BETHLEHEM, Pa. — Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), in an interview with The Hill from the campaign trail in Pennsylvania, said he “probably underestimated” just how much work it would be to lead the House GOP’s massive political operation.
Johnson has been on the road constantly this fall, crisscrossing the country to raise money and preserve — and try to grow — a fragile GOP majority.
“We had a big challenge ahead of us, and I knew there was some travel involved. But I think I’ve had to travel more than my predecessors, because I was introducing myself to people for the first time,” said Johnson, who recently reached the one-year mark as Speaker.
“It’s been all-encompassing,” he added.
Johnson has been tasked with leading a fractious House GOP conference with an excruciatingly small majority, and it could stay that way even if Republicans keep the lower chamber.
Stumping in support of GOP House candidate Ryan Mackenzie eight days before Election Day in Bethlehem, Pa. — the 243rd city across 40 states that he’s visited in the last year — Johnson told a crowd of about 90 people packed into a GOP field office about the difficulties of legislating with just a razor-thin margin.
“It is not like herding cats. It is like exotic animals — and half of them have rabies in Washington. It’s a very dangerous job,” Johnson said to a crowd of about 90 people.
“I spent half my day as the Speaker of the House, the other half as a mental health counselor. The solution is to grow that majority and to have people who can come in on day one and perform for the people who govern,” Johnson said.
Many Republicans expect that Johnson wouldn’t be elected to leadership if the GOP is relegated to the minority.
Johnson declined to say whether he would seek the top slot in that scenario, telling The Hill: “I have not given it a thought because I don’t believe that’s going to happen, and I have to stay laser-focused on delivering this vote.”
If Republicans keep control of the chamber, Johnson’s ability to remain Speaker depends on the margin. A Speaker must get a majority of the votes on the House floor, meaning Johnson would need the vast majority of Republicans to back him.
Earlier this year, Democrats stepped in to kill an effort
led by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) to oust Johnson. A total of 11 Republicans voted against tabling the matter, raising questions about how much support Johnson could get in a Jan. 3 floor vote.
Asked whether he would seek or accept votes from Democrats on the House floor for Speaker to avoid a drawn-out floor fight, Johnson said he intends “to have my party’s support for Speaker” — a job he clearly wants.
“I don’t think it’s wise to switch quarterbacks or coaches in the middle of a game,” Johnson said, going on to reference the economic plan he hopes to pass
under unified Republican control. “In order for us to implement the very aggressive strategy that we have to implement, to do the things we’ve all promised to do, you’re going to have to have continuity of leadership.”
Johnson’s office over the weekend blasted out a release highlighting more than 50 conservative leaders and organizations who praised him on the anniversary of being elected Speaker.
But it is former President Trump who could be most influential in rallying rabble-rousers around a Speaker. And in a good sign for Johnson, Trump gave him a stamp of approval at his Madison Square Garden rally on Sunday, predicting that Johnson will be around “for a long time.”
“Such a nice-looking guy. Just that little beautiful face with the glasses, got the little glasses. Everyone said, ‘Oh, he’s so nice. He’s such a nice person.’ He’s not a nice person. He’s not nice at all,” Trump said, referencing a contentious interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press” in which Trump said Johnson “decapitate[d]” the host.
Chosen to be Speaker in part because of his lack of political enemies, Johnson has certainly made some GOP members unhappy in the last year over his legislative play calls.
But, Johnson said: “I’m still a nice guy.”
“I have to be tough. You got to push back … but you can disagree with people in an agreeable manner, and I try to treat everybody with dignity and respect, even when they’re trying to do gotcha questions on live television,” Johnson said.
Johnson highlighted his close relationship with Trump on the campaign trail, performing— at the urging of the Pennsylvania crowd — an impression of the former president as a cardboard cutout of Trump stood behind him. He took a selfie video with the attendees that he said he would send to Trump, pumping up the attendees.
