Union Leaders Gear Up for the Long Struggle Ahead

This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

Maximillian Alvarez: Welcome, everyone, for a special installment of The Real News Network podcast, produced in collaboration with In These Times magazine. The Real News and In These Times are both founding members of the Movement Media Alliance. Follow the link in the show notes to learn more about the Movement Media Alliance, and please subscribe and donate to The Real News and to In These Times. We can’t keep doing this work without you.

My name is Maximillian Alvarez. I’m the editor-in-chief here at The Real News, and it’s so great to have you all with us. Donald Trump is headed back to the White House in two months. Now that the GOP has won a majority in the House of Representatives, the fully magnified Republican party will effectively control all three branches of government, the executive, the legislature, and the judiciary. 

So what room does that leave for organized labor to affect policy in the coming years? And is the very existence of organized labor in this country at risk? Today we’re going to discuss what a second Trump administration will mean for unions and for the labor movement writ large. Looking back at the first Trump administration and looking at the political appointments Trump is already making for his second administration, what should we be preparing for when it comes to workers’ rights on the job, the right to organize, the makeup and functions of the National Labor Relations Board and the general living standards and working conditions for working-class people around the country? 

And what about the Democrats? Outgoing President Joe Biden famously said he was going to be ​“the most pro-Union president in American history, and I make no apologies for it.” So was that true? And even if it was true, has the uptick in pro-union rhetoric from Democrats in recent years actually corresponded to concrete policies that put working people, union and non-union, first? 

Is it time for a labor party in the United States? And will it be possible for that to be anything more than a pipe dream, as we confront the realities of a Republican trifecta and an entrenched Democrat-Republican duopoly? In a statement released after Trump’s electoral victory over Vice President Kamala Harris, Jimmy Williams, general president of the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades stated plainly and powerfully: 

“Working people deserve a party that understands what’s at stake and that puts their issues front and center when campaigning and governing. A potential Republican trifecta, along with Project 2025, will be catastrophic for unions including my own. But if the Democrats want to win, they need to get serious about being a party by and for the working class.”

So for In These Times magazine and The Real News Network, I’m honored to be joined now by none other than Jimmy Williams himself. Jimmy, thank you so much for joining us today. I really appreciate it.

Jimmy Williams: Yeah, and thanks for having me too. I appreciate it as well. 

Alvarez: Well, we need your voice now and we need to get folks’ heads and hearts right for the fight ahead. I’m really grateful to you for making time for this. So let’s dig in here. I know we only have a little bit of time with you. I want to start by talking concretely about what a second Trump administration will mean for labor, and for you and your union specifically. So can you tell our audience a bit about your union, your members, and what you guys are preparing for with Trump coming back to the White House and a Republican trifecta controlling the federal government? 

Williams: We’re primarily a construction union, but we also represent folks in the manufacturing sector. We also represent public employees around the country. We’re a pretty diverse union, but primarily a private sector construction union. In preparation for an incoming Trump administration a second time around, we’re going to see attacks on every front. We’re going to see it in the private sector through the NLRB. We’re going to see it in the Department of Labor through weakened standards when it comes to things like apprenticeship programs, prevailing wage and Davis-Bacon. We’re going to see it literally in everything we do. Oversight is not going to be there in the Department of Labor. So we’re preparing for an absolute all out attack on every level. You can’t take anything off the table with this group. Project 2025 laid out an absolute destructive path for labor unions, specifically public unions, but private unions as well. And so we’re just sitting here as wounded ducks. The attacks are coming and they’re going to come fast. 

Maximillian Alvarez: Can you say a little more about Project 2025? There’s been a lot of talk about this master plan, right? Trump himself on the campaign trail tried to distance himself from Project 2025, at least rhetorically, because it was deeply unpopular in the public sphere. But there’s a lot in Project 2025 that appears like a corporate CEO’s wishlist for remaking American society to be the exploitable well of cheap labor with no rights that every boss wants. For folks who are afraid of Project 2025, but don’t know specifically what’s actually in there, is there anything specific in the plans laid out in Project 2025 that you want to stress for folks that are going to have deep implications for workers and for unions? 

