We told you so: The union-buster returns on Jan. 20
From The Daily Beast:
By MICHAEL IAN BLACK
It would be one thing if Americans collectively decided to tighten our belts, dig in, and sacrifice a bit now to make the nation better for all. That’s not what we did.
We are a people who voted to cut off our noses to spite our faces. We voted to give more money to billionaires and less to those who could use it to pay for the slightly higher cost of eggs. (Let’s not forget the economic policies Trump promoted during the campaign are likely to short change the average American consumer by way of the tariffs he’s promised to stick on just about everything.) We voted to give our climate over to polluters and tech bros who want to build nuclear power plants to power their sloppy AI moviemaking. We voted for incompetence mixed with incoherence and we called it a movement.
We voted to rid ourselves of the best of us—those who have, historically, always risen from the nation’s underclasses to innovate, educate, explore, create, inspire. That’s the American story told over centuries. We voted to turn our backs on all that because we’d rather believe “they’re eating the dogs, they’re eating the cats.”
From truthout
By MICHAEL ARRIA
In November, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) sided with Amazon workers in ruling that it is illegal to force workers to attend mandatory anti-union propaganda sessions, upending a doctrine of U.S. labor law that has existed since 1948.
The anti-union propaganda sessions, which are formally referred to as “captive audience meetings” are a controversial practice that has long been used to deter unionization drives.
“These coercive meetings are well-known union-busting tools, and the practice has no place in America’s workplaces or in our democracy,” AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler said in a statement celebrating the NLRB’s role in ending the practice.
The celebration will presumably be short-lived, however, as the incoming Trump administration is expected to revert the board to the pro-business, anti-union agency that it was during his first term. This means workers’ rights will inevitably be rolled back and much of the progress made over the past four years could be lost.
From Equal Times
Trump is pro-deregulation, anti-union and unabashedly pro-business – his biggest backer during this election was the ultra-conservative, anti-union Tesla boss Elon Musk – and his policies during his first term in office reflected this. According to the AFL-CIO: “…President Trump spent four years in office weakening unions and working people while pushing tax giveaways to the wealthiest among us. He stacked the courts with judges who want to roll back our rights on the job. He made us less safe at work. He gave big corporations free rein to lower wages and make it harder for workers to stand together in a union.” For example, he issued various executive orders designed to curtail the power of unions, particularly those representing federal workers. He stacked the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) with appointees who tended to vote in favour of employers rather than workers. He failed on his pledge to bring back well-paying manufacturing jobs to states like Pennsylvania, Michigan and Ohio. He cut funding to the Department of Labor by 21 per cent and he did not support calls to increase the federal minimum wage, which has remained US$7.25 per hour since 2009 (although the minimum wage did not change under the Biden-Harris administration, either).
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Project 2025 is a 922-page policy document produced by the conservative thinktank the Heritage Foundation which lays out plans to totally overhaul the US government. When it comes to work, it lays out – amongst other measures – proposals to limit the right to organise, let states ban trade unions, rescind overtime pay laws, ramp up workplace immigration raids, and scrap health and safety protections and protections against child labour in a bid to “spur new jobs and investment, higher wages, and productivity”. Although Trump has sought to distance himself from this document, it was written by a network of more than 100 people linked to his administration.