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Though Republican President-elect Donald Trump has often been vague about his legislative goals, one recent speech and the 2016 Republican platform offer clues about specific worker policies Trump and the GOP plan to pursue when they take complete control of the executive and legislative branches this coming January.
While Trump drew union voters with his stand against job-losing so-called “free trade” pacts – racking up half or more of the union votes in the key swing states of Ohio, Michigan and Pennsylvania on Nov. 8 – his other policies are another matter.
In particular, in a speech in Gettysburg, Pa., late in the campaign, he laid out an agenda that may give his supporters among workers pause. Ditto the Republican platform, adopted at the GOP convention in Cleveland:
In the speech, Trump said he would impose “a hiring freeze on all federal employees to reduce the federal workforce through attrition, exempting the military, public safety and public health.” The platform pledges to reverse the Obama administration’s decision to let the nation’s 45,000 airport screeners, formally Transportation Security Officers, unionize. The screeners are currently represented by the American Federation of Government Employees.
Trump pledged to “cancel every unconstitutional executive action, memorandum and order issued by President Obama.” That could mean cancellation of Obama’s order mandating a higher minimum wage for employees working for federal contractors and his order expanding eligibility for overtime pay to millions of private sector workers.
Trump pledged to spend public money on private and religious schools. He said that within his first 100 days in office, he would propose a “School Choice And Education Opportunity Act” which “redirects education dollars to give parents the right to send their kid to the public, private, charter, magnet, religious or home school of their choice.”
Trump declared he would “lift the Obama-Clinton roadblocks and allow vital energy infrastructure projects, like the Keystone Pipeline, to move forward” and would “cancel billions in payments to U.N. climate change programs and use the money to fix America’s water and environmental infrastructure.”
While supporting greater spending on infrastructure, the GOP platform would ban project labor agreements, a tool used by local governments, responsible contractors and unions to promote quality construction done on time and on budget. The platform opposes prevailing wage laws, which provide a floor under wages for publicly funded projects.
The Republican platform supports a national right-to-work law, which would weaken unions by allowing people to enjoy the benefits of a union contract without having to pay dues. The platform also attacks the National Labor Relations Board, the federal agency charged with enforcement of the nation’s labor laws.
On trade, Trump announced he would oppose the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement and seek to re-negotiate NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement that went into effect in 1994.