The labor movement recognizes that the new Congress and new administration pose both existential threats to workers’ rights and interests, as well as potential opportunities for the same.
An agenda known as Project 2025 was circulated before the November 2024 election and laid out a blueprint for the second Trump administration. That agenda is profoundly anti-worker and anti-union. While President Trump has disavowed Project 2025, he has appointed many of its architects to his second administration, and many of his earliest actions reflect that agenda.
Working people are tired of the rigged economic and political systems, which keep hardworking people from getting ahead and obstruct pro-worker policy change.
Working people have therefore increasingly taken matters into our own hands, organizing and joining unions and striking to win the lives we all deserve.
Politicians from both parties have taken notice of this profound anger, recognize its growing power and want to speak on behalf of the working class, even while they hand billionaires the keys to the government.
Working people are tired of being fed rhetoric and want action.
Over the course of this Congress and administration, with elected officials from both parties seeking to stand with working people, these leaders should understand that it is their actions—not just their words—that matter, and we will decide whether those actions are truly pro-worker based on the following questions:
- Do those actions promote, expand, and strengthen the right of all workers to organize free and independent labor unions and collectively bargain, and does the elected official defend workers whenever we seek to exercise those rights?
- Do those actions protect basic civil and human rights, including the right of workers to be free of discrimination in all its forms, to participate in economic, political, and social life, and to live and work with dignity, no matter where we are from or the color of our skin?
- Do those actions support tax policies that assure all parts of society pay their fair share and that reinforce working people’s ability to lead productive lives?
- Do those actions advance policies that create a level playing field for all workers and family-supporting jobs for our nation, with strong wage and hour, health and safety, and other labor standards, and that assure all workers have access to a decent standard of living, from birth to retirement, including access to health care, education, Social Security, and other critical government services and benefits?
- Do those actions adhere to constitutional principles and ensure a government that is responsive to the needs and demands of working people, including via the right to vote, the freedom of speech and association, adequately funded labor agencies to enforce our protections on the job, and a functioning, fully-staffed civil service committed to the U.S. Constitution and serving the American people?
To stand with the working people of this country means answering these questions in the affirmative with respect to actions, not just words.