Williams: The labor movement itself represents so many different industries, but it literally is going to be an attack on the federal employees, public employees first, stripping them of collective bargaining rights, limiting what you can and can’t negotiate. There are even things in there about setting up corporate-controlled unions to compete with the already existing unions. There’s the all-out call for repeal of Davis-Bacon and an absolute attack on the apprenticeship programs, allowing corporations and business to construct their own apprenticeship programs. All the guardrails that the labor movement has provided for working people for generations are on the chopping block. My father always told me, show me who you hang with and it’ll show me who you are. Donald Trump has surrounded himself with believers in this agenda, with the folks that wrote it, and he’s appointing people already in positions of power that believe in this approach to government. When somebody shows you who they are, you’ve got to believe them.

Alvarez: I think one thing that is really important to stress for folks listening to or reading this, is that we’re talking about labor policy and labor law specifically, and how that’s going to impact the labor movement and working people. But of course, so many other policy plans or stated intentions from the Trump administration, even if they are not focused on the National Labor Relations Board, are still going to have deep impacts on the lives and conditions of working people around the country. Including Trump’s most infamous campaign promise to wage the largest mass deportation operation in this country’s history.

Now, Jimmy, this as you know, is going to impact your industry a lot. When an industry does have a lot of undocumented workers in it, a lot of contract labor, non-union labor mixed in with union labor, when you have these harsh anti-immigrant policies like Ron DeSantis does in Florida, you’re going to end up with a lot of construction sites that are empty, or filled with folks who don’t know what they’re doing. So I wanted to just kind of get your perspective as an expert and a union leader in this industry. How is the attack on immigrants and these plans for mass deportations? How do you expect that to impact the construction industry as such?

Williams: It’s going to have dramatic impacts on our ability to organize. Both parties have gotten immigration wrong throughout the course of my time as an organizer. I’ve been in my role as president of the union for the last three years, but prior to that I was our organizing director. And I can tell you, under an Obama administration, under a Trump administration, under a Biden administration, and in the upcoming future, both parties have gotten it wrong. The workers that come here are being victimized, dehumanized. They have no path to organize, there are no rights in the workplace. And this idea that a mass deportation program is going to somehow solve the problem that this country has had for my entire lifetime and for two generations of preying upon immigrant workers, it’s just the wrong approach. And quite frankly, both parties have gotten it wrong. I cannot see any pathway where this is somehow going to be helpful for the construction industry and for union workers and union employers because workers are just going to go further and further into the shadows. They’re going to have less and less rights. We have members within our union, that have been members of our union for over a decade, that are going to now have the right stripped away and are going to be working under the fear of deportation. I mean, this is just the wrong approach to how this country should handle the working class, and it has been wrong for quite some time. 

Alvarez: I want to, in the few minutes we’ve got left, I want to zero in on what you’re saying about both parties getting this wrong, and circle back to your statement about what Democrats have gotten wrong in terms of serving a working-class base and building a class politics, a populist politics that could counter the corrupting impact of Donald Trump and the MAGA movement. But just to pick up on that last point of yours, I wanted to ask what role unions can and need to play in defending our fellow workers, especially undocumented folks, migrants, the most vulnerable in our midst and in our ranks. 

As you know, unions have not always been great on this issue. I mean, there are really encouraging signs from your union, from unions like the Laborers’ Local 79 up in New York, where construction and demolition union workers have been reaching out to non-union undocumented workers, workers who were formerly incarcerated. And instead of seeing these low-wage, exploitable workers as the enemy of union workers, they’re trying to bring them into the fold. They’re trying to organize ​‘em, defending their rights. So how do we keep our union brothers and sisters and our fellow workers out there from falling into the trap of seeing this attack on our fellow workers, particularly immigrants, as somehow beneficial for American-born union workers here? 

Williams: We have to continue to organize in their workplace, because if you stop, the labor movement can never turn its back on the working class regardless of what political landscape we live in. Secondly, in my opinion, we have to be able to tell the story in a much better fashion. Donald Trump has controlled the narrative that all immigrants that come to this country are here to commit crimes, take jobs away from you. All the fear and the things that were said during the last 10 years since he stepped into the political world, we have to push that back with the real narrative. Workers are here, they want to work, they need the rights to organize. And I think that’s where the Democratic party has missed it from the get-go. Trying to put together an approach that sounds like the Republicans only lighter? It doesn’t work for working people. And during this time, if the labor movement and if unions turn their back on the folks that are here working and want to work and don’t provide defensive comfort, defensive relief, then we’re going to miss it for generations. 

