new york
CNN
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Donald Trump arrives in Michigan on Wednesday with far more support among blue-collar union workers than many previous Republican presidential candidates. But his record as president has been decidedly anti-union.
“I want a future that protects American workers, not foreign workers,” he said at a rally in Detroit on Wednesday, praising blue-collar workers at the beginning of his speech.
But Trump’s appointments to the National Labor Relations Board, which oversees labor relations at most companies, and to the courts, particularly the Supreme Court, have been the biggest setbacks for unions since Trump took office in 2017. has brought.
“He doesn’t support worker solidarity, collective bargaining or the right to strike,” said Cathy, a union lawyer who was an NLRB attorney during the Clinton administration and now heads Cornell University’s Buffalo, New York, office.・Mr. Clayton said. Industrial labor relations. “Other Republican presidents have said they are pro-business or think the Labor Party is too powerful. He told working Americans that everything he did was anti-union. Despite this, he said he was on their side.
During President Trump’s term, the NLRB commissioners he appointed made it more difficult for unions to gain representation in non-union workplaces, increasing the time between unions applying for representation and elections being held. It was extended, resulting in more time for management to campaign against the union. With employees.
The Biden NLRB is moving to roll back those rules and make it easier to unionize after being struck down by the courts.
The Trump Supreme Court also issued the following ruling: Devastating judgment against public sector unions, representing roughly the same number of union members as private companies. A 2018 ruling by Trump-appointed Judge Neil Gorsuch, who cast the decisive fifth vote, makes it easier for public employees across the country to opt out of paying union dues, even if their workplace is unionized. Become.
President Trump famously promised to prevent companies from moving operations overseas or closing. His most vocal pledge was to prevent GM from closing its large assembly plant in Lordstown, Ohio.
In a 2017 speech in nearby Youngstown, he assured residents that manufacturing jobs would return to the area, telling the audience:Don’t move.don’t sell your house”
But two years later, GM closed the factorydespite President Trump. Call GM CEO Mary Barra and attacks on the company’s closure plans.Lordstown Motors, which bought the factory with plans to eventually employ thousands of workers, lost more money than it did on pickup trucks and was already filed for bankruptcy The company then ceased operations.
Trump has promised to impose steep tariffs on cars imported from Mexico, a promise he reiterated during his campaign. But his 2020 revised version of the North American Free Trade Agreement, long unpopular among many blue-collar workers, does not impose such tariffs on cars coming from Mexico and does not allow them to cross the U.S. border. It did little to change the flow of cars crossing.
President Trump has created auto-related jobs and the Biden administration has claimed that they are destroying auto-related jobs, but Michigan has been in the state since February 2017, right after President Trump took office, until 2020, just before the start of the auto industry. Through February 2019, 1,900 auto manufacturing jobs, or 4% of the total, were lost. Pandemic, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The state added 1,800 auto-related jobs from February 2021, Biden’s first month in office, to February of this year.
As President Trump visits Michigan amid turmoil, Strike by the United Auto Workers Union He does so after shooting union leaders striking against General Motors, Ford, and Stellantis.
He was speaking at Drake Enterprises, a nonunion auto parts manufacturer in Macomb County, outside Detroit, which is not involved in the UAW strike. UAW officials said they did not consider Trump’s visit to the company a show of support for the striking autoworkers, even if there were UAW members in the crowd.
Trump has frequently clashed with labor unions during his time in office, perhaps more than any president before his first election. And he and the UAW leadership have been shooting at each other for some time.
On Labor Day, as the industry gears up for the union’s first simultaneous strikes against three automakers, President Trump spoke out against the Biden administration’s efforts to push for a switch from gas-powered cars to electric vehicles. and attacked both management and union leadership for not fighting further. If that happened, he predicted, the U.S. auto industry would be destroyed.
“If union bosses and CEOs refuse to fight back against crooked Joe Biden by forcing the repeal of this disastrous electric vehicle program, then they are not pro-labor, they are not your allies. No, you can see they are not pro-labor. There are some deals going on,” he said in a recorded message.
President Trump then urged UAW members to stop paying union dues.
“You shouldn’t pay your dues because we’re going to sell you to hell. You’re going to hell. There’s going to be no jobs. All those cars are going to be made in China,” he said. said.
Meanwhile, the UAW has criticized the industry’s EV transformation plans and has so far withheld its support for Biden, but UAW Chairman Sean Fein has directed his sharpest attack on Trump. There is. He said Wednesday, a day after Fein met with Biden during a visit to GM’s picket line, that he did not plan to meet him when he visits Michigan.
“I don’t think there’s any point in meeting him, because I don’t think this guy has any idea what the workers stand for, what the working class stands for.” Fein told CNN on Tuesday. “He serves the billionaire class, and that’s the problem with this country.”
Asked if that was an endorsement of Biden, Fein said: “I’m not endorsing anyone. I’m just stating frankly how I view the former president.” I answered.
Trump support by ordinary people
Trump campaign staffers said they did not believe union leadership necessarily represented the views of rank-and-file union members.
“The reality is that there is a disconnect between the political leadership of some unions and the working middle class workers they claim to represent,” said a senior campaign adviser to President Trump. Jason Miller told CNN..
And according to some polls, about 40% of auto workers supported Trump in the last election, said Art Wheaton, director of labor studies at Cornell University’s ILR School in Buffalo.
On Wednesday night, President Trump told a rally in Michigan that EVs will destroy the U.S. auto industry.
“You can be loyal to American workers, or you can be loyal to environmental freaks. You can’t be loyal to both,” he said.
Wheaton and other labor professors argue that Trump’s hard-line stance on imports and many autoworkers’ They say criticism of EVs, which they see as a threat to union jobs, is working well among union members. .
“you hear [that support for Trump] on the picket line. There are quite a few people who like his message,” Wheaton said.
“He made some really powerful comments about outsourcing jobs and moving factories offshore,” said Todd Vachon, a labor studies professor at Rutgers University. “I had not heard anything like that from either party until then.
And beyond issues of labor law and labor relations, many ordinary people support President Trump on issues other than labor.
“People who work in the field, blue collar, average people who work hourly in the Big Three, supported Donald Trump because they have traditional values. They own guns. They don’t want their gun rights taken away or restricted. They’re primarily anti-abortion,” said Brian Pannebecker, an ardent Trump supporter and president of Trump’s autoworkers union. he said.
– CNN’s Kristen Holmes, Alaina Treen and Danielle Strauss contributed to this report.
