“Trump’s decision to select a more pro-worker labor secretary could be more of a messaging maneuver than a substantive one,” Vox’s Li Zhou wrote of lame duck Rep. Lori Chavez-DeRemer (R-Ore). She’s president-elect Donald Trump’s pick to head the Department of Labor.
Her appointment might indeed be a message maneuver designed to con workers. If it is such a ploy, it would be similar to one used 91 years ago by the guy who the president-elect has reportedly said “did some good things, too.”
More on that in a minute.
Meanwhile, much of the media is tagging Chavez-DeRemer “pro-worker” mainly because she was one of only three Republican lawmakers who co-sponsored the Protecting the Right to Organize Act, or PRO Act for short.
Yet Chavez-DeRemer is “more pro worker” only among Republicans, Hassan Ali Kanu wrote in The American Prospect. He said her embrace of the PRO Act was “mostly symbolic” and represented “some outreach to labor, rather than constantly attacking unions. It also shows just as clearly that she is most likely to be a Trump loyalist — a pro-business, anti-union labor secretary, in other words — rather than an ally to labor and workers, if confirmed.”
(Some right-wing, anti-labor Republican politicians and groups are balking at Chavez-DeReamer’s nomination. But to paraphrase Shakespeare: Methinks they doth protest too much.)
A closer look at her record — she lasted just one term in Congress — seems to back up Kanu. In 2023, she voted the AFL-CIO position on key legislation just 10 percent of the time. She endorsed Donald Trump, and the Oregon State AFL-CIO endorsed her opponent, Democratic state Rep. Janelle Bynum, who beat her last month.
Media narratives to the contrary, Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democrat whom Trump beat, did better among union households than President Joe Biden did when he defeated Trump four years ago, according to the Center for American Progress: “Biden won union members handily in 2020, reversing a decline in union support for Democratic candidates that began in 2016, according to previous Center for American Progress Action Fund research. And, according to the VoteCast survey conducted for The Associated Press (AP) and Fox News, Harris appeared to widen Biden’s margin, with union voters preferring Harris over Donald Trump by 16 percentage points in 2024.”
Trump was the most anti-union president in a century. (Click here, here, here, here and here.) “Workers shouldn’t let Trump take them for fools,” Steven Greenhouse wrote in The Guardian last year. “When Trump tells workers he has their back, he thinks he’s a clever wolf trying to reassure a flock of sheep that he has their back.”
Obviously, Trump and the Republicans fear unions as a big barrier to their pro-corporate and anti-labor agenda. Breaking union power is a major goal of Project 2025, the rightwing blueprint for a second Trump term. (Though on the campaign trail, Trump denied any connection to Project 2025, many 2025 contributors worked in the first Trump administration, and he is busy hiring 2025 alums for his cabinet.)
Anyway, when Adolf Hitler took over in January, 1933, organized labor stood as a powerful bulwark against his dreams of turning democratic Germany into a Nazi dictatorship, his first step toward a war of conquest in Europe.
In addition to his homicidal hatred of Jews and contempt for Germany’s Weimar Republic, Hitler despised free, independent unions, which he saw as a dire threat to his budding dictatorship.
Seven million Germans belonged to unions in 1933. For years he had reviled organized labor. But to win unions over, he opted for a messaging maneuver.
Explained American journalist-historian William L. Shirer in The Nightmare Years, 1930-1940, his first-hand account of how Hitler and the Nazis destroyed Germany’s post-World War I democracy:
“To lull the unions before he struck, Hitler proclaimed May Day, 1933, three months after he had taken over the government, to be a national holiday and officially named it the ‘Day of National Labor.’ For half a century May Day had been the traditional day of celebration for the German — and European — worker. In every capital of the continent, the Socialists, Communists, and trade-union workers had staged gigantic May Day parades.
“Though Hitler had just destroyed the Communist and Socialist parties and now secretly planned to destroyed the unions, he promised the latter that the first May Day under National Socialism would be celebrated as never before. Actually, it was. But not in the manner expected by the lulled union leaders. They were flown to Berlin from all parts of Germany, along with big delegations of workers. And out at Templehof Field thousands of banners were unfurled acclaiming the Nazi regime’s solidarity with the worker.
“Before the massive rally Hitler received the workers’ delegates in the ornate hall of the Chancellery in the Wilhelmstrasse. ‘You will see how untrue and unjust,’ he said, ‘is the statement that the [Nazi] revolution is directed against the German workers. On the contrary.’
“Later in his speech to more than a hundred thousand workers at the airfield, Hitler pronounced the motto of the day: ‘Honor work and respect the worker.’ He promised that May Day would be celebrated in honor of German labor ‘throughout the century.’”
It was all a cruel, and soon to become violent, hoax.
Shirer explained: “The next morning, May 2, the trade-union offices throughout the country were occupied by the police, the S.S., and the S.A. All union funds were confiscated, the unions dissolved, and the leaders arrested, beaten, and carted off to concentration camp,” Shirer wrote.
Germany’s free trade unions were abolished, and workers were yoked under the Labor Front, a Nazi puppet organization which turned German workers into industrial serfs, according to Shirer. “Within three weeks ... Hitler decreed a law bringing an end to collective bargaining and outlawing strikes.”
Hitler named Dr. Robert Ley as Labor Front chief. According to Shirer, Ley promised “to restore absolute leadership to the natural leader of a factory — that is, the employer.”
Added Shirer, “Like so much else in Nazi land, the ‘Labor Front’ was a swindle. It did not represent the workers. ... They were bound to their place of labor, like medieval serfs.”
Even if Trump doesn’t arrest, assault, and toss union leaders in concentration camps, he believes in essence that the owner is the “natural leader of a factory.” The authors of Project 2025 would love to outlaw strikes, end collective bargaining, and replace independent unions with something akin to the German Labor Front.
The International Union of Bricklayers and Allied Craftworkers pointed out that Project 2025 would permit employers to “create their own sham company unions by reintroducing Republican Senator Marco Rubio’s Teamwork for Employees and Managers (TEAM) Act, creating employer-controlled ‘councils’ to weaken workers’ bargaining power. These phony organizations with fake employee committees are staffed with anti-union workers hand-picked by management. This would erase unions’ influence on labor laws, worker protections, and splinter worker representation.” (Rubio is Trump’s pick for secretary of state.)
Kanu also wrote that there are signals that if she’s confirmed, Chavez-DeRemer will be “a Trump loyalist, much as we’ve seen with the incoming administration’s other named nominees.”
In business and politics, Trump has always surrounded himself only with those whose chief qualification is servility to him. “Trump’s world is truncated by sycophants who slavishly obey his every whim and is why many of his nominations are similar television personalities,” John D. Foster recently wrote the Longview, Tex., News-Journal. “It’s widely reported that he doesn’t read anything substantial, and as Kamala pointed out, he likes people who ply him with favors and flattery.”
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