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labor
Unions Note Chavez-DeRemer's Record, 'But Donald Trump Is the President-Elect'
The DOL pick has sparked debates about how much she will actually "do right by workers" and whether "Teamsters president Sean O'Brien and Donald Trump are effectively dividing the labor movement."
Nov 23, 2024
Amid a flurry of Friday night announcements about key roles in the next Trump administration, one stood out to union leaders and other advocates for working people: Congresswoman Lori Chavez-DeRemer, an Oregon Republican, for labor secretary.
Chavez-DeRemer, who lost her reelection bid to Democrat Janelle Bynum earlier this month, "has built a pro-labor record in Congress, including as one of only three Republicans to co-sponsor the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act and one of eight Republicans to co-sponsor the Public Service Freedom to Negotiate Act," said AFL-CIO president Liz Shuler in a statement.
"But Donald Trump is the president-elect of the United States—not Rep. Chavez-DeRemer—and it remains to be seen what she will be permitted to do as secretary of labor in an administration with a dramatically anti-worker agenda," she stressed. "Despite having distanced himself from Project 2025 during his campaign, President-elect Trump has put forward several Cabinet nominees with strong ties to Project 2025. That 900-page document has proposals that would strip overtime pay, eliminate the right to organize, and weaken health and safety standards."
"You can stand with working people, or you can stand with Project 2025, but you can't stand with both."
"The AFL-CIO will work with anyone who wants to do right by workers, but we will reject and defeat any attempt to roll back the rights and protections that working people have won with decades of blood, sweat, and tears," added Schuler, whose group endorsed Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris and developed a guide detailing how the right-wing initiative would be catastrophic for working people. "You can stand with working people, or you can stand with Project 2025, but you can't stand with both."
Seth Harris, a Northeastern University professor who served as acting secretary of labor under former President Barack Obama, toldBloomberg that "the president-elect has nominated a unicorn: a genuine pro-labor Republican."
"This is about the best nomination for the Labor Department that Democrats could have hoped for," he said, but "we don't know if she's going to be given the freedom to carry out the agenda that she supported in Congress."
Some skeptics and critics highlighted that Chavez-DeRemer—who only entered the U.S. House of Representatives last year—has just a 10% lifetime score from the AFL-CIO. Among them was longtime labor reporter Mike Elk, who warned, "This is divide and conquer politics at its worst as Trump prepares for an attack on federal workers unions!"
Others, such as Progressive Mass policy director Jonathan Cohn and University of California, Los Angeles historian Trevor Griffey, have suggested that Trump's U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) nominee supporting the PRO Act was simply her "posturing in a swing district."
Like the AFL-CIO, the nation's two largest teachers unions shared nuanced reactions to Trump choosing Chavez-DeRemer. Alongside many other labor groups, both backed Harris after President Joe Biden left the race—though Trump's victory has ignited heated debates over the Democratic Party's failure to win over working-class voters in a cycle that featured Trump cosplaying in a Pennsylvania McDonald's and a garbage truck while cozying up to the world's richest man, Elon Musk, and praising him for firing striking workers.
National Education Association president Becky Pringle said in a statement that "across America, most of us want the same things—strong public schools to help every student grow into their full brilliance and good jobs where workers earn living wages to provide for their families."
Noting Chavez-DeRemer's co-sponsorship of "pro-student, pro-public school, pro-worker legislation" and votes "against gutting the Department of Education, against school vouchers, and against cuts to education funding," Pringle asserted that "this record stands in stark contrast to Donald Trump's anti-worker, anti-union record, and his extreme Project 2025 agenda that would gut workplace protections, make it harder for workers to unionize, and diminish the voice of working people."
"During his first term, Trump appointed anti-worker, anti-union National Labor Relations Board members," she continued. "Now he is threatening to take the unprecedented action of removing current pro-worker NLRB members in the middle of their term, replacing them with his corporate friends. And he is promising to appoint judges and justices who are hostile to workers and unions."