His time on the stump that day also ignited a controversy about GOP plans for health care after Vice President Harris’s campaign said Johnson’s “no ObamaCare” comment forecast plans to repeal the Affordable Care Act.
Johnson, in a statement to The Hill, accused the Harris campaign of misrepresenting his remarks, saying he “offered no such promise to end ObamaCare, and in fact acknowledged that the policy is ‘deeply ingrained’ in our health care system.”
Overall, though, the campaign-trail Speaker showed a stark contrast to his normally buttoned-up presentation on Capitol Hill, where he has faced no shortage of headaches from within his own conference. Sporting some “new swag” in the form of a Trump-Vance jacket embroidered with “Speaker Mike Johnson” — “It doesn’t quite fit, but who cares?” — he appeared relaxed and jovial on the stump, cracking jokes as he fielded questions.
“People ask me if I’m having fun. I enjoy the people, I enjoy these events and all that. But I mean, the job itself is just, it’s a very difficult one. It would be for anybody,” Johnson said.
Dan Conston, president of the Congressional Leadership Fund, the main Super PAC that is aligned with House GOP leadership, told The Hill that Johnson is “exceptionally well-spoken and articulate.”
“He has charm and comes across as rather earnest. All of that has really accrued to his benefit,” Conston added.
When Johnson skyrocketed from relative obscurity to Speaker, there were significant doubts about his ability to keep up the political pace set by former Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), who was praised for his electoral knowledge and fundraising prowess and saw two cycles of House GOP gains.
“I went from having, I think, 19 employees to over 100 overnight,” Johnson said.
He’s calmed some of those worries. Johnson announced a $27.5 million fundraising haul
for campaign committees and individual candidates from July through September, a sum that his political team said amounts to the “highest amount raised by a Republican Speaker of the House in the third quarter of a presidential election year.”
But when those qualifiers are stripped away, it does not break an all-time record for a House GOP leader. McCarthy, for instance, announced raising $31.5 million
in the first quarter of 2022 when he was minority leader. And overall, Republican fundraising for GOP House candidates and the National Republican Congressional Committee has lagged behind that of Democrats, causing GOP leaders to sound the alarm to their members.
Outside groups like the Congressional Leadership Fund (CLF), though, have seen more success under Johnson. CLF posted its highest quarterly fundraising ever in the July-through-August period at $81.4 million.
“Donors took a wait-and-see approach, and as he performed, and as he came to get to know and really develop relationships with donors, they have really taken to him,” Conston said.
In addition to taking the helm of the fundraising efforts, Johnson inherited McCarthy’s candidate recruitment “midstream.” Johnson said part of the reason for his extensive travel was to get to know the candidates and the communities they represent.
Joe Steber, the chair of Veterans for Ryan Mackenzie and a longtime political operator in the Pennsylvania community, got the sense that Johnson was more present and involved at the local level than McCarthy was. And he recognized that could help the Speaker next year.
“If he winds up with a few freshmen congressmen he’s come out and helped, you know, that could be the difference from him getting reelected Speaker of the House,” Steber said.
Leadership elections, in which the House GOP will nominate its leaders by simple majority, are set to take place the week after the Nov. 5 election. But there is a possibility there will not be enough seats called to definitively say which party will control the House by then. It took more than a week for election forecasters to call the House for Republicans in 2022.
Asked about the possibility of delaying leadership elections if House control is unclear, Johnson said: “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. We’re planning to follow the calendar.”
And the same week, Republicans in the Senate — who are favored to take control of the chamber — will be choosing a replacement for Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.). Senate Republican Whip John Thune (S.D.) and Sen. John Cornyn (Texas) are vying for the post.
Johnson said he has “good, close working relationships” with both candidates.
“It’ll be interesting to see how it turns out. I mean, I got enough to do on my side of the chamber, so I can’t get involved in it,” he said. “But I think it’s gonna be a good season for Congress.”
Johnson has already been planning with Republicans in the Senate on how to “use the budget reconciliation process very aggressively” to pursue an agenda that includes extending the Trump tax cuts and pursuing regulatory reform — assuming the party wins total control of government.
