[ad_1]
Workers still die on the job and struggle to keep workers safe, but the dangers on the job go beyond bad bosses. At the federal level, the far-right’s Project 2025 playbook includes gutting unions, laying off federal workers, and limiting the powers of agencies like the National Labor Relations Board. The Heritage Foundation’s 900-page action plan for the next Republican administration was written by a range of right-wing think tanks and many members of the last Trump team. James Goodwin, policy director at the Center for Progressive Reform, has taken a close look at the document, examining what Project 2025 has in store for workers and the implications for all of us. I interviewed him with Maximillian Alvarez, the editor-in-chief of the paper The Real News Network and its author Life’s work.
Maximilian Alvarez: If Project 2025 were to happen today, what would it mean for unions and union workers, especially in the public sector?
James Goodwin: We would have no place for unions. He talks more specifically about increasing oversight of unions and regulating them more tightly, even as we deregulate employers. There’s a kind of traditional mix of old conservative labor politics like hostility to unions, but there’s a new kind of thread in the Christian family view, and unions don’t fit into that vision.
Laura Flanders: I’m curious about the relationship between executive power and states’ rights. We hear a lot from Republicans about states’ rights, especially reproductive rights and so on. However, everything he says is about the concentration of power. So where does Project 2025 stand?
JG: This is a kind of fundamental paradox that runs throughout Project 2025. There is a very interesting chapter written by Russ Vought, which to me is essentially the thesis statement of Project 2025. It sets up a vision that we’re going to suck it all up. we take the power out of the federal government and put it in the president, and then the president does all these great things, and then gives the power back to the public. What it doesn’t answer is what kind of power is returned to the public? What happens if the president doesn’t give that power back, and who gets it? In theory, the returned power is a new Christian nationalist vision of social hierarchy within the United States.
TODAY: One of the driving forces behind this whole project is Section F, to turn a bunch of government employees who have civil service protections into at-will employees who could be fired much more quickly. I was wondering if you could tell me more about what Schedule F is and why it is so central to the Project 2025 plan.
JG: The foundation of our administrative state is people: professional, apolitical professionals. This is what we started building in this country in the late 1800s to replace what was then known as the spoils system. These jobs were essentially done by friends of the president or those in political power, and it was only a breeding ground for corruption and incompetence. That’s what Schedule F would do – bring us back to this system. Under this proposal. we would take these experts, these tens of thousands of scientists, engineers, lawyers, what have you, and fire them. The person being replaced is someone whose only real ability is unquestioning loyalty to the president.
TODAY: Here I would like to ask about the National Labor Relations Board. The NLRB is the independent government agency that oversees labor law in this country and has been under attack and underfunded for years. So James, I wanted to ask what exactly are Project 2025’s plans for the NLRB, and what should people expect Trump to do with the NLRB if he becomes president again?
JG: One of the most important things Project 2025 requires of independent agencies like the NLRB is structural. There are agencies that are run by officials that the president cannot easily get rid of. They have to be fired for a reason. One of the things Project 2025 wants to do is end all independent agencies, including the NLRB, to increase presidential control over those agencies.
LF: So another fascinating paradox is that Republicans who say they’re against this administrative state say they’re good at figuring out how we can weaponize that state. James, you’ve been researching this for a year now, this thing came out in September 2023. It is authored by a vast array of right-wing think tanks in every area of concern. It scared me that these people were brought together and agreed to be part of a single document. The Republican presidential candidate says, “Oh, no, it has nothing to do with me. I have nothing to do with Project 2025.” What is the truth in this and who do you think is really behind it? Because let’s face it, it’s not the work of one person or even one group.
JG: It is very difficult to separate Project 2025 from Trump, the presidential candidate. About 80 percent of the lead authors of various chapters in Mandate for Leadership, the main political playbook, have been Trump administration officials since the first term, according to the guys who ran it, according to the gender language. His super PACs advertise with endorsements.
TODAY: Have you thought creatively about what it would be like to be a worker who wants to organize a workforce into a health and welfare committee, even if you don’t have a union, even if you don’t have a clear employer, simply to express your concerns about about workplace hazards? Or the Texans who talk about the right to self-government, a right not to have our laws made in our own territory overturned by some higher office? Imagine what it would be like to wake up and find ourselves. land in 2025. If you were one of them, how would things be different?
JG: It’s bleak. As a worker, I would not have free time for such a thing, because overtime pay has ceased. We enable increased concentration within different industries. So the differences between me and my bosses, whoever they are, wherever they are, continue to grow. My co-workers who may not look like me, who are queer or people of color, will be afraid to speak up because they no longer have recognized civil rights. For this reason, I cannot associate with them either informally or as part of a union. This creates a divide in this way. In fact, this is the basic dynamic that Project 2025 is trying to set up as an authoritarian plan to create divisions in our society to facilitate these kinds of power shifts, concentrations of power to support a minority government.
TODAY: This really sums up what I would call boss governance. Trump is not the first Republican to say he wants to run the government like a business. That’s what Republicans have been saying since I was a Republican 20 years ago and way before that, but that’s what it really means. As someone who conducts interviews in America, I can tell you that most workers work in a dictatorship. They don’t have democracy in business. They have no democratic accountability to their bosses or managers, let alone to make demands with their employers to improve their working conditions. I wanted to chime in on that James and ask why Wall Street bosses and corporate powers love Project 2025 as much as they do “Death Star“ Bill in Texas. How does this sync?
JG: One of the ways Project 2025 is to turn all of America into a corporate city where the corporation controls everything, every aspect of our government, our society, what have you. Frankly, if you took corporate America into a quiet room and bought them a few drinks, they’d probably be a little conflicted about Project 2025. I think there’s a lot of things in it, like the old stuff, small government, tax cuts, that kind of stuff — totally on board. I don’t know how comfortable they are with the authoritarian aspects, because look at Target. Celebrate Pride Month a little too much during Trump’s second term, and he’ll turn the Justice Department against you or the FBI. If I’m the CEO of Target, I don’t like it. Crackdowns on immigration have left many industries dependent on undocumented workers to sustain themselves. I think there are many things in the immigration chapters of Project 2025 that the business community is not happy with. In many ways, then, Project 2025 aims to provide enough tax breaks and regulatory rollbacks for the business community to swallow the bitter pills of authoritarianism and Christian nationalism.