A youngster holds up a pro-union sign at Laborfest in Milwaukee on Labor Day, Sept. 2, 2024. Both presidential nominees are trying to appeal to union members. (Erik Gunn/Wisconsin Examiner)
Ross Thomas was in a Pennsylvania Department of Transportation truck, idling on the shoulder of a highway, when a car drifted from its lane and slammed into it. Fortunately, no one was hurt in the December crash. That’s because Thomas, an equipment operator for the department, was in a so-called “safety truck,” with an attenuator that absorbed the impact.
Thomas walked away. But he views the crash as a stark reminder of the dangers of his job — and what he could stand to lose if his state government employer had the power to compromise on worker safety.
Thomas is a member of Local 3033 of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, which represents operators, mechanics and inspectors of the department in Harrisburg’s Dauphin County. He is particularly concerned about how a Donald Trump presidency may threaten his safety at work. Trump allies, he told Capital & Main, “want to dismantle union protections.” (Disclosure: AFSCME is a financial supporter of Capital & Main.)
Thomas pointed to Project 2025, the lengthy playbook for a second Trump term (“900 pages of pure terror,” Thomas said), published by the conservative Heritage Foundation. Trump has distanced himself from the plan written by those close to him in light of widespread public opposition; still, the proposals are similar to many of Trump’s own. And both Trump and Project 2025 have explicitly challenged public sector unions.
Capital & Main spoke to Thomas at AFSCME’s statewide headquarters in Harrisburg, where a large plaque is visible on the opposite wall. It’s a memorial: Dozens of gold plates are engraved with the names of state Department of Transportation workers who have died while on duty.
Ross Thomas at the AFSCME Council 13 Headquarters in Harrisburg. (Photo by Kalena Thomhave for Capital and Main).
Nearly half of Pennsylvania’s 750,000 union members — 350,000 workers — are public employees like Thomas. In light of Project 2025’s proposals to weaken or even eliminate public sector unions, AFSCME — the largest union of public service workers in Pennsylvania and nationwide — is mobilizing its members to campaign for Democratic candidate Vice President Kamala Harris in the battleground state.
The stakes are high, as many public sector workers count on their unions to negotiate not just for pay and benefits — in 2023, AFSCME state workers in Pennsylvania won 22% wage increases over four years — but also for safe working conditions.
Dian Roy Smith, a member of AFSCME Local 1981, is concerned that Trump wants to “get rid of AFSCME altogether,” she said.
Roy Smith has worked as a field agent for the Pennsylvania Department of Revenue for 35 years and is just two years away from retirement. “He [might] prevent me from getting my retirement that I worked for,” she said.
She said that Project 2025 questions the value of public sector unions, pointing to a statement on page 82 of the report that said, “Congress should also consider whether public-sector unions are appropriate in the first place.”
Public sector union members include more than just civil servants — they also include workers such as firefighters, police officers and teachers. But more than 65,000 Pennsylvania union members belong to AFSCME, which mostly represents state workers such as Roy Smith, as well as those in local government.
The proposals in Project 2025 that threaten her union were partly what motivated Roy Smith to take a leave of absence from her job to canvass for Harris, even though it will delay her long-awaited retirement.
She’s part of a massive AFSCME campaign to get out the vote among members. So far this election cycle, AFSCME’s political action committee is a top spender among labor unions on independent communications campaigns — such as extensive mail programs or social media and TV ads — either for Harris or against Trump. It’s also spent more than other unions on its own internal election communications to sway members.
Project 2025 is a major talking point for AFSCME in general. The union has worked to educate its members and canvassers on the plan, even setting up a website about it.
The tenets of Project 2025 serve as persuasive canvassing information to union members. Roy Smith recalled discussing Project 2025 with an AFSCME member who was an ardent Trump supporter but had concerns about losing his overtime pay. She explained how the plan suggested limiting access to overtime for millions of workers. According to Roy Smith, the member ended up telling her, “I guess I should reconsider how I’m going to vote this year.”
Trump has repeatedly tried to distance himself from the blueprint written by some of his former advisers, but in 2022 he said in a speech to The Heritage Foundation that the group’s policy proposals would “lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do.”
And if the plans come to fruition, union rights would likely be in the crosshairs, as would the safety protections unions often negotiate, union advocates argued.
“Unions, especially through collective bargaining, act as a safeguard against [management] decisions that would favor efficiency over safety,” said Dominic D. Wells, associate professor of political science at Bowling Green State University. Research — including his own — bears this out, he said. Wells found that where unions are strong, there are fewer fatalities among firefighters and police officers. Wells added that union decline has led to increased workplace fatalities in right-to-work states.
Thomas worried that, without a union to negotiate with his employer, the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation could save money and manpower by limiting the use of safety trucks, like the one that saved his life.
Even Roy Smith is concerned about safety on the job, since she travels across the state writing citations to businesses that have failed to pay taxes. Her union local negotiated with the Department of Revenue for self-defense classes for workers, which Roy Smith found helpful.
Campaigns against public sector unions are not new. Republicans have often argued against unions in the public sector, saying that they lead to inefficiencies in government and increased spending.
That’s in part why AFSCME is a heavy hitter in electoral politics, almost always supporting Democrats, which is another reason Republicans are concerned about union power. Since 1990, the national organization has contributed more than $175 million to federal campaigns, the 12th most of any organization.
But it’s not just financial resources that AFSCME pours into political work. The scale of the perceived threat of Project 2025 has AFSCME members recommitting themselves to the defensive organizing strategy that the union developed in response to the gutting of public sector unions in Wisconsin in 2011 and the wider right-wing movement against public sector labor unions that followed.
In 2015, the union launched AFSCME Strong, a program aimed at turning members into organizers by encouraging them to talk regularly one-on-one with coworkers about their experiences on the job. The strategy, a form of internal organizing to strengthen the union itself, became more urgent when the Supreme Court restricted the ability of public sector unions to collect fees from nonmembers they represent in the 2018 Janus v. AFSCME ruling.
“It is more important to know how [workers] are doing at their workplace than focusing in on elections,” said Michael Maguire, legislative director of the statewide AFSCME Council 13, describing how the union combines political education with workplace-focused organizing. Conversations about job-related issues often lead to political discussions — as when Roy Smith spoke to the Trump supporter who expressed concern about access to overtime, which Project 2025 aims to weaken.
For its canvass in 2024, AFSCME is activating a subset of workers who already tend to be politically involved. Public sector workers not represented by a union are almost 40% more likely to vote than nonunion workers in the private sector — but a union public sector worker is twice as likely to vote than nonunion workers in the private sector, according to a 2020 study published in Sociological Forum. The result is a sizable electoral force that could help swing Pennsylvania, which Biden won in 2020 by just over 80,000 votes. And that could swing the 2024 election to the Democrats.
YOU MAKE OUR WORK POSSIBLE.