Thirty-nine percent of voters with no college education approve the job performance of Trump. But that is because organized labor is a popular entity among even more voters. Make a move, Democrats.
Ishraq Ahmed Hashmi CEO
East West News
In fact, the level of support the Republican
Party garners among the working class is simply impressive. A NYT/SIENA Poll
conducted in August revealed that 53% of likely voters without college
education endorsed Trump while only 39% would vote for Biden, the most
pro-labor president since Harry Truman. The American Prospect published an
interview earlier this week in which it queried whether it is even possible to
‘turn these numbers around’. To achieve this, Democrats have to make sure that
people are informed about GOP’s intentions to dismantle unions, although today,
unions have more support than they have had in the last six decades with 67%
approval rating. What’s more, more than one-third of Republican would agree
that labor unions are good for the country.
Mike Johnson, or the Religious Zealot, is
speechless over Trump’s womanizing.
These Republican politicians do not hide their
disdain for the ‘working class’. Every time GOP regains the House of
Representatives it changes the name of the Education and Labor Committee to
‘Education and the Work’, because ‘Labor’ is an anathema to Republicans.” On
Wednesday, the committee held its fifth union-bashing hearing since Republicans
regained the House in 2023, this one under the heading “Big Labor Lies: Union
interference with the electoral process to subvert the free and fair elections”
Regarding that impolite saying, “Big Labor.” As
I have indicated in the past, it is so removed from the current state that
union membership rate is as low as 6% in the private sector that
using such a name feels as if one is teasing a man without hair to call him
‘Curly’.
It highlights that even at the golden age, in
1954, barely one-third of the workplaces in the private sector were unionized.
The position of labor has diminished in recent years but it was always the
underdog and management were always the giant. Recently, however, there are
indications that it is beginning to stir again, for example, the so-called ‘hot
labor summer’ last year with strikes by unions of hotel employees,
screenwriters, nurses and other with the United Auto Workers strike last fall.
The GOP strategy is quite clear in this context, to suppress any emergence of
such movement at its infancy.
It is possible for you to be convinced that
Republicans only want to hate something about labor but not labor as an entity.
On Wednesday, the Republican Bob Good washed that myth right up at the hearing.
“That’s the truth,” he said: unions are antithetical to a good economy.”
They lead to the high, unreasonable wages that
are detrimental to competitiveness; they result in tremendously heightened
costs; they discourage productivity; they foster antagonistic, detrimental
organizational relations, highly toxic organizational climate; they shield non
performers or worse; all in all, the worth of unions [has been] eradicating
from the world for a very long time. We have a relatively long time ago enacted
laws that improved the previous unfair treatment of working conditions.
Moderate competitive forces along with American cultures state that union is
useful at best and detrimental at worst. What finer points of this brief
account are beyond the understanding of Donald Trump’s voters without college
degrees?
It is very clear that Trump detests unions which
are as much despised by Good. Some of the anti-union actions that he took while
serving as the president were. Electing anti-union members to the National
Labor Relation Board and extending the time for union election, making it hard
for unions to win; making it easier for corporations to avoid the blame of
labor violations by their subcontractors; allowing employer to prohibit labor
unions from reaching out to workers, through company email among other measures.
Trump also made it possible to exclude about
eight million of workers from gaining eligibility for overtime; never attempted
to increase the minimum wage from $7. Failing to raise the hourly minimum
wage (though he campaigned in 2016 to do so only after a backlash against
his earlier posts promising to eliminate it entirely); eliminated a regulation
forbidding employers to demand that employees sign non-suit agreements as a
condition of employment; presiding over a 75,000 manufacturing job loss (he had
lost 43,000 the year before the Covid-19 epidemic); and conducting the fewest
federal workplace safety inspections Very incomplete is the list of equity that
I present below. There is more here and here.
Could it be even worse if Donald Trump is
re-elected again for another four years? By Tuesday, CNBC’s Eamon Javers
tweeted ‘The outsiders, conservative economic thinkers, have produced… a
set of worker-first, anti-corporate elite policy proposals that are popular
within the party and especially the Trump orbit. ’It contained a long list of recommendations
as follows, none of which mentioning labor unions or workers. “However,” Javers
observed, “This is not yet the prevailing body of Republican economic thinking
within Washington.” That is a stern saying, so to speak! It will never be the
leading or main kind.
