The Far Right's Plot Against Workers

[Omaha Steve]

https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/james-goodwin-interview/?custno=

October 15, 2024 by Laura Flanders and Maximillian Alvarez

James Goodwin, the policy director at the Center for Progressive Reform, explains what the “bleak” world of labor under Project 2025 would look like.


James Goodwin, the policy director at the Center for Progressive Reform. A Project 2025 sign is seen as at the Capitol Visitor Center on September 12, 2024.
(Screen grab; Tom Williams / CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)

Workers continue to die on the job and struggle to protect worker safety, but the dangers for labor go beyond bad bosses. On the federal level, the far right’s Project 2025 playbook has plans to gut unions, fire federal workers, and limit the power of agencies like the National Labor Relations Board. The Heritage Foundation’s 900-page action plan for the next Republican administration is written by an array of right-wing think tanks, and a lot of members of the last Trump team. James Goodwin, the policy director at the Center for Progressive Reform, has closely reviewed the document and investigated what Project 2025 has in store for workers and what the implications are for all of us. I interviewed him with Maximillian Alvarez, the editor in chief of The Real News Network and author of The Work of Living.

—Laura Flanders

Maximillian Alvarez: If Project 2025 was implemented today, what would that mean for unions and union workers, especially in the public sector?

James Goodwin: We’d have no room for unions. More explicitly it talks about increasing oversight of unions, regulating them more stringently even as we deregulate employers. There’s kind of that traditional mix of old, conservative labor policy like hostility towards labor unions, but there’s this new sort of thread of the Christian view of the family, and unions do not figure into that vision.

Laura Flanders: I am curious about this relationship between the executive and states’ rights. We hear a lot from Republicans about states’ rights, certainly when it comes to reproductive rights and so on. Yet everything you’re saying is about concentrating power in the executive. So where does Project 2025 stand?

FULL story: https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/james-goodwin-interview/?custno=

or here: http://archive.today/ug0EQ