WASHINGTON—Two prominent Black union leaders, Communications Workers President Claude Cummings and James Curbeam, chairman of the Teamsters Black Caucus, are warning African-American voters—and everyone else–about the threat of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, and specifically about his platform, Project 2025.
Their cautions were part of a wide-ranging discussion of that tome, created by the radical right Heritage Foundation, an ideological think tank which hates workers, women, LGBT people, and people of color, among others. A former Trump regime official led the project and others of his ilk, plus GOP President Ronald Reagan’s Attorney General, Edwin Meese, populated it with their recommendations.
The warnings are important because, as Curbeam said, organized labor sets the standards for other firms in the U.S. to match wages and benefits. Democratic President Joe Biden has repeatedly made the same point by declaring, “Where unions are strong, America is strong.”
Trump’s Project 2025 platform “would make it harder for workers to organize” into unions to protect themselves “and make it harder to get ahead,” Cummings told the October 20 session the Working Families Party and MoveOn.org sponsored.
And a measure co-sponsored by Trump’s vice-presidential running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance, R-Ohio, “would let management set up their own fake unions,” Cummings added. Project 2025 includes that while also abolishing card-check recognition of unions, he said.
Anti-union employers would benefit
“The ones who really benefit from that are anti-union employers” who can use union recognition election campaigns to intimidate, spy on, fire, and otherwise break labor law against workers. CWA endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris as soon as she took over the Democratic ticket from her boss, President Joe Biden.
“Organized labor sets the standards for all working people in this country,” said Curbeam, whose Teamsters Black Caucus endorsed Trump’s foe, Harris, even before the parent union decided to stay neutral in the race between Harris and Trump. Besides the Black Caucus, Teamsters Joint Councils in the key swing states of Michigan, Minnesota, and Pennsylvania, as well as on the entire West Coast, and the union’s largest local, in New York City, backed Harris.
And it is the councils and the locals, not the national union, that decide where to deploy people and spend voluntarily contributed political cash.
Other Project 2025 threats participants in the Working Families Party session discussed included a total nationwide abortion ban and Trump’s, and the platform’s demand, to round up, jail in concentration camps, and then deport every one of the estimated 11 undocumented people in the U.S., ripping families apart in thousands of cases. Speakers also discussed the threat of massive climate change.
“Donald Trump would appoint himself Emperor for the sole purpose of deporting nine million people,” said Greisa Martinez-Rosas, executive director of “The Dreamers,” United We Dream. Trump previously promised he’d be “a dictator on day one” for that purpose. Nobody, including Trump and his rightist supporters, believes he’d stop then.
Project 2025 has become a flash point for workers and their allies, including people of color, ever since Heritage released it and trumpeted it as the basis for Trump/s latest run for the White House. It’s become so controversial that he’s tried to disavow it, but workers keep finding ways to hang it around his neck.
Among other Project 2025 plans for immediate Trump actions should he win next month and be inaugurated next year would be the abolition of government employee unions, curtailing worker rights, a national “right to work” law, a virtual end to federal funding for public schools, including meals, and unspecified reconstruction of Social Security and Medicare to reduce future benefits and payments. The Teamsters’ Curbeam re-named “right to work” laws as “right to steal” statutes.
Trump would also impose tariffs of up to 1000% on imports, especially from China. He claims doing so would force firms to build factories here to avoid the tariffs, but independent analysts note the corporate class would pass on the cost of the tariffs to workers and families—and that a quarter of the U.S. workforce is tied to trade.
The two leaders listed other harms to workers under a new Trump regime. Cummings particularly noted Trump “would fire Jennifer Abruzzo,” the National Labor Relations Board’s General Counsel and chief enforcement officer “on Day 1.” He predicted Trump “would appoint a professional union-buster” to replace Abruzzo, a former top CWA counsel and longtime NLRB attorney.
“And it”—Project 2025—“would encourage more child labor. Can you believe that? It’s absolutely ridiculous,” said Cummings, a Texan who knows of child labor in the Lone Star States’ farm fields. Curbeam agreed. “You have 8-9-10-year-olds working on those farms.”
All of this, Cummings contended, would be undertaken “with the goal of maximizing corporate profit. It would be absolutely horrible for workers and the middle class would be destroyed.”
Curbeam emphasized Project 2025’s public workers union ban and its proposal to let companies “halt [union] contracts in mid-stream.
Would unleash union busters
“And right now, a union-buster must provide information on how much they earn” and from which firms. Many union-busters evade those duties though, by claiming they only “advise” companies on union-avoidance tactics and campaigns, while not running them.
“Union busters make up to $4500 an hour,” he said. Project 2025 would take that information, as skimpy as it is, out of the public eye. Meanwhile, Trump’s platform “would take away overtime pay” and substitute comp time at the boss’s choice. “The average American is working overtime”—or two or sometimes three jobs—“to survive.”
And firms that “want to have fair wages and working conditions” for their employees “would get hurt.”
Abortion—or lack of it—migration and climate change were other big issues in the Working Families Party-MoveOn session about Trump’s plans. Trump “would put people in dog cages,” as he did during his first term before deporting them to Mexico, said actor and activist Mark Ruffalo.
The cost would be $315 billion “at a time when he [Trump] wants to give more tax breaks to the rich while taking out an entire workforce,” he said. Independent analysts put the cumulated addition to the federal deficit from those tax breaks, with almost all the gain going to the top one percent, at $8 trillion over four years.
As for climate change, Rahna Epting, MoveOn’s executive director, lauded Biden and Harris for pushing wide-ranging legislation to combat climate change, complete with $270 billion to do so, to promote electric vehicles, solar polar, “electrical upgrades and protecting marginal communities.”
Though Epting did not say so, Biden’s “historic” anti-climate change law requires unionists to build the new “green” factories and electric cars.
“Trump wants to claw it all back” and pull the U.S. “once again” out of international agreements to combat climate change. “He’d allow the U.S. to emit all these pollutants” now scheduled to be phased out by 2050 or before.
And Drucilla Tigner, co-Executive Director of Planned Parenthood of Texas, said women in the Lone Star State, which has banned almost all abortions and threatens doctors with life in jail “on a first-degree felony” for performing abortions, said women nationwide would feel the same impact.
She explained those lucky few Texan women who can afford to drive or fly to neighboring abortion haven states, principally New Mexico, but as far as Colorado and southern Illinois, do so. Except most can’t. They can’t afford it, in time, money, or both.
“Rural people, people with low resources, people of color, and young people are being forced to carry children to term. Rape and incest are not exceptions” and since the right-wing dominated Texas legislature approved the abortion ban, “26,000 children were the result of rape” there.
“Now they want to export this abortion ban to the rest of the country.”
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