Those kinds of legislative intricacies seem far removed from the crowd-rousing, Trump-impersonating campaign-trail Johnson. But the Speaker insists he “had a lot of time to stop and reflect on the fun parts.”
“I have regarded myself as sort of like a wartime Speaker,” Johnson said, adding that it is “a heavy lift every day.”
History will show, Johnson predicted, that “we’ve performed under pressure.”
A former medical office facility in Joliet will be renovated into a comprehensive veterans support campus by 2026, under a plan by Will County and the Will County Veterans Assistance Commission.
The county bought a vacant building in 2023 at 1300 Copperfield Ave., that was once connected to the former Silver Cross Hospital. The four-story building was constructed in 2003 and was a medical professional building through 2010.
The county is working with Legat Architects on renovations to serve veterans and their families, said Mike Theodore, spokesman for the county executive’s office. The county budgeted $4 million in its fiscal year 2025 budget, to will be voted on in November, to retrofit the interior, replace the roof and rehabilitate critical systems such as heating, ventilation and air conditioning units, and elevators and utilities, he said.
Next door is the Hines VA Joliet Community Based Outpatient Clinic and the Volunteers of America Illinois Hope Manor Housing, a housing development specifically designed for veterans with families.
Adding the Veterans Assistance Commission to the campus will increase the services offered in one place, Will County officials said.
“We are thinking big on this project,” County Executive Jennifer Bertino-Tarrant said.
Jen Solum, superintendent of the Veterans Assistance Commission, said Will County is home to the third largest veteran population in Illinois with just under 30,000 veterans.
The veterans campus will allow the commission to expand existing services, decrease wait times and reach more veterans, Solum said.
The commission’s existing office space at 2400 Glenwood Ave., Joliet, is about 7,000 square feet. Plans for the new building include retrofitting the former medical center’s 72,000 square feet to meet the needs of the commission and other veteran organizations.
“We are robbing Peter to pay Paul for space; we are busting at the seams, Solum said. “Don’t get me wrong. We are awesome. We are knocking it out of the park. But what we can do with a greater space and a bigger facility will be amazing.”
The commission has 10 staff members, seven who are full-time veteran service officers, Solum said. The commission is also the only one in the state to include in-house staff from the Illinois Department of Veterans Affairs.
They help veterans navigate the bureaucracy so they can obtain state and federal assistance, including pensions, disability, retirement and educational benefits, Solum said. Financial assistance for rent, utilities, food and transportation is also available to veterans who fall below 150% of the federal poverty line, she said.
“It is a lot for someone to navigate on their own,” Solum said. “Our number one goal is service. We never tell a veteran or their family no.”
Sometimes they are booked out for five weeks, which is not acceptable, Solum said. Demand for assistance has risen over the years.
Solum said the commission would like to hire more staff to shorten the wait times for veterans to get the services they need.
Having the commission next to the VA outpatient clinic and the veterans’ housing development also will be more convenient for veterans to use its services, Solum said. One complaint veterans have is having to drive from location to location for different needs. Sometimes, transportation is a problem, Solum said. Serving veterans in a timely fashion is important, she said.
The new campus will offer a one-stop shop for veteran services, Solum said.
For instance, if a doctor at the VA clinic diagnoses a veteran with a disability, they can walk next door and get claims filed the same day, she said.
The new building will also allow the commission to hire more counselors, expand its mental health programs and offer help to spouses and widows of veterans, Solum said. They can offer classes in financial literacy or cooking, improve veterans’ physical health through an onsite fitness center and build camaraderie by offering a place for veterans to meet, she said.
The commission will occupy at least the first two floors of the four-story building with other space for outside agencies that serve veterans.
The county is in discussion with Joliet officials to see if the building could be used for emergency transitional housing to combat veteran homelessness until the Veterans Assistance Commission can find the veteran permanent housing, Bertino-Tarrant said.
