| Welcome to Bw Reads, our weekend newsletter featuring one great magazine story from Bloomberg Businessweek. Today we're featuring Josh Eidelson's post-election look at what unions can expect from a second Donald Trump term. The landmark labor wins of the past few years will be vulnerable under a hostile government. You can find the whole story online here. You'll also find more stories about Trump's return below and coming soon in Businessweek. If you like what you see, tell your friends! Sign up here. For American labor, which has been embattled for decades but invigorated over the past few years, Donald Trump's big win is a body blow. During Joe Biden's presidency, workers have racked up victories that would have been unimaginable just a few years earlier. Historic union contracts with the Big Three automakers, Hollywood studios, UPS and Boeing. Unions freshly established at Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Chipotle and Starbucks. The risks and burdens foisted on workers early in the Covid era had a lot to do with making those changes feel urgent. The tight labor markets the pandemic created made them seem more possible. But the Biden administration played an important part, too. A handful of key appointees took on corporate America in ways unseen in decades. The industrial policy coming out of Washington favored workers. Biden himself walked a picket line. These moves helped create openings for organized labor that Trump is likely to slam shut. "All of that is now under threat," says Daniel Vicente, a regional director for the United Auto Workers. "Everything becomes harder, from organizing to negotiating strong contracts to strikes."  Donald Trump on his way to address Teamsters members at the union's Washington, DC, headquarters in January. Photographer: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images On the campaign trail this year, Trump courted union workers and promised many that he'd do better for them than Biden did. The last time Trump ran the government, however, he filled key enforcement roles with management-side attorneys who pushed for companies to have more control over workers' tips, more time to run anti-union campaigns and more discretion over who gets paid overtime. Now that he's had some practice, he's likely to do more, faster, with "a deregulatory emphasis," says Paul DeCamp, a corporate lawyer who served as George W. Bush's wage and hour enforcement chief. "There's no real preparation for being president other than having been president." Biden's appointees have issued rules to eliminate noncompete agreements and make more workers eligible for overtime, and proposed regulations to protect them from excessive heat. More management-friendly regulators could work to dissolve such efforts in tandem with like-minded judges. Project 2025, the policy blueprint drawn up by Trump administration alumni and advisers, calls for the loosening of laws governing safety, nondiscrimination and child labor, and floats eliminating public-sector unions. Trump suggested on the stump that he'd give new pal Elon Musk a crack at slashing the federal budget, which would almost certainly involve downsizing. Trump's promised crackdown on immigrants would also hand employers more leverage to scare workers out of causing a fuss. Whether or not Republicans retake the House, Trump appointees can reshape Biden's signature green energy legislation, whose hundreds of billions of dollars in tax breaks, loans and grants came with safeguards meant to promote union, or at least decent, jobs. The strength of those safeguards depends in large part on how federal agencies choose to enforce them—or not. Keep reading: What Trump Can Do to Workers' Biden-Era Gains | 
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