OPINION: Project 2025 threatens Alaska construction workers

Donald Trump has a plan for the construction industry: Eliminate overtime pay and slash wages by ending prevailing wages. Trump’s plan also would break our Registered Apprenticeship system by replacing high-quality training with “Industry Registered Apprenticeship Programs” that Trump tried and failed to institute in his first administration. Read it for yourself in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, which was written with the help of 140 Trump administration staffers.

The same radical special interests that fund the Heritage Foundation are pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into Donald Trump’s campaign. Their agenda is simple: Turn middle class construction careers into jobs with poverty wages. This is white-collar crime, and we should stand up and reject any effort by elitists to take wages out of the pockets of construction workers.

Ironically, dismantling the policy framework that sustains middle class construction employment would be destructive and disruptive for contractors of all sizes. The only way we sustain the construction workforce is with good wages, benefits, retirement programs, and strong apprenticeship systems. Eliminating overtime and dismantling prevailing wage laws would produce a short-term spike in profits for contractors at workers’ expense, but we’d all lose as the workforce falls apart and people stop entering an industry that no longer has family-supporting wages and benefits.

Donald Trump has never worked with his hands in his life, so I’m not surprised he doesn’t understand or care about apprenticeship training. As Alaskans, we all know friends or family who have trained in apprenticeship for construction, oil and gas jobs. Apprenticeship works, and it’s the key pipeline for hard-working blue collar young people to build a career and often work their way up into management. Trump’s IRAPs would tear apart the apprenticeship system that has worked well for 100 years, because his white-collar criminal friends want to raid federal workforce funding and subsidize fake apprenticeship programs like “sandwich apprenticeships.” This is a con, just like so many of Trump’s other proposals, and would take money from your pocket to subsidize multibillion-dollar multinational corporations.

Over the past century, we’ve built a win-win-win system for workers, contractors and the public. Workers earn middle class wages with health benefits and retirement following outstanding training in an apprenticeship system. Contractors reap the benefits of a skilled, productive workforce, which they jointly manage with labor unions. The public benefits from a training system that is privately funded and the roads, bridges and public buildings that are well-built in a timely and economical manner thanks to skilled workers.

Donald Trump’s Project 2025 would tear down this system, replacing middle-class American workers with an increasingly precarious system of low-wage and illegal immigrant workers, who’d be the only people taking such difficult and dangerous jobs for low pay. Trump’s billionaire buddies would profit in the short run, and we would all lose.

My family has worked in construction for generations, and I’m proud my son is on the job building Alaska today. I’m proud to have saved, provided great opportunities for my children, and be able to retire with dignity. I want the same opportunities for my children, so I’m a strong vote for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. They’re the only candidates who respect blue-collar workers, and the only candidates who will fight back against the short-sighted special interests that want to tear down our construction industry.

Mike Gallagher is a retired constitution laborer. He and his wife live on the Anchorage Hillside.

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