ways, Project 2025 promotes a return to the distant past, before the advent of legislation to prevent the abuse and exploitation of American workers.

Moreover, to safeguard the implementation of the Heritage Foundation’s rightwing agenda, Project 2025 champions firing as many as 50,000 federal government workers and replacing them with Trump loyalists.

Not surprisingly, once the extremist proposals in Project 2025 began to attract negative publicity, Donald Trump scrambled to distance himself from it. "I know nothing about Project 2025," the Republican presidential candidate declared. "I have no idea who is behind it."

Nevertheless, the connections between Trump and Project 2025 were hard to disguise. A CNN investigation revealed that at least 140 people who worked in the Trump administration helped write or had a hand in the Heritage Foundation game plan, including six of Trump’s former Cabinet secretaries. In fact, the person overseeing the entire project, Paul Gans, had served as a top official in the Trump White House.

Embarrassed by the growing controversy over Project 2025, key participants scurried for cover. Gans suddenly retired from the project in July, announcing that, given the election season, he would "direct all my efforts to winning bigly."

Upon Gans’s departure, Kevin Roberts, the director of the Heritage Foundation and a leading Trump ally, took command of Project 2025. But Roberts, too, facing unpleasant public scrutiny and Democratic Party criticism, sought to downplay Project 2025’s connection to Trump and the Republican Party. This included postponing, until after the election, the publication of his forthcoming book, which contained a revealing foreword by J.D. Vance. In the foreword, the GOP vice-presidential candidate observed that "the Heritage Foundation isn’t some random outpost on Capitol Hill; it is and has been the most influential engine of ideas for Republicans from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump."

Only two years before, Trump himself emphasized his staunch and continued partnership with the Heritage Foundation. Attending a foundation event, he remarked: "This is a great group, and they’re going to lay the groundwork and detailed plans for exactly what our movement will do and what your movement will do when the American people give us a colossal mandate to save America, and that’s coming."

In addition, if anyone had any doubts about what Trump and his MAGA Republicans would do in the future about workers’ rights, they had only to look at the labor record of the first Trump administration. That record included sabotaging America’s labor unions, presiding over massive plant closures and job losses, blocking workers’ wage gains, and undermining the health and safety of American workers.

Consequently, the nation’s labor movement saw Trump’s past record and agenda for the future for what they were. In a statement issued on July 18, 2024, Liz Shuler, president of the national AFL-CIO, declared: "In his first term as president, Donald Trump was a disaster for workers and our unions." Moreover, "the Trump Project 2025 Agenda lays out his plan to turbocharge his anti-worker policies, eliminate or control unions, and eviscerate labor laws and workers’ contracts." Consequently, "a second Trump term would put everything we’ve fought for good jobs, fair wages, health care, retirement security, worker security on the chopping block."

Indeed, Project 2025 provides a powerful reminder to the labor movement and its supporters of how important it is to defeat the election of Trump and his MAGA Republicans this November.

Dr. Lawrence Wittner is Professor of History emeritus at SUNY/Albany

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