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, comprised 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."
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