Bertino-Tarrant said the campus will be unique and one of the first in the nation to bring all these resources together.
“One thing even a divided County Board can agree on is that this is a positive move for the county to show we appreciate the people who have served our country,” Bertino-Tarrant said. “We know Will County is going to continue to grow and we want to take care of our veterans.”
County Board Chair Judy Ogalla said members of the County Board and the Veterans Assistance Commission have talked extensively about plans for the building. She noted two members of the board are veterans.
“It’s a great location to have multiple services in one spot,” said Ogalla, a Monee Republican. “We are taking care of and thanking our veterans for all they have done for us.”
Meta Mueller, an Aurora Democrat who chairs the County Board’s Capital Improvements Committee, said after years of discussion, she is glad the project is going to come to fruition.
The building isn’t very old so she hopes renovations go smoothly, she said. County staff will update the Capital Improvements Committee on the progress.
“I am very excited about this project,” Mueller said. “We all care very much about our veterans.”
Construction is estimated to be completed by early 2026, county officials said.
Mayor Brandon Johnson’s 2025 budget plan for Chicago police slashes several offices that are critical to the ongoing federal consent decree, sparking alarm from policing experts who say now is not the time to take the foot off the gas with reform.
Johnson’s $17.3 billion spending plan for the city carves out $2.1 billion for the Chicago Police Department, a $58.7 million increase from this year’s allocation. However, it also includes 456 vacant positions being cut — 98 of them sworn and 358 civilian — saving more than $50 million in salary and other costs.
The mayor’s budget recommendation would cut staffing for the Office of Constitutional Policing and Reform by 57%, from 65 to 28. Established by interim CPD Superintendent Charlie Beck
in 2020, the office was meant to combine all of the functions tied to consent decree efforts under one office, including training, professional counseling, and reform management.
CPD’s training division, which trains new recruits for service and current employees for promotions, would shrink by about 27% under Johnson’s proposal, from 327 to 237 employees.
The professional counseling division that offers mental health care and other assessments for CPD employees would drop by the same percentage, from 35 to 25 employees. The reform management group responsible for tracking reform efforts consistent with the consent decree would shrink by about 10%, from 19 to 17 employees.
The Office of Community Policing would see its staffing dip from 141 down to 55 employees, a decrease of 61%, under Johnson’s proposal. The office coordinates with other city departments to “create a more cohesive partnership” between CPD and the neighborhoods they serve, according to CPD’s 2023 annual report.
Transparency efforts might also be affected under Johnson’s budget proposal: The records inquiry section that processes and stores field reports and responds to public requests for information under the Freedom of Information Act is slated to shrink by 43%, from 83 to 47 employees.
Robert Boik, former executive director of the Office of Constitutional Policing and Reform, told the Tribune that eliminating those positions would hobble the massive reforms needed in the department. The situation resembled one that led to his own ouster in 2022, when then-Superintendent David Brown fired him after he sent an email asking for a reversal of a decision to distribute his staff to patrol instead of officer training, though those were not vacant positions.
“We have to make a decision about what our priority is,” Boik said. “If we want police reform to happen in Chicago, we have to invest in it. That is one of the offices that requires investment. … Hundreds of check boxes of compliance do not happen without the backbone to make it happen.”
The city has been subject to the consent decree for more than five years
. But the most recent report from independent monitor Maggie Hickey measuring the city’s progress found CPD was in full compliance with just 7% of the decree’s requirements by the end of 2023. That was an increase of 1 percentage point from the previous reporting period. The city achieved “incremental progress,” the report found, in developing a community policing strategy and a data-driven staffing study to figure out how to best allocate people and resources.
Chicago police Superintendent Larry Snelling, left, and Mayor Brandon Johnson walk to speak to the press on June 18, 2024, outside Stroger Hospital following the fatal shooting of 7-year-old Jai’Mani Amir Rivera. (Vincent Alban/Chicago Tribune)
The Civic Federation’s Joe Ferguson said the cuts to community policing, constitutional policing and training represented a “retrenchment bordering on a reversal of what appeared to be the commitment last year” to civilianizing more roles in the department and driving reform. “In some respects, it is not merely a reversal, it’s a gutting.”
