They should
Biden went where no sitting president had gone before:
When former President Donald Trump visits Detroit on Wednesday, he’ll be looking to blunt criticisms from a United Auto Workers union leadership that has said a second term for him would be a “disaster” for workers.
Trump will bypass the second Republican presidential debate that day to instead visit striking autoworkers in Michigan, where he has looked to position himself as an ally of blue-collar workers by promising to raise wages and protect jobs if elected to a second term.
But union leaders say Trump’s record in the White House speaks for itself. Union leaders have said his first term was far from worker-friendly, citing unfavorable rulings from the nation’s top labor board and the U.S. Supreme Court, as well as unfulfilled promises of automotive jobs. While the United Auto Workers union has withheld an endorsement in the 2024 presidential race, its leadership has repeatedly rebuffed Trump.
Nevertheless, Trump plans to speak directly to a room of former and current union members. A Trump campaign radio ad released last week in Detroit and Toledo, Ohio, praised auto workers and said the former president has “always had their back.”
Not everyone thinks so. Despite Trump’s history of success in courting blue-collar workers in previous elections, union leaders say their members would do well to believe their own eyes.
“Just look who Trump put in the courts,” said Dave Green, the UAW regional director for Ohio and Indiana. “Look at his record with the labor relations board. He did nothing to support organized labor except lip service.”
The National Labor Relations Board, which enforces the country’s labor laws and oversees union elections, came under Republican control during the Trump administration for the first time since 2007. The board reversed several key Obama-era rulings that made it easier for small unions to organize, strengthened the bargaining rights of franchise workers and provided protection against anti-union measures for employees.
In 2017, the Trump-era board reversed a decision holding employers responsible for labor violations by subcontractors or franchisees. In 2019, the board gave a boost to companies that use contract labor, such as Lyft and Uber, by emphasizing “entrepreneurial opportunity” in determining a worker’s employment status, making organizing harder.
Mark McManus, president of the plumbers and pipefitters union, said in a statement last week that Trump “tried to gut” the labor relations board under his administration “to undo the safeguards that protect working families.” Michigan AFL-CIO President Ron Bieber told The Associated Press in an emailed statement that the board was stacked with “anti-worker appointees who trampled on collective bargaining rights.”
The union leaders also point to unfavorable U.S. Supreme Court rulings under a conservative majority that grew during Trump’s term. The nation’s high court has dealt a number of blows to unions, most recently ruling against unionized drivers who walked off the job with their trucks full of wet cement, allowing a civil suit against them to go forward.
In 2018, the court’s conservative majority overturned a decades-old pro-union decision involving fees paid by government workers. The justices in 2021 rejected a California regulation giving unions access to farm property so they could organize workers.
“If you’re appointing conservatives to the court, you’re often appointing people who relate to the preference for business or property owners or shareholders, more than the preference of stakeholders like workers,” said Peter Berg, a professor of labor relations at Michigan State University.
As president, Trump largely sat on the sidelines during a 40-day walkout at a General Motors plant in 2019.
A lot of union workers love Trump anyway, of course. The white ones anyway.
“President Trump has always been on the side of American workers,” his campaign spokesman Steven Cheung said in a statement.
Cheung responded to the criticisms from labor leaders with a long list of economic gains and policies from Trump’s time as president, ranging from the surging stock market to low unemployment. He cited Trump’s broad push to remove regulations and abandon or renegotiate trade deals as beneficial to American workers across a range of industries.
Union workers really care about the stock market. It’s a huge issue for them …
Job growth figures in the auto industry during Trump’s presidency contradict his claim that the industry thrived under his watch. The total number of auto manufacturing jobs in Michigan, which holds the most automotive jobs in the U.S., stayed even during Trump’s presidency.
In Ohio, the number of auto manufacturing jobs grew by fewer than 2,000 jobs during Trump’s four years in the White House. But Green, the UAW director, said some communities that had backed Trump in 2016 were abandoned by him. He pointed to Lordstown, Ohio, an area that Trump won by a significant margin in 2016 and where Green previously served as the local UAW president.
In 2017, during a visit to the region, Trump pledged that jobs there were “all coming back” and implored residents to stay put. A year later, General Motors announced the closure of its Lordstown plant, one of the largest employers in the area.