Alvarez: The last time you and I spoke was three years ago, when organized labor and its advocates and many within the Democratic party, were trying to pass the PRO Act, the Protecting the Right to Organize Act. I wanted to ask if we could use that as a springboard to talk about what Democrats could have been doing and should be doing more to really appeal to and serve a working-class base. What was the PRO Act, right? What would it have meant and how would it have changed people’s lives if it had actually become law? And why did it fail? Why didn’t Democrats kind of push it harder, or was it not fully up to them? 

Williams: Yeah, it wasn’t fully up to the Democratic slim majority in the Senate. You needed 60 votes in order to pass the PRO Act fully, and there’s zero Republican support for the PRO Act. So you can’t fully blame the Democratic Party for not being able to enact that law during Joe Biden’s time. But what you can blame the Democratic Party for is missing the tone. The Democratic Party has to be about movement-building. The story about how broken our labor laws are hasn’t been told by the Democratic Party. We get little crumbs on the edges here and there. And truthfully, what’s needed in this country is to organize a movement about giving workers more rights on the job. The PRO Act does that. It fixes 80 years of lost labor laws in this country. It fixes all the wrongs that have been done over the course of my lifetime and others. 

And that story needs to be told to the American public as a whole. People don’t realize that the basic rights they have right now in their workplace, let alone how difficult it is to organize your workplace in the wake of how screwed up our system is. Look, I can tell you just in the construction industry currently, the model that’s used in the non-union sector is to misclassify everybody as an independent subcontractor. Well, those workers don’t even have rights to organize a union in their workplace, because they’re being abused and victimized as self-employed independent contractors. The PRO Act fixed that. The PRO Act made elections and corporate interference illegal. Currently, if you wanted to organize your workplace, you have to go up against your boss in a way that is totally weighted towards management. It equaled the playing field to get to elections quicker, to get to bargaining quicker. Those are the things that workers need in this country. The Democratic Party has failed to tell that story to the 80% of the world that doesn’t come from a union household.

Alvarez: I know I’ve only got you for another minute or two. So by way of rounding out, I want to zero in on the last sentence of the statement that you put out after Trump won the general election. You said, as I read in the beginning, if the Democrats want to win, they need to get serious about being a party by and for the working class. The last election just sent a very big sign to all of us that they don’t want to do that. So I wanted to ask you, what would that look like? What should that look like? How do we get there, concretely? And for folks out there who are maybe just done with the Democratic Party, what role can they still play in advancing this movement through their unions and through other forms of engagement outside of the Democratic Party? 

Williams: I think that question is right in front of them, right now, as far as the party goes. Are you willing to allow the labor movement to set your economic agenda for the working class, or are you going to continue to try to woo over corporate interests and blend them with a message that somehow is supposed to help build out the working class? Because this last election was an absolute refusal to think that the Democratic Party actually works on behalf of the working class. Going forward, if the labor movement isn’t allowed to set the agenda for what the Democratic Party’s message is for working-class people, they’re going to continue to fail. They’re going to continue to lose. They need to really take it serious as they figure out how to rebuild a message that is going to be attractive to working-class people. Quite frankly, at this point, I don’t have much faith that the corporate interests that are still involved in the Democratic Party are going to cede that power either. That’s the fight ahead within the Democratic Party. The Labor movement needs to call balls and strikes, needs to be independent of either party, and needs to know when and how to engage in our electoral politics the right way. 

Alvarez: So that is General President of the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades, Jimmy Williams. We’ve been speaking with Jimmy for this special collaborative report by In These Times magazine and The Real News Network. Jimmy, thank you so much for joining us today. I really appreciate your time, and thank you again, brother, for all you’re doing for the movement. 

Williams: Thank you, my man. Take care. 

Alvarez: I want to thank Jimmy for joining us today for this important conversation. And as always, I want to thank you all for listening, and I want to thank you for caring. And one more time before you go, if you want to see more reporting like this from the front lines of struggle around the US and across the world, then we need you to become a supporter of The Real News Network and In These Times magazine. Now follow the links in the show notes and donate today. I promise you it really makes a difference for The Real News Network. This is Maximillian Alvarez signing off. Take care of yourselves, take care of each other, solidarity forever.