The department’s Office of Constitutional Policing and Reform was already “a very, very small number to begin with,” said Ferguson, the city’s former inspector general.
“Sixty-five was known to be inadequate. Cutting it down to 28 basically reduces it to the low watermark that it was at the time that Bob Boik was fired,” Ferguson said, rendering it “all but ineffectual.”
Los Angeles, a smaller department with a less complicated consent decree, dedicated approximately 300 people to its equivalent reform department.
At an unrelated Thursday news conference, Johnson did not directly address a question about his CPD budget proposal but spoke broadly about his administration’s commitment to the consent decree.
“We understand that over the course of unfortunately decades in this city, that there’s been a disconnect between the needs of the community and how law enforcement can respond to those needs,” Johnson said. “So this is an ongoing process, and as the superintendent indicated, as we continue to go through the budget discussion, all of that will come to light.”
His proposal also adds two new initiatives: an Office of Crime Victim Services with 59 employees and an Office of Equity and Engagement, with seven employees.
At the same news conference, Snelling did not comment on the proposed cuts, instead saying his department will forge ahead regardless of “roadblocks.”
“When it comes to the consent decree, I am 100% — and the Chicago Police Department, 100% — dedicated to getting to the bottom of the consent decree,” Snelling said, adding that more questions would be answered during CPD’s budget hearing with aldermen. “We’re going to continue to work in that direction. It doesn’t matter what the roadblocks are that we may see.”
A year ago, the mayor earned plaudits from fiscal watchdogs and policing experts for pledging to create 398 civilian positions in his budget plan for 2024. It was part of a bid to shift desk duty roles away from sworn personnel, thereby freeing up them to do police work while cutting costs.
But a September Tribune story
noted the city has made little progress in hiring civilians to the new administrative positions — 100 of them being in Boik’s old constitutional policing office that is now seeing 37 cuts.
Boik noted that one of the biggest impediments to hiring on the civilian side are internal issues with Chicago government.
The steps required to bring on a civilian employee at the Police Department start with the budget office approving the position to be filled. Then, the Police Department’s hiring manager must finalize the job description and clear it with the Office of Public Safety Administration and the Department of Human Resources. From there, the posting goes live and DHR oversees minimum screening qualifications before handing a batch of applicants back to the Police Department to conduct interviews.
That process has at times averaged half a year but can blow past nine months.
Faced with a nearly $1 billion projected budget deficit next year, Johnson was surely turning over every rock looking for fat to trim. And as a progressive mayor who faced attacks for his previous support of the “defund the police” movement, touching sworn positions would have enraged pro-law enforcement critics, with or without a budget crunch.
Ferguson still said Johnson could have been served just as well by eliminating empty slots in the patrol division, especially given that the department’s hiring of new officers remains slow, and a workforce allocation study that would help determine where cops are put to their best use is still pending.
Johnson this week did tout that he will fulfill his campaign promise to hire 200 detectives by the end of this year. But as of last month, the department’s net detective headcount has not budged: There were 1,102 total detectives as of May 2023, and 1,104 as of September. His budget office did not respond to an inquiry on what progress has been made as of this week.
On the pro-police side, the mayor’s CPD budget is also catching flak from aldermen who say that the sluggish civilianization effort this year, coupled with next year’s slashed civilian positions, amounts to de facto defunding of the police.
“We reduced sworn positions and then increased nonsworn positions, and now we’re eliminating nonsworn positions and saying, ‘Don’t worry about it. These are not police,’” Ald. Brian Hopkins, 2nd, told the Tribune. “It’s a backdoor way to reduce police staffing, and that is another concern I have.”
Six months ago, grocery staff at a North Center Trader Joe’s filed for a union election.
