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Teamsters president Sean O’Brien spoke on Monday night at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, where the GOP invoked the “forgotten men and women of America.”
As they assemble in Milwaukee, are the MAGA Republicans taking seriously their newly minted pro-worker rhetoric? The GOP platform announces itself with an almost Rooseveltian flourish, dedicating the party “To the Forgotten Men and Women of America.”
That’s a nice touch, but when it comes to actual worker welfare issues, the new GOP platform emphasizes, overwhelmingly, immigration restriction, often in the most racist fashion, as well as raising obstacles to trade with China. There is very little else that bears directly on worker status. The platform does call for “merit-based immigration” in contrast to what the GOP labels “chain migration,” allowing spouses or children of those new workers into the country. That probably opens the door to the kind of temporary employees demanded by both Silicon Valley and American agribusiness, but, please, no family members!
The platform favors ending the transition to electric vehicles, an industrial policy championed by both President Biden and a newly powerful UAW, whose 2023 strike ensured that higher wages and union jobs would spread to many new battery plants and EV factories. Trump and the GOP are wagering that EVs will still fail, and in their place their platform offers a bet on crypto and artificial intelligence. One of the very few places where the platform-writers put forward a specific work-related proposal comes with a call to eliminate the tax on the tips that restaurant and hospitality workers earn, a substitute perhaps for raising the minimum wage, otherwise unmentioned in the 2024 GOP platform.
To actually find out what a Trump administration would do to revise, repeal, and administer those laws governing work and employment, one has to turn to the Heritage Foundation’s Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, better known as “Project 2025.” The 887-page set of policy recommendations was actually published in 2023, but as a Trump victory has become more plausible, Project 2025 has become an ominous specter to American liberals. Most of the headlines have emphasized the degree to which a new Republican administration would seek to dismantle what the MAGA crowd calls “the administrative state,” thoroughly politicizing and populating key departments, like Justice and Defense, with Trump loyalists.
In the recent uproar, Donald Trump himself declared that he knew little of the Heritage Foundation project, and there is no reason to doubt him on this score. But the Republican candidate’s ignorance about policy is nothing new. Indeed, it is actually irrelevant, because any new GOP government, including that headed by Trump, is going to have to draw a substantial portion of its personnel and policy initiatives from the right-wing think tanks, conservative foundations, K Street law firms, Wall Street investment banks, and MAGA-friendly academics scattered about American law schools and departments of economics. To get a sense of all that, one merely has to glance at the list of the 54 institutions on the Project 2025 Advisory Board or the 277 contributors who volunteered their time and expertise to assist those key authors who developed and wrote each of the volume’s 30 chapters. Many of them served in the Trump administration. These are the people who would fill the second-, third-, and fourth-level slots in Trump 2.0.
Chapter 18, “Department of Labor and Related Agencies,” covers a wide range of hot-button regulatory policies and legislation that a new GOP government would be eager to reconfigure. It was written by Jonathan Berry, a 40-something managing partner at Boyden Gray. He has impeccable conservative credentials, although not entirely MAGA: a Federalist Society member, he clerked for Samuel Alito, perhaps the Supreme Court’s most ideologically anti-union justice, and then worked in the Trump administration, where he assisted with the confirmation of Neil Gorsuch to the high court before taking a job at the Department of Labor where Eugene Scalia, an Alito soulmate, was secretary.
The real substance of the chapter arises out of corporate America’s long-standing effort to limit the reach and potency of labor and employment law.
In his 36-page chapter, Berry frames a slew of policy proposals using the kind of workerist rhetoric projected by Sens. J.D. Vance and Josh Hawley: American workers must once again have “rewarding, well-paying, and self-driven careers,” with a “family-supporting job as the centerpiece of the American economy.” “The Judeo-Christian tradition,” writes Berry, “has always recognized fruitful work as integral to human dignity, as service to God, neighbor, and family.” A restoration of this virtuous world will ultimately arise out of a transformation of a debased American culture—and here Berry mainly zeroes in on government-mandated diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policy—however, Berry concedes that state agencies can also play an important role in protecting workers, creating healthy labor markets, and encouraging wages that can support a family.
