Labor, Project 2025: Trump Win Would Imperil Worker Organizing Gains Under Biden's NLRB

- The right-wing agenda "offers a playbook for how an administration could jeopardize the NLRB's ability to protect organizing workers." June 20, 2024. Common Dreams, Ed.

With longtime labor lawyer Jennifer Abruzzo at the helm of the National Labor Relations Board, serving as general counsel, the Biden administration has worked to reverse the decades long trend in the U.S. of weakened labor laws—achieving a high rate of workers voting to join unions, requiring thousands of workers to be reinstated at their jobs after being illegally fired for organizing, and increasing the number of workers who are eligible to unionize.

But as the Center for American Progress warned in an analysis published on Thursday, all that progress and more could be erased if former President Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee in the November election, were to win a 2nd term in the White House—enabling him to put the right-wing plot Project 2025 into action. P2025 is spearheaded by the Heritage Foundation and includes agenda items for continuing to roll back reproductive rights, imposing mass deportations of undocumented immigrants, and rolling back climate actions taken by President Joe Biden and other administrations.

The CAP analysis released Thursday details how the project would also push the White House and the NLRB to dismantle protections achieved for workers in recent years. The general counsel would be among the federal employees whose jobs would be eliminated "on Day One" of a potential Trump presidency, threatening the NLRB's "ability to protect workers trying to organize for good, middle-class jobs," wrote CAP policy analyst Aurelia Glass.

Project 2025 also advises the NLRB to reinstate a 2019 standard which allowed many workers to be classified as independent contractors, leaving them without the legal ability to organize in the workplace. The right-wing playbook would further hamstring workers' efforts to unionize by reinstating Trump-era rules that gave anti-union companies more freedom to fight organizing campaigns and allowed them to more easily avoid liability for labor violations by relying on staffing agencies and contractors to supply their workforce...
https://www.commondreams.org/news/project-2025-2668555142