The move came amid a swell of union organizing that swept the service industry over the last several years, hitting big names such as Starbucks and Apple and REI. At Trader Joe’s, grocery staff said they saw a union as a way to secure better pay, benefits and a bigger say in their workplace.
When the Chicago workers voted in a union election in April, National Labor Relations Board officials counted 70 votes for the union and 70 votes against the union.
One ballot, which belonged to a pin-wearing union supporter, wasn’t counted.
For months, Trader Joe’s and the union fought over whether the ballot, which belongs to 25-year-old Brandi Hewitt, was valid. Last month, a labor board official recommended Hewitt’s ballot be opened and counted. This week, Trader Joe’s appealed that decision, which will now wind its way through additional layers of legal review. The status of the union remains in limbo.
The Chicago workers organized with Trader Joe’s Workers United, an independent, worker-led union that had its roots at a Trader Joe’s in Hadley, Massachusetts. At the time of their union filing, Trader Joe’s Workers United represented workers at just four stores, a tiny fraction of the company’s approximately 545.
Trader Joe’s, meanwhile, faced a host of allegations of labor law violations from the union and the National Labor Relations Board. The company has settled some allegations while others remain under investigation. Some workers said they felt the company’s stance on unions conflicted with its cheerful public image. Trader Joe’s staff are known for being warm and outgoing, complimenting customers on their snack selections or even outfits. That vibe can be authentic, one worker said, “if we’re all being taken care of.”
At the time of the vote, Hewitt had just moved to Chicago from the East Coast, where she’d worked since 2021 at a Trader Joe’s in Rockville, Maryland. When she moved to Chicago, she arranged a job at the North Center store and started working there in March, weeks before the union election. When she learned about the union campaign at the store, she was supportive and started wearing a union pin to work.
“I’ve been with the company for three years now,” Hewitt said, “and I think there are a lot of things that I would like to see changed.”
But on election day, Hewitt’s name wasn’t on the list of eligible voters provided by Trader Joe’s. She said she was instructed to cast a vote anyway, and her ballot was separated from the others.
“It was just said that it wouldn’t really matter unless there was a tie,” Hewitt said. “And then there was a tie.”
In union elections, ties are losses for the union. Hewitt’s ballot, therefore, would determine the results of the election. Trader Joe’s argues that Hewitt was only a temporary staffer on loan from her Maryland store and therefore ineligible to vote. The union maintains that her move to the Chicago store was always intended to be a permanent transfer.
The case went to hearing at the National Labor Relations Board offices in downtown Chicago this summer, where the company and the union called witnesses and made their case to labor board officials. In addition to challenging Hewitt’s ballot, the company alleged Trader Joe’s United had tainted the election by, among other things, intentionally spreading misinformation about the logistics of the vote, threatening and harassing employees and allowing a union sticker to be visible on an observer’s water bottle during the election.
The union filed one election objection of its own.
Last month, the NLRB’s representative in the case issued a report that said Hewitt was an eligible voter and that her ballot should be opened. “I do not find Crew Member Hewitt’s transfer to the Chicago Store to be temporary in nature,” she wrote.
The official recommended all of Trader Joe’s other objections to the election as well as the union’s single objection be dismissed.
The saga, however, is far from over. Trader Joe’s has appealed the hearing officer’s report, maintaining in court filings that it believes Hewitt to be ineligible to vote and arguing that its other objections to the election should still stand. The case will now wind its way through additional levels of review at the NLRB, leaving the status of the union in limbo. Alec Plant, a union organizer at the store, said the union fully expects Hewitt’s vote to eventually be counted but expects it to take about a year.
Nakia Rohde, a spokesperson for Trader Joe’s, declined to comment on pending litigation. The company has said previously it supports workers’ “right to choose” whether or not to unionize.
Hewitt said the process of litigating her ballot through the labor board taught her that “these corporate entities really have all the money and power.”
“Why not?” she said. “Why wouldn’t they drag it on as long as possible, if they have the means to do so?”
Seth Goldstein, an attorney for the union, accused the company of participating in what he described as “Trump tactics” to deny Hewitt’s right to vote.
