A forthcoming book by Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts attacks unions and calls for weakening of workplace safety standards, according to a Media Matters review of a galley copy. Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance wrote the book’s foreword, calling Roberts’ work an “essential weapon” in the “fights that lay ahead.”

Heritage is the lead organizer of Project 2025, a sprawling effort to provide policy and staffing recommendations to a second Trump administration which has come under intense scrutiny for its extremist proposals. Following the backlash to Project 2025, Roberts recently announced that he was delaying the publication of his new book — titled Dawn’s Early Light: Taking Back Washington To Save America — until after the election. 

MAGA figures like Vance and Roberts frequently attempt to portray themselves as pro-worker. But in Dawn’s Early Light, Roberts makes it clear that he opposes labor unions, the primary political formation that actually advances the interests of the working class, often mirroring language from Project 2025. 

“Personally, I think unionization is not the right answer; in almost every case, something like a workers’ council could do the same job at lower cost and without coercive measures,” Roberts writes. “In any case, national-level unions are often part of the problem and part of the Uniparty.” 

“Surveys show that that’s how most working-class Americans see it, too,” he continues.

Roberts doesn’t define what he means by a “workers council,” but his language echoes anti-labor passages from Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, the policy book from Project 2025.

The labor chapter in Mandate calls for Congress to “pass labor reforms that create non-union ‘employee involvement organizations,’” which can’t collectively bargain on behalf of their members. Pro-labor think tank the People’s Policy Project explains that such groups “would give employers another union avoidance tool by allowing them to muddy the waters and by allowing them to fend off union organizing drives.”

Roberts’ attack on “national-level unions” as “part of the problem” further underscores his anti-working class politics. A 2023 study found that union workers wages were 13.5% higher than similarly positioned workers not covered by a union contract. The benefits extend to the rest of the working class as well, as higher union density increases wages for non-union workers. States with relatively high union density see all sorts of other positive outcomes as well, including higher rates of health insurance coverage and fewer restrictive voting laws.  

Roberts fails to provide a citation for his claim that “most working-class Americans” agree with him, and the chapter’s scant bibliography doesn’t give the reader any clues either. There doesn’t appear to be much polling on union approval by income, but — generally speaking — Roberts is totally wrong that unions are unpopular. 

A 2022 Gallup poll found that 71% of Americans approved of labor unions, the highest percentage since 1965. The rate mostly held steady the next year at 67%, with a large plurality (43%) responding that unions should have more influence than they currently do. 

Roberts cribs from Mandate elsewhere in his book. In one telling passage, he calls on Congress to “enact legislation increasing the revenue thresholds at which the National Labor Relations Board asserts jurisdiction over employers to match changes in inflation since 1935 and should also exempt small-business, first-time, nonwillful violators from fines issued by the Occupational Health and Safety Administration.” 

This sentence is taken nearly verbatim from page 594 of the Project 2025 policy book, and is another broadside against the working class. Practically, decreasing the NLRB’s jurisdiction is a win for employers and a loss for labor. Similarly, limiting OSHA’s regulatory purview harms workers’ health and well-being.  

Roberts doesn’t have much else to say about organized labor beyond the passages above, with one prominent exception. In his chapter on education — really just a call for dismantling public schools under the guise of so-called “choice” — Roberts characterizes teachers unions as “so transparently self-serving, so unconcerned about parental voices and desires, so callous about what is best for students that they have been by far the most effective marketing for universal school choice.” 

Roberts, again, is out of step with the rest of the country. A 2023 poll found that by a “30-point margin, most Americans have a favorable view of teachers unions.” The only group that had a net unfavorable view of teachers unions were “Republicans who identify as being very conservative.” 

Vance’s ties to Roberts, Heritage, and Project 2025 extend far beyond writing the foreword to Dawn. In January, Vance said Roberts “is somebody I rely on a lot who has very good advice, very good political instincts.” Vance is “very close to Heritage,” according to Reuters’ Gram Slattery, and he said during a recent Newsmax interview that “there are some good ideas in” Project 2025. Vance previously praised Roberts and Heritage for their “incredible work” and has appeared at numerous events and on podcasts of Project 2025 partner organizations, frequently celebrating the groups and their leaders.