Weeks ago, President Donald Trump declared an “emergency” in Washington, D.C., and deployed the National Guard, despite the local government’s wishes. This happened just days after the Heritage Foundation — the conservative think tank that wrote Project 2025 — called on state lawmakers to “de-charter” cities they don’t like. In other words, remove their local elected officials and place them under state control.
As an American, I’m worried for our democracy. As an SEIU union member and Detroit resident, I’m worried for the people of D.C. and across the nation, and the labor laws and worker protections that could be taken away if that happens. When Michigan’s local governments suffered state takeovers, that’s what happened to us.
Candidates for statewide office in Michigan are calling on Trump to send the National Guard to Detroit. But 10 cities, including Detroit, have already seen the consequences of unwanted state or federal control over our cities. Just over a decade ago, we faced our own democracy crisis: emergency management.
Michigan was in the midst of a manufacturing decline when the 2008 financial crisis destroyed our property values and pushed manufacturing to the brink of extinction.
Instead of helping cities or reforming tax policy, then-Gov. Rick Snyder executed a series of “emergency manager” laws that had the effect of allowing bureaucrats to overrule city councils and mayors to run majority-Black cities like Detroit and Benton Harbor. For those who don’t remember, emergency managers were never accountable to the city’s voters. They were accountable only to the governor and state government, not local government. They could (and did) cut council members’ salaries, demote them and overrule their decisions. These actions destroyed our local democracy.
The wounds that emergency management has left are too countless to name. Rather than help struggling cities, emergency management was a tactic to hurt unions, especially in the public sector, tearing up union contracts, destroying schools and reducing pensions.
When faced with urban problems of any kind, the reaction of people like Snyder, Trump and the Heritage Foundation is to respond with deploying the military, firing workers, bulldozing homes and overtaxing poor residents.
They never seem to respond with help or resources, only punishment and budget cuts. Michigan has a long history of repeatedly taking resources and powers away from local governments instead of offering help and assistance. Emergency management is perhaps the best example of that, but there are other examples too.
PA 98 of 2011 and PA 105 of 2015 took away cities’ freedom to enact specific local labor laws or require labor standards as part of development deals. Now, as our cities rebuild from emergency management, bankruptcy and budget cuts, we can’t even require that developers create good jobs when they receive massive subsidies.
After all this happened, unions fought back to try and get better wages, benefits and respect on the job from the profiteers of state-controlled supervision of our city’s destruction. I work as a janitor in the Renaissance Center.
SEIU union members that I work alongside and represent are janitors, security guards and staff in many of the gorgeous developments downtown. But while we work in buildings that receive millions in taxpayer dollars, we are paid hardly enough to stay afloat. That’s not right. It’s because of people like the Heritage Foundation, Trump and their allies in the Michigan government that we’re in this situation.
The game plan that the Heritage Foundation and others have is to take power away from our cities to make way for big business and massive corporate profits. Washington, D.C., is just the beginning.
It happened in Detroit already, and we’re still dealing with the consequences. We don’t need the National Guard — we need investment, a chance and freedom to decide our own futures.
Pam Owens is a janitor in Detroit and vice president of SEIU Local 1.