“This is part of Trader Joe’s, Morgan Lewis’ and the billionaires’ tactics and schemes to delay bargaining,” he said, referring to Trader Joe’s outside counsel, which also represents Elon Musk’s SpaceX in lawsuits seeking to declare the NLRB unconstitutional in federal court in Texas.
Earlier this year, at a hearing over alleged unfair labor practices, Trader Joe’s echoed arguments made by SpaceX and a litany of other companies by suggesting the structure of the labor board and its administrative law judges was unconstitutional, though the company has said it has no plans to join a lawsuit like SpaceX’s.
Labor lawyers and experts, including Goldstein, have raised alarms that a possible second term for former President Donald Trump could lead to a major rollback in labor rights for U.S. workers in part because of pending constitutional challenges to the labor board.
“It’s all related,” Goldstein said.
The vote in Chicago hinges largely around the contents of Hewitt’s ballot because the election was so close.
It wasn’t the first thin margin for Trader Joe’s United: In 2023, employees at a store in Manhattan voted 76-76, a loss for the union.
Typically, union organizers file for elections when they believe they have more than enough support to win — not just enough, said Bob Bruno, director of the labor studies program at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
Razor-thin margins, he said, suggests that union organizers may have overestimated the strength of their support.
“You would expect that this body, this labor organization, would be reassessing how they’re reaching out to workers, how they’re interpreting what workers are saying,” Bruno said.
Workers said the campaign in Chicago had been divisive and marked by interpersonal disputes.
Plant said pro-union workers began their organizing in secret, which is typical for a union campaign, because they feared reprisal from the company. But some store veterans felt left out of the process, Plant acknowledged. “They treated that as a personal betrayal,” he said, “and they took that very, very, very hard.”
Other union opponents, Plant said, felt “like they just don’t need a union because Trader Joe’s treats them so well.”
José Alvarado, a longtime employee who voted against the union, said he hadn’t been notified of the campaign until after pro-union workers went public when he showed up to work the next day. Alvarado also didn’t trust union leadership personally, he said.
He described Trader Joe’s as “one of the greatest companies that anybody could work for,” but said that didn’t mean he didn’t think there were things the grocer couldn’t do better. If the union campaign had been led by other people, he said, he would’ve “love(d) to be part of the conversation.”
As of last month, the NLRB had certified bargaining units at four union Trader Joe’s stores. The company is facing a litany of unfair labor practice allegations from the union and from labor board officials. Last month, labor board officials dismissed a petition by a worker seeking to decertify the union at the first union store in Massachusetts because of a pending complaint against the company there. The worker, represented by an attorney with the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, has appealed.
“It’s just this persistent desire to crush us in any way possible,” said Sarah Beth Ryther, the union’s vice president.
In September, labor board officials issued a complaint against the company alleging it had violated labor law in the run-up to the tied New York election and therefore undermined its validity.
The complaint seeks an order that would require the company to recognize and start bargaining with the union, according to the NLRB.
If the case isn’t settled, it’ll go to a hearing next January.
Trader Joe’s declined to comment on pending litigation.
In an onstage interview in Arizona with Tucker Carlson, former President Donald J. Trump slammed a top Republican critic as he criticized U.S. involvement in foreign conflicts.
Across the United States, companies that rely on foreign suppliers are preparing to raise prices in response to the massive import tariffs
that former president Donald Trump
promises if he wins the election Tuesday.
Producers of a range of items, including clothing, footwear, baby products, auto parts and hardware, say they will pass along the cost of the tariffs to their American customers.
The planned price increases next year would come as consumers are beginning to enjoy relief from the highest inflation
in four decades and directly contradict Trump’s repeated assurances that foreigners will pay the tariff tab.
“We’re set to raise prices,” Timothy Boyle, chief executive of Columbia Sportswear, said in an interview. “We’re buying stuff today for delivery next fall. So we’re just going to deal with it and we’ll just raise the prices. … It’s going to be very, very difficult to keep products affordable for Americans.”
