Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1543164
14 C I N E M O N T A G E R O B C A L L A H A N WHY WE FIGHT GOVERNMENT ACTIONS COULD SPELL BIG TROUBLE FOR ORGANIZED LABOR Rob Callahan. L ooking back on the past year, I'm re m i n d e d o f a m a x i m c o m m o n l y (apocryphally?) attributed to Lenin: "There are decades where nothing hap- pens; and there are weeks where decades happen." 2025 seemed to contain 52 such weeks. And so far, 2026 offers yet more of the same. Last year began with the horrific blazes in Los Angeles that left tens of thousands suffering, some — including many of our union kin — losing everything. It extended the entertainment industry stagnation that continues to tax everyone struggling to eke out a living in this business. It further eroded our purchasing power as consumer prices remained on the rise. It brought from abroad heartrending images of the devastation and misery wrought by brutal wars. And domestically, it shook us with a relentless series of affronts and outrages as our politics pulled us ever deeper into authoritarian rule. This incessant barrage of news can make it difficult to recall what happened two weeks ago, never mind what happened all the way back in 2024. But you might recall a document published that year by the Her- itage Foundation, a right-wing think-tank, titled Project 2025. The 920-page volume laid out a wishlist of ultra-conservative policy proposals to serve as a blueprint for governance if the right wing were to recap- ture the presidency. Although candidate Trump repeatedly disavowed it during his 2024 campaign, many of the actions Presi- dent Trump's administration took last year were lifted directly from the Project 2025 playbook. By one expert estimate, in fact, Trump has already accomplished roughly half of the objectives laid out in the Heritage Foundation's ambitious agenda. This column was initially conceived of as an examination of the various labor-related initiatives in Project 2025. I'd intended to recap some of the ways the Trump admin- istration attacked the labor movement in its first year, and also to predict some of the assaults unions can anticipate in the second. But as I write this, screens all over the country continue to play on an endless, agonizing loop the frame-by-frame slo-mo cellphone footage of good Samaritans (one of them a member of AFGE Local 3669) suffering extrajudicial execution at the hands of masked secret police on the streets of Minneapolis. Our neighbors continue to be abducted by squads of ethnonationalist goons bedecked in paramilitary gear. The so-called leader of the free world continues to bray about nakedly imperial conquest. The regime continues to tell us to reject the evidence of our eyes and ears. One could go on. And on. And a fresh batch of outlandish offenses will no doubt be added to the ever-growing inventory before this column sees print. In the face of a voluminous catalog of atrocities — or to put it bluntly, of fascism — a narrow focus strictly on Project 2025's proposals for the Department of Labor and the National Labor Relations Board seems inexcusably small ball. Therefore, I'm not going to get into detail here about how Trump, with merely a few strokes of his Sharpie, stripped more than a million federal workers, roughly 7% of the entire U.S. labor movement, of their collective bargaining rights in 2025. I won't describe how Trump violated the explicit letter of federal labor law to incapacitate the National Labor Relations Board for eleven months of last year. I won't get into the specifics of how his remaining Project 2025 to-do list includes a prohibition on all routes to unionization other than secret ballot elections — a prohibition that would render impermissible the pathways the IATSE typically takes to organize non-union jobs. If you'll pardon my apophasis, I'll gloss over the nitty and the gritty of the myriad ways Trump has undermined and will con- tinue to undermine the ability of workers to come together in union to win a better quality of life. I would, though, like to remark upon one particular element, yet to be addressed, of Project 2025's labor agenda. It's one easily overlooked in the document's chapter full of anti-union initiatives, but it's potentially of momentous consequence. Project 2025, on page 600, calls for allowing members who have "political conflicts of interest" with their union's "use [of ] member resources on left-wing culture-war issues" to sue the union for a breach of its legal duty of fair representation. Presumably, a "left-wing culture-war issue" that could trigger such legal action would be any stance, activity, or advocacy with which an individual member disagrees — the formation of a diversity committee,