Project 2025’s Anti-Union Game Plan
Much attention has been paid to the antidemocratic aspects of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, a radical playbook for the first 180 days of a new Trump term. But few have focused on its plan to kneecap unions and attack workers’ rights.
Former president Donald Trump arrives at his campaign rally at the Bojangles Coliseum on July 24, 2024, in Charlotte, North Carolina. (Brandon Bell / Getty Images)
Corporate backers of the Donald Trump campaign have tipped their hand. In “Project 2025: Presidential Transition Project,” the Heritage Foundation unveiled its 900-page wish list for a new Trump presidency and a compliant Supreme Court.
Trump’s victory last time was a surprise, and many corporate types view his chaotic term as a missed opportunity. This time Heritage, which is a mouthpiece for big employers, has compiled a long list of people they want Trump to hire and appoint, and a scorched-earth plan for his first 180 days.
Day one, they want to fire the best National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) general counsel we’ve had in my lifetime, Jennifer Abruzzo.
Then Project 2025 foresees reclassifying thousands of civil service employees by executive order so they can be fired and replaced with the corporations’ loyal troops.
From there, the plan is to bulldoze the protections US workers have built up over one hundred years of determination, sacrifice, and unity.
It’s ugly: abolish overtime pay laws, outlaw public sector unions entirely, get rid of health and safety protections, eliminate the federal minimum wage, make it harder to receive unemployment, and put children back to work like in the 1920s.
Hitting building trades workers, they would get rid of requirements for prevailing wage pay and project labor agreements in federal projects.
There’s more. They want to get rid of the Department of Education. Ban teaching women’s history and African American history in schools — lest we get ideas about how to change things! Ban abortion nationwide. (The AFL-CIO details the whole alarming list here.)
Florida Pilot
I’m from Florida, where parts of this playbook are being tested out. My old union, AFSCME Local 3340, represented janitorial, secretarial, and technical workers at the University of Florida in Gainesville for fifty years.
Last fall, the contract was shredded and the union was decertified due to a law put in by the Republican legislature requiring 60 percent paid-up membership. (Florida is already a right-to-work state, so members can get the benefits of a union without joining.)
A friend who works for the city water treatment plant lost his union protection (Communications Workers of America) the same way. He said younger workers on his jobsite don’t understand what it’s like to work without a union, so they refused to join, leaving the union to be decertified.
Project 2025 wants to take this nightmare nationwide.
We’re already living with the consequences of Trump’s three Supreme Court appointments. The court just got rid of the Chevron deference doctrine, so now, when corporations sue over regulations they don’t like, judges don’t have to defer to the NLRB’s or the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s interpretation of what the law means — they can substitute their own antiworker views.
A Better 2025
How do we respond? First, we can let our coworkers know that this antiworker agenda is the real playbook for a future Trump administration, no matter what Trump himself may say about being on the side of ordinary Americans. While Trump has distanced himself from the 2025 plan, many of his former staffers are part of it, and they’re ready to step into key roles. They know that in the face of congressional gridlock, “personnel is policy.”
Second, let’s demand a positive program to rebuild our country and pressure any candidates who are mealy-mouthed about it to get serious: a $25-an-hour minimum wage, real enforceable rights to unionize, health care for all with no insurance company interference, tax the rich for fully funded schools and transit, unemployment insurance that doesn’t run out, stronger Social Security benefits, and a continuation of the Joe Biden administration’s serious investment in jobs for a new green economy to stop climate change.