“When we say Donald Trump is a scab, this is what we mean”

Shawn Fain’s Words Have The Ring Of Truth

The Republican threat to the working class came into sharp focus just one week before the Democratic National Convention kicked off in Chicago, with long-time union member Tim Walz on the ticket as Kamala Harris’ running mate. It began with Trump’s chaotic interview withby Elon Musk on his dilapidated social media site, formerly known as Twitter.

Musk fired huge swathes of employees when he bought the site two years ago, and the loss of quality and basic functionality that resulted was on full display in the 40-minute delay that began the interview. But wantonly firing people was a good thing, actually, Trump insisted, praising Trump for firing workers at his car company when they went out on strike several years ago. After Musk volunteered to serve on a hypothetical cost-cutting commission, Trump praised him as “the greatest cutter,” saying, “They go on strike and you say, that’s OK. You’re all gone. You’re all gone. So every one of you is gone and you are the greatest.”

Not only is what Musk did illegal under existing labor law, so is threatening it. As a result, the UAW filed federal labor charges against both men the following day.

“When we say Donald Trump is a scab, this is what we mean. When we say Trump stands against everything our union stands for, this is what we mean,” said UAW President Shawn Fain. “Donald Trump will always side against workers standing up for themselves, and he will always side with billionaires like Elon Musk, who is contributing $45 million a month to a Super PAC to get him elected. Both Trump and Musk want working-class people to sit down and shut up, and they laugh about it openly. It’s disgusting, illegal and totally predictable from these two clowns.”

In striking contrast, the next day Walz addressed the annual convention of AFSCME, the public service union he was a member of for two decades as a teacher. Walz stressed the difference between the two tickets’ records and what they would do in the future. When Fain calls Trump a scab, “That’s not name-calling, it’s an observation,” Walz noted and went on to say:

You know, you can tell a lot about people in their personal lives. He spent a decade stiffing service workers, from dishwashers, waiters and carpenters on his own properties to enrich himself. As president, he cut overtime benefits for millions of workers. And he opposed any effort to raise the minimum wage. That’s all you need to know. You don’t have to ask twice. We know who they are.

Walz is certainly right for the people in that room, for people who’ve spent years, even decades fighting to defend workers’ rights. But for the broader public, in perhaps the most consequential election in our lifetimes, it’s helpful to flesh things out more fully. This goes double for the detailed plans laid out in Project 2025, the carefully prepared playbook for Trump’s hoped-for second term.

There is a bewildering array of specific proposals involved, so one way of thinking of them is in terms of three categories: those impacting individual workplace/job issues, such as cutting overtime pay and the minimum wage, etc.; those impacting organizing/union issues, such as decertifying unions en masse; and those impacting individual/family issues beyond the workplace, such as increasing healthcare costs in multiple ways.

But Jody Calemine, director of Advocacy for the AFL-CIO, divided things a bit differently on MSNBC’s The ReidOut a few days before Walz spoke. First was “a category of proposals that sort of eliminate the floor from workers. They want to go after minimum wage, overtime, after child labor laws, they want to turn more people into independent contractors so they have no rights whatsoever.”

Such proposals aren’t new, Calemine noted. But bringing them all together like this really is. Trump’s allies seek to undermine these protections in a bewildering different number of ways.

To start, Project 2025 says, “To encourage experimentation and reform efforts at the state and local levels, Congress should pass legislation allowing waivers from federal labor laws.” Thus states could set minimum wages lower than the already super-low level of $7.25/hour, and also reduce overtime, child labor and worker misclassification protections.

At the federal level Project 2025 would undermine overtime pay in multiple ways. Here are three of the clearest and most consequential. First, reverting to the former overtime pay rules for salaried workers under the Trump administration would take overtime away from 4.3 million workers. Under Trump, only workers making less than $35,568 were eligible, now the threshold is $43,888, rising to $58,656 on Jan. 1, 2025.

Second, it would end overtime pay guarantees and let employers give workers time off instead — scheduled by employers, of course. This is essentially paid leave, and there’s already substantial data showing that workers significantly underuse the paid leave they’re already entitled to. So the net effect would simply be more unpaid overtime.

