Jonathan P. Baird lives in Wilmot.

When it is election season, political parties typically pose to be seen as a friend to the working class. Nowhere is that more true than in the case of the Republican Party. No matter how anti-labor the party actually is, they will pretend to be on the side of the worker.

J.D. Vance, the vice presidential candidate, is a perfect incarnation of the Republicans’ seeming embrace of workers. Born into the working class, he expresses a degree of empathy for the hardships people experience. Vance claims to represent heartland values rather than those of coastal elites. He will talk a good game about how the ruling class has betrayed America’s workers.

But Vance has come a very long way from the Appalachia of Hillbilly Elegy, his memoir steeped in blaming poor people for their poverty. A Yale Law graduate, Vance ditched the working class for the big bucks available to those willing to do the bidding of tech billionaires like Peter Thiel, his patron. Thiel made Vance a viable U.S. Senate candidate in Ohio by dropping $10 million into his campaign. Without that $10 million, Vance would have been an also-ran, not a U.S. Senator.

Whatever his class origins, Vance now represents the political interests of the tech sector which hatched him. Money like that always has strings attached. That is why the billionaires around Trump lobbied so hard to make him the vice presidential choice. He is their man.

At the same time, Vance can point to a couple populist positions he has taken. He teamed up with Sen. Elizabeth Warren on legislation that would crack down on big banks and he joined with Sen. Sherrod Brown to introduce a Rail Safety Act after the train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio. He has voiced support for Lina Khan, the embattled FTC Chair who has been aggressively anti-trust but all these positions are not reflective of more than lip service. Vance has opposed the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act which would expand protections for workers seeking to unionize.

Scratching beneath the surface, the Republicans’ actual attitude toward labor, especially organized labor, remains hostile. As noted with Vance, Republicans do not look favorably on union organizing. Ever since President Reagan busted PATCO, the air traffic controllers’ union, in 1981, Republicans have been uniformly opposed to union organizing and have worked to make union successes a rare event. It is no accident that since the 1980s, the number of American workers in unions has dramatically declined.

There was no better indication that this has not changed than Donald Trump’s livestream discussion with Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, in August. Trump lavished praise on Musk for firing striking workers. Trump’s admiration for Musk’s anti-worker stance could not have been more palpable. They were both laughing it up about how great it was to fire strikers.

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After the interview, the UAW filed federal labor charges at the NLRB against Trump and Musk for threatening and intimidating workers. Under federal law, workers cannot be fired for going on strike and threatening to do so is illegal under the National Labor Relations Act.

While Trump has been desperately trying to distance himself from Project 2025 because he worries that the association will lose him votes, I think the Project remains a good source to look to as far as Republican plans for a second Trump administration. They have an extensive section on labor. It includes these points:

■Banning unions for public service workers

■Firing thousands of civil service workers and replacing them with pro-Trump anti-union loyalists

■Letting bosses eliminate unions mid-contract

■Letting companies stop paying overtime and allowing states to opt out of federal overtime and minimum wage laws

■Eliminating child labor protections

■Firing “on day one” Jennifer Abruzzo, the NLRB’s strongly pro-union general counsel

■Reversing diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) efforts in the workplace

■Weakening OSHA enforcement against small businesses

I think the section in Project 2025 about expanding child labor is telling. The Project recommends that the Department of Labor should amend its regulations to let teenagers “work in more dangerous occupations.” Under federal law, age 18 is the floor. If you are 16 or 17, you are currently not allowed to work in dangerous jobs.

Project 2025 is responding to the employer community which is struggling to find enough workers. The Project wants child labor but remains oblivious to the obvious risk. There has been a national surge in child labor. In 2023, the U.S. Department of Labor pursued 955 cases and found 5,792 minors employed in violation of labor law. 196 of the violations involved hazardous occupations.

Relaxing child labor laws is a form of child abuse. We need a new Charles Dickens to write about it. There is a noticeable silence about this child abuse to real children from a party dedicated to protecting the unborn. In 2023, a 16-year-old was killed on the job at a slaughterhouse in Mississippi, another 16-year-old was killed working at a sawmill in Wisconsin and a third 16 year-old-died in Missouri working at a landfill when he was pinned between a tractor trailer rig and its trailer.

The Republican Party has not changed. They have never tried to use the government to help working people and it is the height of naivete to expect that would change now. Republican legislators, judges and presidents work to help corporate America evade or overturn any law that helps the working class. In 2024 we can expect more of the same.