GOP pretending it is pro-union
GOP Pretends as usual
By Robert Reich
The Republican Party began its national convention last night, with a bow to . . . (wait for it) . . . organized labor. Or Unions.
You read that correctly.
A few days ago, the Republican National Committee sent out an email with this remarkably ironic headline:
“RNC STATEMENT ON FAILED BIDEN’S ANTI-UNION, PRO-CHINA POLICIES”
This was followed by an even more absurd RNC statement:
Joe Biden is not pro-union, he is pro-CCP—forcing EV mandates to please Communist China while making gas prices soar and killing auto industry jobs. If Biden really cared about working class Americans, he would stop caving to China, unleash our energy, and make life affordable again for working families. President Trump put hard-working Americans first once, and he will do it again when he’s back in the White House.
As my friend Harold Meyerson, writing for The American Prospect, notes, the RNC statement didn’t address the Republicans’ enduring and ongoing opposition to unions, or the officials Trump appointed when president (Labor Secretary Eugene Scalia, NLRB General Counsel Peter Robb, et al.) who devoted themselves to crippling unions in every way they could.
It ignored the assessments of dispassionate historians that Biden is either the most pro-union president since FDR or the most pro-union president ever.
Harold went on to explain the RNC email was to be some what a tease. It lays out a bit of groundwork for the opening night of the Republican convention. The prime-time 10 p.m. speaking slot was awarded to Sean O’Brien, president of the Teamsters.
Despite the misgivings and stunned disbelief of numerous Teamster officials, O’Brien has been playing footsie with Trump for a number of months, donating $45,000 of the members’ money to help fund the Republican convention (he gave an equal amount to the Democrats), inviting Trump in to speak to his executive board, and now, effectively kicking off the televised portion of the Republican convention.
O’Brien’s openness to Trump overlooks a Biden record that includes bailing out the union’s multi-employer pension fund and jump-starting a manufacturing and infrastructure renaissance with hiring stipulations favoring union workers, Teamsters very much included. For which reason, among many others, a number of Teamster officers have taken issue with O’Brien’s Trumpian tilt.
As Jonathan Weisman has reported in The New York Times, the Teamsters national office has come down hard on those critics, including filing suit against a member discussion website for using the word “Teamster” in its title.
Why didn’t O’Brien use his allotted speaking time to ask the Republicans to adopt the pro-union initiatives the Democrats support. Republican members of Congress have to a person opposed, like the PRO Act, which would enable workers to unionize without fear of being fired, or raising the national minimum wage from its current $7.25?
Why didn’t O’Brien ask them to endorse the recent ruling from Biden’s OSHA that requires employers to provide heat breaks to workers in weather like the kind the nation is currently experiencing?
Or ask that Republicans on the NLRB not continue to work to destroy unions, or that Republicans, should Trump win, not scuttle the antitrust suit that Biden’s FTC has brought against Amazon, which the union is seeking to organize?
If O’Brien really wanted to do the nation a service, he would have spoken forcefully against Trump’s commitment to deporting undocumented immigrants.
Harold notes, in his years covering labor, he’s met a number of Teamsters who are themselves undocumented — the very workers and their families whom Trump has continually vowed to arrest, lock up, and deport. It’s atop Trump’s to-do list. It’s hard to see how this would be good for the Teamsters.
A breakdown of the 2020 presidential election exit poll showed that working-class (i.e., with no college degree) union members actually favored Trump over Biden by 6 percentage points (those with college degrees favored Biden over Trump by 48 percentage points).
Trump’s rants at enemies, real and imagined, can stir some of the same fuck-’em-all sensibilities that the legendary Jimmy Hoffa’s rants once stirred, though Hoffa put his rants in the service of building a powerful union that genuinely bettered members’ lives, while Trump puts his rants in the service of solely benefiting Donald Trump.
Years in sales have highlighted the concept of incremental approaches in certain situations. Bailout the union pensions a year at a time, for example. That tends to work well if the other party’s alternatives are not good. If the pension fund was underfunded by 7%, that’s one situation. If it was 70%, that’s completely another story. The bailout probably required an honest approach to the future incremental obligations. If so, well it may not seem fair, but the union likely views the whole matter as ancient history. That could bite them in some way in the future, but for now it doesn’t count for much.
I agree that Trump is most likely just selling snake oil with this “pro-labor” BS. What’s amazing to me is that he has been able to create that perception by merely taking a couple token actions as “proof” of intent.