“The guy came to my community and flat out lied to everybody,” Green said last week. “Banks were closing, schools were shutting down. I wrote the guy two letters, and he didn’t even reply.”
AP VoteCast shows that in the 2020 presidential election, Trump was the choice of 62% of white voters without a college degree, whereas Biden won the vote of 37% in this group. Biden performed better than Trump did among union members, receiving 56% of union members’ votes in the 2020 election, compared with Trump’s 42%.
Anyone union member who votes for Trump is a sucker:
Donald Trump has admitted before that when he has a choice between union and nonunion labor for his construction projects, he’d go with nonunion labor. Just how often was that? A new report from the Electrical Workers (IBEW) reveals some figures about his dealings with IBEW contractors.
From the IBEW investigation:
A review of the presumptive Republican presidential nominee’s projects reveals that he hires union when project labor agreements or dominant market share forces him to. But more than 60% of his projects developed outside New York City and Atlantic City—which includes most of his recent projects—were built nonunion. When you exclude developments with project labor agreements, that number jumps to nearly 80% built nonunion.
Except for his own house.
Trump has developed or licensed his name to eight projects in Florida, for example. The only one using IBEW workers is his palatial home and private club in Palm Beach. “For everything he sold to other people, he went nonunion. But for his house, he went with us,” said IBEW Local 728 Business Manager Dan Svetlick. Svetlick says it’s something he’s seen with other billionaires like Trump. When it comes to their own homes or the homes of their family members, “They want that to last,” he said.
Here are 10 other key facts from the IBEW report:
1. According to analysis of lawsuits filed against him and his companies, when union contractors were hired, Trump developed a reputation for stiffing some, delaying payment to others and shorting workers on overtime and even minimum wage.
2. USA Today found 60 lawsuits against Trump for not paying his bills on time, including by a dishwasher in Florida, a New Jersey glass company, a carpet supplier, plumber, painters, 48 waiters, dozens of bartenders and a real estate broker.
3. Trump has been cited for 24 violations of the Fair Labor Standards Act.
4. Trump-associated properties and companies have filed for bankruptcy often: Trump Taj Mahal (1991), Trump Plaza and Trump Marina (1993), Trump World’s Fair and Casino (1999), Trump Hotels & Casino Resorts (2004) and Trump Entertainment Resorts (2009). In each of the bankruptcies, unpaid contractors were sent to the back of the line for repayment and often received only pennies on the dollar for what they were owed.
5. Lawyers who represented Trump in lawsuits for non-payment sued Trump for not paying them.
6. Since 1980, more than 200 mechanic’s liens have been filed against Trump properties for nonpayment.
7. According to former Trump Plaza President Jack O’Connell, Trump would negotiate the best price he could, but when it came time to pay the bills, Trump would say: “I’m going to pay you, but I’m going to pay you 75% of what we agreed to.” It was known as the “Trump discount,” according to The Wall Street Journal.
8. Trump continues to stonewall unionized casino and culinary employees looking for their first contract at the Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas.
9. Most of Trump’s recent projects have been in anti-union and “right to work” states. Where the law is different, his choices are different: “For every union-built development outside of New York and Atlantic City, Trump built nearly two nonunion, and if there is no PLA, Trump has hired union workers once for every four projects that go nonunion.”
10. Trump Tower, where he announced his presidential campaign, was built on a site cleared by undocumented immigrant laborers from Poland. A lawsuit was filed against Trump that dragged on for nearly two decades—he didn’t reach a settlement with the working people who did the job until 19 years later. The U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York wrote: “No records were kept, no Social Security or other taxes were withheld, and they were not paid in accordance with wage laws. They were told they would be paid $4.00 or in some cases $5.00 an hour for working 12-hour shifts seven days a week. In fact, they were paid irregularly and incompletely, sometimes with [the subcontractor’s] personal checks, which were returned by the bank for insufficient funds.” Employees complained to the press of working in “choking clouds of asbestos dust without protective equipment.” The District Court concluded that Trump “knew the Polish workers were working ‘off the books,’ that they were doing demolition work, that they were nonunion, that they were paid substandard wages with no overtime pay and that they were paid irregularly if at all.”
Donald Trump and the Republicans are not and have never been supportive of working class economic interests. They dazzle them with culture war nonsense while they’re stabbing them in the back. That any of these union workers would vote for a billionaire gadfly is absurd.