Trump's track
record also includes nominating agency leaders and U.S. Supreme Court justices with histories of siding with companies over employees, gutting DOL regulations intended to protect workers' wages and benefits, and giving major tax cuts to wealthy individuals and corporations—policies he plans to extend with the help of an incoming GOP Congress.
"Educators and working families across the nation will be watching Lori Chavez-DeRemer as she moves through the confirmation process," said Pringle, "and hope to hear a pledge from her to continue to stand up for workers and students as her record suggests, not blind loyalty to the Project 2025 agenda."
American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten called Chavez-DeRemer's selection "significant," given that "her record suggests real support of workers and their right to unionize."
"I hope it means the Trump [administration] will actually respect collective bargaining and workers' voices from Teamsters to teachers," Weingarten added, referring to the International Brotherhood of Teamsters.
The Teamsters notably declined to endorse in the U.S. presidential contest after the group's general president, Sean O'Brien was widely criticized by labor advocates including his predecessor for speaking at the Republican National Convention. O'Brien lobbied Trump to choose Chavez-DeRemer and welcomed the Friday development on social media, posting a photo of himself with the pair and thanking the president-elect "for putting American workers first."
"Nearly a year ago, you joined us for a Teamsters roundtable and pledged to listen to workers and find common ground to protect and respect labor in America," O'Brien wrote. "You put words into action. Now let's grow wages and improve working conditions nationwide. Congratulations to Lori Chavez-DeRemer on your nomination! North America's strongest union is ready to work with you every step of the way to expand good union jobs and rebuild our nation's middle class. Let's get to work!"
Washington Post labor reporter Lauren Kaori Gurleydescribed Trump's decision as "a coup for the Teamsters" and New York Times labor reporter Noam Scheiber called it "a bona fide win" for the union, though he added that "the way you'll know if they have substantive influence or mostly cosmetic influence is if Trump's NLRB continues pressuring Amazon to bargain with unionized workers and drivers, who the Teamsters represent."
Meanwhile, Labor Notes staff writer Luis Feliz Leon said: "Lori Chavez-DeRemer for labor secretary isn't a win for the labor movement. The PRO Act is dead. Unlike the Democrats, the Republicans have party discipline. What's noteworthy: Teamsters president Sean O'Brien and Donald Trump are effectively dividing the labor movement."
Some right-wing leaders and groups have already expressed disapproval of Trump's nominee, a sign that she may need some Democratic support to get confirmed by the Senate—if the president-elect doesn't pursue recess appointments.
Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), who serves as Senate Appropriations Committee chair and president pro tempore until Republicans take over in January, said Friday that "Americans deserve a labor secretary who understands that building a stronger economy means standing up for workers, not billionaires and giant corporations."
"We need a labor secretary who will protect workers' rights, help ensure everyone can have a secure retirement, make sure every worker gets paid the full paycheck they've earned, and that all workers are treated with dignity and respect. And as an original author of the PRO Act, I'm glad to see Rep. Chavez-DeRemer is a co-sponsor," she continued. "I look forward to carefully evaluating Rep. Chavez-DeRemer's qualifications leading up to her hearing and a thorough vetting process."
In a statement announcing the nominee, Trump said: "Lori has worked tirelessly with both Business and Labor to build America's workforce, and support the hardworking men and women of America. I look forward to working with her to create tremendous opportunity for American Workers, to expand Training and Apprenticeships, to grow wages and improve working conditions, to bring back our Manufacturing jobs."
"Together, we will achieve historic cooperation between Business and Labor that will restore the American Dream for Working Families," he added. "Lori's strong support from both the Business and Labor communities will ensure that the Labor Department can unite Americans of all backgrounds behind our Agenda for unprecedented National Success—Making America Richer, Wealthier, Stronger, and more Prosperous than ever before!"
Other key picks announced Friday included former Office of Budget and Management Director Russ Vought, a Project 2025 architect, to return as the agency's leader, and ex-professional football player Scott Turner of the Trump-allied America First Policy Institute to helm the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
Trump also chose billionaire hedge fund manager
Scott Bessent, who supports his tariff plan, to run the U.S. Treasury Department. That followed the president-elect naming billionaire Wall Street CEO Howard Lutnick as his nominee for commerce secretary, meaning he will lead tariff and trade policy.