Third, it would let employers shift from calculating hourly overtime pay on a weekly to a biweekly or even four-week basis, forcing workers to work 50 or 60 hours a week without earning overtime pay, if alternated with shorter work weeks. This would also seriously worsen the problem of wage theft associated with overtime pay. Writing for the Center for American Progress, Lily Roberts explained:

“Overtime eligibility and access are already among the most common forms of wage theft and other violations of the law by employers. From 2013 to 2023, overtime violations accounted for 82 percent of back wages for Fair Labor Standards Act violations—which cover minimum wage, overtime, retaliation, and tip theft by employers…. A system rife with abuse needs clearer guidance and more enforcement, not additional ‘flexibility’ for employers to decide who gets overtime pay and when.”

Altogether, billions of dollars would be taken from workers and given to their bosses each year.

Child labor protections would also be rolled back, allowing 16- and 17-year-olds to do dangerous jobs they’re currently not allowed to do.

Unlike these and other proposals in the first category, Calemine warned, “What we haven’t seen before is the rest of it, which I think is very, very nefarious and dangerous. … The second category of proposals has to do with civil rights.”

Here they want to kneecap civil rights enforcement against federal contractors, “but they leave the EEOC in place” because “they want to turn Title VII [of the Civil Rights Act] on its head and weaponize it against diversity, inclusion and equity. They want to weaponize it against employers that put on anti-harassment and anti-racism training. And in other words, they want to normalize everyday racism and sexism in the workplace and in society,” Calemine said.

At the same time, “They privilege employers who are religious, that is religious bosses. And so those religions will trump the civil rights of workers. If you want a job, if you want to keep your job, if you want to get promoted, you better comply with your boss’s religion,” he warned.

Then, “When they go to labor law, they’re going to weaken private sector unions and replace them with unions controlled by companies, and then they want to totally eliminate public sector unions.”

Specific proposals to weaken unions include eliminating the use of card checks to certify a union, and allowing employers to attempt to decertify them virtually any time at all, instead of the current narrow time windows. Replacing real unions with company unions — in which workers have basically no power at all — would require congressional action, and Trump’s VP pick, J.D. Vance, is already a co-sponsor of such a bill.

However, some of the most devastating proposals in Project 2025 affect workers as the core part of society as a whole. It would eliminate Head Start, and include attacks on Medicare, Medicaid, the Affordable Care Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act, all of which would hit workers especially hard. For example, private Medicare Advantage [MA] plans will cost at least $83 billion more than traditional Medicare would cost this year, according to the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission, which advises Congress. But Project 2025 calls for it to be made “the default enrollment option” for all new Medicare beneficiaries, ballooning current costs, boosting private profits and pushing us toward a future of fully privatized Medicare. It also calls for Medicaid cuts which roughly parallel Republican congressional proposals that are projected to produce a 53% spending cut over the next 10 years. Under their plans, approximately 21 million people would be at risk of losing coverage due to red tape involved in work reporting requirements. (The vast majority of adult recipients are already working, caregiving, or unable to work.)

Because it’s concerned with what the president can do alone, Project 2025 doesn’t tell the full story of what Trump and his allies intend to do. For that, we can look to repeated statements and past actions — such as the 40+ attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act, legislative proposals to extend the Social Security retirement age, and the proposed Medicaid cuts mentioned just above.

Ever since the Affordable Care Act was passed, Republicans have tried to repeal it, almost always, after the first few years, with promises to replace it with something better. But it’s now been 14 years since it was first passed, and the GOP replacement plan has still yet to be seen. And this goes to the heart of what the GOP has planned for labor — in the workplace, at the bargaining table, and in workers’ everyday lives. They have detailed plans about what they want to take away. And nothing but vague promises about what to replace it with.

As the details of Project 2025 have come out, Trump and his allies have all tried to disavow them. But in his AFSCME convention speech, Walz was crystal clear. “Trump’s playing dumb. ‘Oh, I don’t know about [Project] 2025,’” Walz said. “I’m a football coach at heart. And I’ll tell you one thing I know for sure is, if you’re going to take the time to draw up a playbook, you’re damn sure going to use it.”