The union that bankrolls the Fight for $15 minimum wage movement will slash spending in anticipation of its funding being "dramatically reduced" during the Trump administration.

The 2-million member Service Employees International Union will cut spending by 10% in the new year and by 30% in 2018, its president Mary Kay Henry announced in an internal memo earlier this month. The SEIU is the country's second-largest union and has been the primary backer of the movement to raise wages in the fast food industry and beyond, spending tens of millions of dollars on the campaign since its inception in 2012.

The memo, first reported by Bloomberg Businessweek, painted a dire picture of the labor movement's preparations for the Trump era, with looming Supreme Court rulings that could devastate the ability to collect membership dues from unionized government employees. The SEIU is heavily dependent on such fees from public-sector workers.

“Because the far right will control all three branches of the federal government, we will face serious threats to the ability of working people to join together in unions,” Henry wrote in the Dec. 14 memo, sent to all SEIU staff. “These threats require us to make tough decisions that allow us to resist these attacks and to fight forward despite dramatically reduced resources.”

Beyond the prospect of a conservative majority on the Supreme Court, the unions will face a hostile White House, Labor Department, and National Labor Relations Board, and emboldened Republican majorities in Congress.

Henry did not specify which programs and priorities will receive less funding, but nor did she say that funding for the Fight for $15 will be protected. The campaign has been seen as a rare success for the labor movement, transforming a $15 hourly minimum wage from a pipe dream to a legal reality in some of the country's biggest economies, including New York, California, Seattle and elsewhere.



But while the SEIU's membership pays for the expensive minimum wage campaigning, the fast food workers who benefit from it are unlikely to be unionized in the foreseeable future, meaning they will not contribute new revenue for the union. It puts the campaign in a precarious spot as budgets are cut.

"As we prepare to fight-back against the forth-coming attacks on working people and our communities under an extremist run government, we know we must realign our resources and streamline our investments," said SEIU spokesperson Sahar Wali in a statement to BuzzFeed News.

"As part of this process, we are currently looking at possible ways to improve our budgets. Once the path forward and the attacks we face become clear, we will make decisions on which financial refinements to implement that will best poise us to continue strengthening and growing our movement to ensure that all work is valued and every community can thrive."