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The View From Mount Trump
Looking over his gigantic domain astride the country and soon the world, Trump can recount the pillars of his elected dictatorship.
Nov 23, 2024
Let’s look at the political scene from Trump’s viewpoint.
Sitting in his luxurious Mar-a-Lago palace receiving the daily obeisant supplicants eager to heed his every word and praise exuberantly his megalomania, Donald J. Trump can hardly believe his good fortune.
Starting in the 2015 presidential race against 16 GOP primary opponents, Trump’s vituperative attacks were unleashed. Never in American history have words from a politician’s mouth ever metastasized into such unchallenged electoral victory and domination. His daily, hourly bullying verbal abuses flooded THE MASS MEDIA, which faithfully transmitted to tens of millions of people like clockwork—lying or false statements and tweets in the tens of thousands.
Looking over his gigantic domain astride the country and soon the world, Trump can recount the pillars of his elected dictatorship.
The Supreme Court in their impeachable June 2024 unconstitutional decision (Trump v. United States) has decreed that the president’s “official conduct” (undefined) is immune from criminal prosecution for whatever they do. This 6-3 decision already fortifies Trump’s previous determination notoriously declared in July 2019 when he exclaimed, “Then, I have an Article II, where I have the right to do whatever I want as president.” And he did just that, violating with impunity federal criminal statutes (See the December 18, 2019, Congressional Record, H-12197), violating the Constitution, defying over 125 congressional subpoenas, and according to John Bolton, his national security adviser, making “obstruction of justice a daily practice in the White House.”
Who is going to challenge him? He believes correctly that it will not be the Supreme Court or Congress.
Second, Trump has control of Congress with the Republican majority in the House and Senate, however narrow. Congress is thus far showing no sign of resisting his demands for utter submission. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) has already signaled this abdication of his constitutional duty for checks and balances. Senate Majority Leader Senator John Thune (R-S.D.) is more circumspect. However mindful he is of the Senate’s constitutional duty of “advice and consent” regarding Trump’s nominees, Thune has to worry about being overthrown and replaced at any time as Senate majority leader by hovering Trump loyalists.
Trump wants the Senate to declare a recess for more than 10 days to get his team of Cabinet and agency nominees appointed without the usual confirmation hearings. This is an extreme demand. As constitutional law specialist, Bruce Fein asserts: “Such contrived recesses serve no legitimate constitutional purpose. That would make such official acts voidable,” i.e., unenforceable.
This illegal escape hatch for Trump is unlikely to materialize for some of his nominees whom the Senate majority will want to reject. Why? Because, for example, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s nomination for secretary of health and human services will be vigorously opposed by Big Pharma, the Big Food processors, the health insurance giants, and the Big Global Warming Polluters (fossil fuels) industries whom he has long criticized and sued when he was an effective environmental lawyer. He doesn’t have much support from Democratic senators due to his statements about vaccines and their side effects. Guessing, I expect the Senate will turn him down following a conventional nomination hearing.
The military-industrial giants will oppose Tulsi Gabbard as Trump’s director of national intelligence. She is seen as too extreme a critic, too inexperienced, and likely not to “get along by going along” with the entrenched national intelligence agencies like the CIA and NSA.
Trump’s choice for secretary of defense, Fox News host Pete Hegseth, a veteran, with no managerial experience, has made harsh statements about military leadership, women, and Muslims. He evinces wanting to go on a vengeance kick and not on a mission to do what Trump has campaigned for, which is ending “endless wars.” The 47 Democratic senators are likely to be joined by enough Republican senators to block his nomination.
Trump’s choice of Chris Wright, head of a fracking company and a climate-denier, as secretary of energy, will get the full backing of the oil, gas, and coal industries leading to an affirmative vote in the Senate.
None of these problems bother Trump. Just as was the case with former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), who was forced by disclosures, regarding his sexual aggressions and other negatives, to take himself out of the running nomination for attorney general, Trump will find plenty of replacements willing to run a Justice Department which lets him do whatever he wants with impunity.
