by Rob Callahan
Looking back on the past year, I’m reminded of a maxim commonly (apocryphally?) attributed to Lenin: “There are decades where nothing happens; 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 Heritage 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 recapture the presidency. Although candidate Trump repeatedly disavowed it during his 2024 campaign, many of the actions President 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 administration 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 continue 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, for instance, or the backing of a ballot proposition. This very column could be plausibly deemed such a “left-wing culture-war issue.” And Project 2025’s proposed right to sue would effectively create a heckler’s veto, rendering unions legally liable for any conduct that could broadly be construed as “political,” should any one individual member disapprove. The provision would, in short, prevent union participation in the political arena.
The Editors Guild has long been a deliberately apolitical union. Many labor unions regularly charge into the political scrum to advance their members’ interests in matters of public policy, but our local has generally sat on the sidelines. Political topics can be contentious, disputes over them divisive. Our leadership has historically opted to maintain a narrow institutional focus on matters directly relevant to collective bargaining, avoiding the fray of politics. Our parent union, the IATSE, will sometimes adopt public positions on political or “culture-war” issues, but we’ve usually ceded such concerns to the International. Indeed, if Project 2025’s proposal permitting members to sue their unions over political differences of opinion were to have been the law in past years, even the most MAGA of our Local 700 members would not have had much cause for complaint with our Guild.
Notwithstanding objections from a few naysayers, that’s starting to change. It’s becoming increasingly obvious to Local 700 members that a lot of our employment-related issues — like the proliferation of artificial intelligence or the decline in domestic film and TV production — demand public policy solutions; they can’t be addressed in contract negotiations alone. Moreover, our union isn’t made up of people who are defined entirely by employment; we’re also parents, siblings, caregivers, community members, and citizens, folks who share in the societal interest in a just and healthy democracy.
In 2024, recognizing that we have a stake in politics, we began to mobilize member-volunteers to assist with the campaigns of labor-endorsed candidates. We understood it was critical to try to forestall an administration and Congress that would prove historically hostile to workers’ rights. Then, early in 2025, we took an active role in the coalition of IATSE locals and other entertainment unions lobbying hard for enhanced production incentives in California. Local 700 members wrote to their legislators to press the issue, and some even travelled to Sacramento. Together with our union kin from other locals, we won legislation revamping California production incentives, and the effort has begun to pay off as the improved incentives drive an uptick in employment.
On the heels of that win, this past summer, our board of directors voted to form a Political Engagement Committee so that we have an enduring structure with a responsibility to marshal support — in the form of volunteers, votes, and lobbying — for pro-labor candidates and causes. Last fall, the committee mobilized volunteers and votes to help pass California’s Proposition 50, a measure intended to counter Trump’s election-rigging so that voters have a chance to elect representatives who won’t reflexively rubber-stamp his administration’s agenda.
The committee is also signing up members for the IATSE Political Action Committee in order to wield influence in support of the interests of entertainment-industry workers. Historically, very few Local 700 members have contributed to the PAC, but we’re changing that. At the last IATSE General Executive Board meeting, our Guild was recognized for the first time as a leading local in PAC participation.
2026 is going to be a pivotal year. In his first year in office, Trump seized complete control of the executive branch. The legislative and judicial branches — constitutionally intended to balance power — have done effectively nothing to check his monarchical rule. But Trump’s policies — whether it be his union-busting, his capricious trade wars, his military adventurism abroad, or his squads of goons in gaiters unleashed upon city streets — are profoundly unpopular. The midterm elections, if free and fair, offer voters an opportunity to curb his power. Our Guild will be part of that effort; our union’s very survival, and much else, may very well depend on the outcome.
Labor’s struggles on behalf of democracy, though, cannot begin and end at the ballot box. Voting is necessary, not sufficient. If one major party has come to be unabashed in its antipathy to organized labor, we must acknowledge that the other has been at best an inconstant champion. Political action isn’t simply about electing the politicians less hostile to our interests, but also about holding those in power accountable, and about exercising collective power to change the parameters of what’s politically possible.
In Minnesota last month, unions came together with community organizations and faith leaders to call for a day of “No work, no school, no shopping” to protest the mayhem the Trump administration brought upon the state. Tens of thousands walked away from their jobs and into the bitterly cold streets in what amounted to the first significant U.S. general strike since the 1940s. The action didn’t result in the strikers’ list of demands being satisfied. Indeed, only days later we would all witness union member Alex Pretti being shot down by masked agents. But someday, when the story of how we defeated this regime is at last told, I trust that we will remember as pivotal that winter day when a community coalesced in solidarity to show that they would not be cowed by thugs.
Unions are intrinsically anti-authoritarian organizations. The purpose of a union is to bring democracy to the workplace, a realm where otherwise bosses exercise the power of dictators. And unions understand that democracy in the workplace cannot survive the death of democracy at large. Although our numbers in the greater labor movement have been diminishing for decades, organized labor is still the only broad-based, multiracial, multicultural movement of working folks wielding solidarity to counter the power of corporations and oligarchs. If we’re to build upon the defiant solidarity we saw in Minnesota, unions will need to play a key role in the coalition. It’s no surprise that right-wing politicians and the billionaires they serve want us weakened, or, better yet, eliminated.
As our local takes on a greater role in the public sphere, some of our members will not agree with all — or, in some cases, even any — of the stances our union takes. That’s OK. A healthy union needs to brook debate and dissent. But when individual members object to the union’s taking a political position and insist that the organization instead ought to stick strictly to “union business,” they need to realize that democracy and justice are, in fact, central, not incidental, to union business.
It’s not incumbent upon our little local or even our international union to figure out how to defeat authoritarianism. But it is imperative that we join with our union kin and with allied organizations in a popular front to preserve democracy in the workplace and in society at large. Despots, oligarchs, and their enablers all want us out of the way. But they’re not going to find us sitting out this fight.