[…]
“A consistent theoretical and empirical finding in economics is that domestic consumers and domestic firms bear the burden of a tariff, not the foreign country,” according to an analysis by the nonpartisan Budget Lab at Yale University.
Executives at AutoZone, an auto parts retailer, told investors this month they were prepared for products they import to become more expensive. The company’s top suppliers include companies in India, China and Germany, according to a June press release.
“If we get tariffs, we will pass those tariff costs back to the consumer,” Philip Daniele, CEO of AutoZone, said on a recent earnings call. “We’ll generally raise prices ahead of — we know what the tariffs will be — we generally raise prices ahead of that.”
This should surprise no honest person who has been following this issue. Despite Trump’s constant lies, foreign governments do not and never have paid tariffs. Generally speaking, while the people importing the goods could, in theory, absorb those tariffs, that’s a tough pill to swallow in our “maximize shareholder value” era.
And Trump’s supporters are not denying this. The best counter most have is that perhaps he won’t follow through on a core campaign promise. That’s also the hope of some business leaders too. From the same Washington Post article:
By December, some of Acme United’s Westcott brand products, such as rulers and paper trimmers, will be made in Thailand and the Philippines, allowing them to escape tariffs aimed at China, CEO Walter Johnsen said on a recent earnings call.
The Shelton, Connecticut-based company, which operates under multiple brands, also has shifted production of some first aid and medical products to India, Egypt and its U.S. factories in Florida, North Carolina and Washington state.
Johnsen said he was skeptical that Trump would actually follow through with his announced plans to increase tariffs on all U.S. imports. Taxing imported medical products, including medicines, for example, would be too disruptive for the U.S. health-care system, he said.
“The hospitals would come to a halt. So it’s highly unlikely, in my view, that 60 percent tariffs are even remotely going to be real, but it’s a negotiating point,” he told investors.
Likewise, on a recent trip to China, Sebastien Breteau, CEO of QIMA, which conducts worldwide factory inspections and audits for major retailers, found few Chinese suppliers who believed Trump would implement what he has promised.
“He’s a man who can change [his] opinion 10 times in a day. So people don’t believe him. People don’t believe Trump is going to raise tariffs by 60 percent,” said Breteau, whose clients include Costco and Walmart.
With just a week until the presidential election, Donald Trump’s close ally and major economic adviser Elon Musk is warning supporters to expect economic chaos, a crashing stock market and financial “hardship” — albeit only “temporary” — if Trump wins.
It sounds so extreme that Trump fans must either wonder why he had been so foolish as to say the silent part out loud, or maybe hope that the whole story is made up — “fake news.”
But it’s very real.
Billionaire Musk, Trump’s would-be budget-cutting and government-efficiency czar, also says there will be “no special cases” and “no exceptions” when he starts slashing federal spending after Trump takes office.
Speaking on a “telephone town hall”
with supporters Tuesday, Musk promised deep federal budget cuts, austerity and economic pain ahead in a new Trump administration.
“We have to reduce spending to live within our means,” Musk said. “That necessarily involves some temporary hardship but it will ensure long-term prosperity.”
To that point, Musk doubled down on the “necessary economic hardship” on Twitter, agreeing to this “best case” scenario:
I know some anti-anti-Trump commenters will say “but this is only a short-term pain for a better America going forward.” My only response is to remind them of everything they have written about the inflation we experienced during the first few years of the Biden administration and how unacceptable it was.
Some may also suggest it will be fine because Trump will be tapping brilliant people like Elon Musk to help. And Musk promised things will turn around by the midterms in that discussion.
So I’m not exactly feeling comfortable taking his promises to the bank–especially when it’s setting up conditions for Elon to get even richer while a lot of Trump’s supporters (and many of the rest of us) continue to get poorer.
Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Florida) voted against a measure to extend FEMA funding right before two hurricanes hit her district. But her Democratic opponent, Whitney