At the end of the day, what matters to Trump is getting what he wants. He is warranted in such confidence. Who is going to challenge him? He believes correctly that it will not be the Supreme Court or Congress. The state legislatures will be on the defensive due to his willingness to cut grants and federal contracts to the states, including critical Medicaid services for millions of needy Americans, along with other traditional social safety net programs.
The labor unions, worrying about a third of their membership being Trumpsters, among other inhibitions (See, Election Day Delirium by Chris Townsend), are not much of a factor, as they have tethered themselves (with few exceptions) to the Democratic Party bureaucracy. The citizen groups will file their lawsuits and wait for the expected court delays that spell “Justice delayed is justice denied.”
As for the mainstream media CEOs, Trump knows they want higher ratings and more readers so he has given them daily fodder for outrageous epithets, falsehoods, braggadocios, and empty promises. In return, media outlets have faithfully published his crazed bloviations. The media has also reported his many corruptions, lies, ignorance of facts, bigotry, sexual escapades, and indictments —to no avail. The MAGA crowd just gets bigger. All the exposés, helped by blunders of prosecutors and partisan Trump judges, have fallen off Teflon Trump like water off a duck’s back.
He has procrastinated releasing his full medical history, contrary to his promises in 2016, 2020, and 2024. He has also resisted releasing his tax returns. He now has not complied with ethical reports during the transition from President Joe Biden’s regime to his regime. Der Fuhrer Trump believes the rules that his presidential peers have followed do not apply to him.
There is a little light at the end of the tunnel. Democratic state attorneys general will sue and block some of Trump’s violative decisions. Some state prosecutors will go after the burgeoning corruption of Trump’s nominees and their corporate collaborators eager to raid the honey pots of Uncle Sam.
The biggest risk to Trump’s domination will be Trump himself and what damage he will be unleashing that workers, consumers, and communities, even those who voted for him, will feel intensely.
But the biggest risk to Trump’s domination will be Trump himself and what damage he will be unleashing that workers, consumers, and communities, even those who voted for him, will feel intensely. The assault on their health, safety, and economic well-being may weaken Trump’s support. Once people start thinking that MAGA is really MABA (Make America Betrayed Again), the polls should start sliding propitiously from the sky-high expectations of the Paradise that Trump promised every campaign day.
At his core, Trump is not all that much different than his worst predecessors. He continued several Bush/Obama wars overseas in his first term, intensifying his backing of war criminal Bibi Netanyahu. He later swallowed his campaign criticism of price-gouging drug companies. And of course, he loves Wall Street, Houston, (the fossil fuel giants), the corporate welfarists, tax escapes of corporate crooks, those who cheat consumers and crush workers’ rights. Remember that is the way he behaved during his former failed business exploits. Nobody stopped him then and he believes the stars of his destiny will not let anyone stop him now.
Trump is at his core a corporatist and a corporate statist, who pushes bloated military budgets, lawlessness, and police powers, all of which are the frameworks of American fascism.
Buckle your seat belts people, and start the civic resurgence. (See my piece, Rise Up: Congress is Yours for the Taking in the new issue of the Capitol Hill Citizen).
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From Taxing the Rich to Defending Unions, the Best Defense Against Trump Will Be Offense
The super rich who backed the Republican president-elect must think they have us exactly where they want us. Now is the best time to turn the tables.
Nov 15, 2024
With Donald Trump about to re-enter the White House and his sidekicks about to assume control over Congress, America’s progressives are once again shifting — to playing defense. But the best defense, as one old football adage suggests, almost always turns out to be a good offense.
In the coming Trump redux, can we progressives take that adage to heart? Dare we go on offense and maybe even snatch a victory or two? We certainly can — if we start pushing for what the vast majority of Americans so want to see: an America where the really rich don’t run the show.
How much our richest run that show has never been more obvious. Campaign spending figures help tell that story.
Back at the beginning of our 21st century, out-of-state contributions to House and Senate races, be they from political action committees or individuals, funneled about the same amount of cash to candidates as in-state donors. These PACs and individuals faced strict limits on how much they could contribute politically. PACs, for their part, could accept no more than $5,000 from individuals each year and give no more than $5,000 directly to a candidate in each election cycle.