That said, the worker vote should have been up for grabs ever since Biden joined the Senate, when Democrats abandoned the working class in favor of big money donors and college educated professionals. But Republicans, notorious for being anti-labor, never figured out how to capitalize on working class economic discontent…until Trump. Democrats’ support for shipping jobs abroad (NAFTA, China PNTR), refusal to act on union card check (which they campaigned on in 2008), and open immigration all served to severely limit any increases in real wages, while transferring income upwards. Everyone had to know what was going on– a bi-partisan coalition against workers’ interests, but nobody talked about it…until Trump and Bernie.
Now Democrats have been caught with egg all over their faces. True, real wages–after decades of stagnation–have risen by almost 2% under Biden when compared to 4Q2019 (excluding COVID effects.) But they rose almost 4% under Trump until 4Q2019. Employed full time: Median usual weekly real earnings: Wage and salary workers: 16 years and over (LES1252881600Q) | FRED | St. Louis Fed (stlouisfed.org)
I am in awe at how Trump was deftly able to capitalize on an opportunity that was just sitting there waiting to be seized. Of course, Bernie did the same thing but ran into stiff Democratic Party opposition, which ultimately won out.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think that Republicans’ support for workers’ interests is sincere. Trump’s rhetoric is merely posturing. It’s just a different version of Democrats’ rhetoric over the past forty years–empty words uttered to garner the votes of people they to hope to take for granted via empty gestures.
The question remains: why would anyone vote FOR either of these two evils. Personally, I am voting third party, as I have done for the past 30 years.
Many forget that Hoffa’s Teamsters have endorsed Republican presidential candidates in the past: Nixon, Reagan, and HW Bush.
For years the Teamsters were also associated (rightly or wrongly) with the mob. That is now the distant past, but in the distant past Trump was also associated (rightly or wrongly) with the mob. Just a point in common.
I still wonder why Democrats did nothing to raise the minimum wage when they controlled the White House, Senate and House from 2021 till 2023. The minimum wage has now not been raised since 2009.
The Democrats went for a raise to $15 per hour, but 8 Democratic Senators voted no. They could have then regrouped and gone for a reasonable increase to $10, but they never tried again.
There are still millions of American workers who make $7.25 per hour. An increase to $10 per hour would mean $5,720 more per year for a full time worker.
I’m a lifelong Democrat but damn I wish my political party was better.
@Jim,
I wish the Democrats were better than they are. They’re way better than the alternative. Yes, that’s a low bar, but there are only two choices in our winner-take-all system. I don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. YMMV.
Jim Han–precisely. Democrats had a filibuster-proof majority in 2009 and refused to raise or index the minimum wage. There are many other examples of Democrats’ perfidy. In a number of red states like Florida the minimum wage was on the ballot as an initiative. It was successful, but Democrats refused to seize on the opportunity to endorse it, and lost the election.
Yes, the perfect shouldn’t be the enemy of the very good, but exactly where is there much good in the behavior of Democrats’ wage and worker policies of the past 45 years? Mostly, they just assumed that they could rest on their abandoned New Deal laurels and that labor had no place else to go with their votes. Now pay-back time has arrived, much as workers will probably soon regret voting for the other evil this year.
@John,
LOL! Because the environment, foreign policy, Medicare, Social Security, public health, reproductive choice, education and fair voting don’t matter. Just the minimum wage. Feh.
I’ve never been a single issue voter, so I’ll vote for the Democrat. YMMV.
Joel–a wise Democrat once said, “it’s the economy, stupid.” That was before he championed NAFTA. Politicians who dismiss or trivialize kitchen table issues do so at their own peril. But they can get away with as long as both parties agree that it’s outside the Overton Window.
@John,
The people’s business includes a lot of things besides minimum wage. Politicians who dismiss or trivialize job creation do so at their own peril. Politicians who dismiss or trivialize women’s reproductive rights do so at their own peril. Politicians who dismiss or trivialize climate change do so at their own peril. Each of those things have a huge impact on the economy.
Stronger unions would also have an effect on wages and other kitchen table issues.
@Arne,
Good catch. Add to that, the minimum wage wasn’t the only issue before the Senate during that short interval.
Arne,
You are referencing a different time frame than me. I was referring to the period of Joe Biden’s first two years, 21 till 23. There were definitely Republicans who were also open to raising the minimum wage as well.
Talk about perfect being the enemy of the good, the Democrats got trapped with a $15 minimum but never realized that $10 or $12 is a very substantive raise.
John H,
No, the minimum wage was raised in 2009, the last time it was raised.