“Have you heard about Project 2025?” Robert Reich asks in a follow up fund-raising email from Inequality Media Civic Action. “If not, you might want to sit down before reading the rest of this email — because frankly, it’s terrifying.”
Added Reich: “Project 2025 is a nearly 1000-page step-by-step playbook for Donald Trump’s second term that would literally turn America into an authoritarian MAGA police state and shred our most cherished freedoms.”
One of those “cherished freedoms” most in peril is the right of workers to form unions. Trump proved to be one of the most-anti-union presidents in history. “Trump’s disdain for the American labor movement continued in the years after he left office,” author and historian Lawrence Wittner recently wrote in Forward Kentucky. “Chief among them is his record in sabotaging the nation’s labor movement.”
Added Wittner: “In August 2023, attacking the newly-elected, dynamic leaders of the United Auto Workers (UAW), he told UAW members that ‘you shouldn’t pay those [union] dues because they’re selling you to hell. Don’t listen to these union people who get paid a lot of money.’ That October, he insisted: ‘The auto workers are being sold down the river by their leadership.’ In fact, though, that November, UAW president Shawn Fain and his team led one of the most impressive nationwide strikes of modern times, securing wage raises for auto workers of at least 25 percent, as well as boosting retirement contributions and other benefits.”
Convergence Magazine is out with a video titled Project 2025: A Warning for Labor. The video explains the grave danger Project 2025 poses to organized labor. Hosted by Ash-Lee Woodard Henderson, Jackson Potter, and Stephanie Luce, it ought to be shown in every union hall in the country.
“The right to strike, the eight-hour day, and the minimum wage have only been recognized by federal law since the 1930s,” the hosts explain. “Even those basic protections come riddled with loopholes. Important groups, such as domestic workers and agricultural workers, are excluded. Now the right wing has its sights set on stripping away those rights won by more than a hundred years of hard organizing and bloody battles. Project 2025’s “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise” spells out just how they would do it.”
In the video, Henderson, co-executive director of Tennessee’s Highlander Center, Chicago Teachers Union Vice President Jackson Potter, and Convergence’s Luce discuss Project 2025 and how we can fight against it.
The fight starts with viewing the video.
The hosts explain that “The Project 2025 report’s chapter on the Labor Department contains a few items that sound appealing, such as overtime pay for Sunday work – but the plan aims to undermine labor unions and independent worker power, and hand employers more control over their workforce. Even the positive elements are primarily in the service of a Christian nationalist agenda, aimed at bolstering a male-head-of-household, stay-at-home mother family.
“Project 2025 would make it easier for employers to set up company unions and to misclassify workers as independent contractors. It would provide more government resources to investigate unions and worker centers, but sap agencies charged with enforcing workers’ safety and rights.”
Says Henderson: “Project 2025 comes for everybody. It comes for LGBTQIA+ folks. It comes for folks of color, and people of good will of all stripes. But it particularly comes for labor. Unions and workers and all of us who care about worker justice need to take this very seriously.”
Click here to watch the video.
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