Enter the Super PAC. In 2010, the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision essentially gave America’s wealthiest and the corporations they run free rein to spend as much as they want to boost the candidates they find most appealing. This green light for what became known as “Super PACs” gave America’s richest the legal capacity to cement in place a new and “improved” plutocracy.
Dare we go on offense and maybe even snatch a victory or two? We certainly can — if we start pushing for what the vast majority of Americans so want to see: an America where the really rich don’t run the show.
In the 2024 election cycle alone, former AFL-CIO political director Michael Podhorzer points out, Super PACs and related groups have spent seven times more on the candidates they support than those candidates have raised “from individuals in their own states.”
And that spending is coming overwhelmingly from the richest of America’s rich. In this year’s presidential race, according to the latest pre-election stats available, some 60 percent of all outlays on Donald Trump’s behalf were coming from the Super PAC universe, and 90 percent of that universe’s spending, Michael Podhorzer adds, was coming from the top donor 1 percent.
Just who from the ranks of our super rich are doing all this spending? We don’t exactly know for sure. Spending by outside contributors this election cycle, researchers from the campaign funding watchdog OpenSecrets reported on Election Day, hit an all-time record $4.5 billion, “with more than half of that spending coming from groups that do not fully disclose the source of their funding.”
America’s wealthiest “have always weighed in on politics,” as the business journal Forbes understatedly noted the day after Election Day, but their capacity to make a difference has significantly “ramped up.” These wealthy “can now make unlimited donations,” and those donations without limits have been making each election “more expensive than the last.”
And billionaires like things that way. Exulted crypto billionaire Tyler Winklevoss just after Trump’s triumph: “We are on the brink of a new American Renaissance.”
But billionaires today have an electoral influence that goes far beyond their hefty campaign contributions. In today’s social media environment, these rich can speak directly to potential voters. Between October 1 and Election Day, a Forbes analysis shows, America’s 200 richest billionaires posted over 2,000 comments on this year’s elections. Those comments gained over 10 billion reads.
And where did we end up, after all this billionaire spending and speaking out? We ended up with an exasperated electorate. Voter turnout in 2024, the political scientist Peter Dreier points out, ended up down more than 16 million votes, with Trump pulling over 2 million fewer ballots than in 2020 and Kamala Harris collecting over 14 million fewer than Joe Biden pocketed in 2020.
That turnout for the Democrats, Dreier argues, reflects the continuing weakness of America’s labor movement, despite the isolated labor organizing triumphs of recent years. Back in the mid-20th century, unions represented over a third of all U.S. private-sector workers. Last year, only 6 percent of private sector workers carried union cards.
If today’s union membership rate stood at a mere 20 percent of all workers, Dreier contends, “Harris would have won” because unions would have been able to reach more working people directly — including those “who might be gun owners or evangelical Christians” — “about why to vote” for pro-worker candidates.
Three generations ago, in mid-20th century America, high unionization rates kept in place World War II’s high federal tax rates on the nation’s highest incomes, rates that would run over 90 percent on top-bracket income throughout the 1950s. That twofer of a strong labor movement and high taxes on our nation’s richest would go on to nurture a political climate open to greater equality in every sphere.
Today’s richest, by contrast, pay taxes at rates that amount to a tiny fraction of what they pocket, and vast swatches of the American economy have essentially no union presence at all. Trump and his deep-pocketed pals can flourish and thrive in this environment. The task for the rest of us: to change it.
Can we win that fight? We can. Just look at the numbers.
Earlier this year, polling found that 71 percent of all likely voters — and even 53 percent of self-described Republicans — think billionaires should be paying more in taxes. Over two-thirds of the American people, Gallup reports, see themselves as union supporters. Even more Americans — 80 percent — favor higher taxes on corporations with CEOs who make over 50 times what their workers make. Top CEOs today averagehundreds of times what their workers earn.
Our super rich are now celebrating what they see as a glorious future. Let’s put them on the defensive.
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