But this prologue hardly structures the chapter. As we will see, there are a few initiatives that Berry puts forward in the MAGA vein: tougher overtime rules for “Sabbath work”; a bit of worker voice on corporate boards; and a sharp reduction in H-2A and H-2B immigration work permits, covering farmworkers and seasonal hospitality and service work. But the real substance of the chapter arises out of corporate America’s long-standing effort to limit the reach and potency of labor and employment law, a contest reaching back to the era of Ronald Reagan and before. This is the kind of litigation cum legislative and agency lobbying that has been the meat and potatoes of many a K Street law firm.
Thus, for example, Berry waxes at length on the evils of data collection by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Given the rise of intermarriage and multiculturalism, race, Berry implies, has become an indeterminate and fictitious category. That’s possibly true in some ideal world, but what American corporations really dislike about such data collection is that these statistics become the basis for Title VII litigation based on the “disparate impact” generated by employer hiring and promotion policies that fail to take actual racial realities into account. That way leads to “quotas,” sniffs Berry.
In another intrusive instance, Berry also rejects government reporting requirements when it comes to union-busting law firms. During the administrations of Barack Obama and Joe Biden, liberals sought to implement a “persuader rule” that would require employers to disclose the advice they received from outside law firms seeking to thwart unionization. This “created significant regulatory burdens,” so any new Republican leadership at the Department of Labor must make sure this idea goes nowhere.
Lest one think that Berry is hostile to all aspects of the administrative state, one only has to list the new governmental initiatives advocated in his section of Project 2025. While EEOC data collection must cease, Berry advocates creation of an entirely new “Assistant Commissioner for Family Statistics” with a staff mandated to generate metrics on marriage and fertility rates, the proportion of children living with both biological parents, the cost of a standard basket of middle-class essentials, and the like. And on the labor front, while Berry rejects more oversight of business, he advocates a far more vigorous and intrusive examination of union finances, and in the process he seeks to fulfill a long-standing right-wing goal: bringing the many worker centers that foundations and some government entities have funded within the regulatory ambit of the National Labor Relations Act, thereby constraining or prohibiting much of the organizing and mobilizing activities that have made these centers lively and potent.
And of course, when it comes to unionism and traditional labor standards, Berry would check almost every box long demanded by corporate America. Overtime rules would be made far more flexible, offering employers the right to schedule their employees for more than 40 hours a week at straight-time wages if the next week those same employees worked an equivalent number of hours less. Meanwhile the definition of an independent contractor, of the sort driving for Uber or delivering groceries for DoorDash, would be codified, ensuring that such workers were not eligible to form a union or even claim coverage under the Fair Labor Standards Act. And of course, union organizing would be made far more difficult by proscribing the “card check” certification sought by the pro-labor liberals now in the majority on the National Labor Relations Board. Likewise, the NLRB effort, under both Obama and Biden, to create a “joint employer” standard for those working in franchised workplaces would go nowhere. With the hard-pressed, cash-strapped individual franchisee the sole employer of record, union organizing in fast food and other such sectors becomes pointless.
If Berry’s chapter is any guide to the rest of Project 2025, then traditional corporate conservatism trumps MAGA radicalism almost every time. In instance after instance, Berry lays out a MAGA mandate: slash immigrant visas under H-2A and H-2B; require government contractors to employ only American citizens, starting at 70 percent now with higher requirements a few years later; crack down on imports produced by forced labor; disincentivize work on the Sabbath by mandating overtime on that day; end the “BA box” requiring federal employee applicants to have a college degree; prohibit ESG (environmental, social, and governance) social responsibility considerations for public pension funds; and, admitting that “workers lack a meaningful voice in today’s workplace,” create a set of “employee involvement organizations” that in some instances might give workers a nonvoting voice on corporate boards.
None of this passes muster with corporate America. In every instance, there’s an “alternative view” attached to each proposal; a paragraph and more asserting that a deregulated market will solve most problems; that immigration restrictions or citizen employment mandates will raise costs and limit profits; that supply chains should not be overregulated; that corporations and individuals have the right to choose their own social policies without government interference; and that the decline of unionism over the last several decades is a pretty good indication that most workers are happy with the workplace status quo.
None of this is a recipe to dismantle the administrative state. Both the MAGA culture warriors and the corporate conservatives will use their own version of such a state to stanch the contemporary union revival and hasten the erosion of racial, gender, and climate justice. Should Donald Trump once again make it to the White House, the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 ensures that the infighting will be intense.