Much closer to what “Trump’s economic circles”
actually is Trump’s own economic forum. The America First Policy Institute is
headed by Linda McMahon who previously served as the head of the Small Business
Administration and later a Pro- Trump Super PAC. She wrote an op-ed for the
Daily Caller last June criticizing the Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer for
signing into law a repeal of right to work law in Michigan. This law had
prohibited the unions from demanding “fair share” fees from the members who were
not in the unions. These are indeed strategies in which workers are provided
with an effective bargaining tool that crafts laws that can economically
cripple unions.
Some other writings in AFPI have focused on
unions in the Veterans Administration and the Transportation Security
Administration. The AFPI is a HQ for future appointments for a second Trump
term and is demonstrably anti-union.
Republicans who plan to denounce unions for
restraint of trade, (for instance by assessment of fair share fees) has no
qualm about restraint of managers to decide what to do when workers undertake
to organize. I’ve mentioned a bill in the past that was written by the American
Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, which has been funded by the Koch
brothers and is currently in law in Tennessee, Georgia and Alabama. Several
southern states offer fabulous incentives to automakers and other manufacturing
companies to set up factories in their region. The ALEC bill would prohibit
pre-emptive relief of such form of tax credit to any company that categorically
recognizes a union voluntarily, namely without NLRA sponsored elections. Good
has introduced legislation (accompanied, among others, by a Rep from
Florida Matt Gaetz) that would go ALEC one better by prohibiting management
from agreeing to remain neutral in a union election, active or threatened, as
Microsoft did in December. According to an interview
in a press release, Good said that the Trump administration designed
the idea.
Another notice by the only Democratic witness,
Lynn Rhinehart of the Economic Policy Institute, was taken at Wednesday’s
hearing is the anti-labor bill sponsored by a Republican member of the
Education and the Workforce Committee, Rick Allen of Georgia. The bill put
forward changes to the existing Illinois statute regarding unfair labor
practices where it became prohibited for an employer to blacklist a candidate
due to that individual’s membership in a labor union which is actually commonly
known as labor union “salting.”
This, according to Rhinehart, is “a solution in
search of a problem since hiring one professional-union officer doesn’t ensure
that the remainder of the workers will do the same. The intention of this bill,
she said, is to “pave way for sheer anti-union discrimination, which has been
unlawful since enactment of the [National Labor Relations Act of 1935].”
The Biden record on labor, however, is entirely
different, and it is quite pathetic that it is only anti-labor Republicans who
are most likely to enlighten one about this since they believe that the
knowledge will make one shudder. As I have pointed out before, there Democrats
who are vaguely associated with the Biden administration but criminally avoid
making the public aware of Biden’s great record on working-class issues for the
fear that the new college-educated demographic will bolt the party (even though
they are to the left of the working-class voters). Thus, it was left to Good,
on Wednesday, to assert that Biden “provided a vision of his intention to
govern as the most pro-union president in history. Indeed, President Biden has
delivered on his part and has emerged as the most partisan and Big Labor
president in the White House since Franklin Roosevelt. ” It costs money to get
the exposure, and this they have gotten it for free.
I’m also thank Republican Congresswoman Virginia
Foxx, the chair of the full Committee on Labor and the Workforce, and possibly
the most anti-union legislator in the history of the United States, for
pointing me to recent initiatives by the Biden administration on behalf of the
United Auto Workers of which I was previously unaware. “There must have been
also pressure from the U. S. government on the German government on Mercedes
attitude towards the election,” Foxx said. That the election is the union
election at a Mercedes plant in Tuscaloosa, Alabama which the UAW lost last
week. Foxx based her on Bloomberg report by Josh Edelson, which I never came
across.
The piece stated that unidentified individuals
from the Biden administration opposed to Mercedes’ union busting in Tuscaloosa
to unidentified people in Germany for potential violations of both American and
German legal requirements. The European Union expressed the same views to the
German government as did the UAW itself. In response to this, Olof Gill, a
spokesperson of the European Commission (that which represents the EU
overseas), told Edelson, “We expect them to respect both local law and European
values.” Thus, the investigation is now underway.
The particular German law is Act of 20 July 2021
on Corporate Due Diligence Obligations, according to which any company
established in Germany or foreign company employing more than thousand people
in Germany is bound by its regulation. These companies are restricted from
participating in activities (primarily, but not only through their
contractors/suppliers) which infringe on human rights, which are described
(inter alia) as ‘failure to respect employee’s freedom of association whereby
they have the right to form unions’ In its provisions, the law holds: ‘use of
formation, joining or membership in a trade union must not be a basis for
discrimination or punishment.” This is relevant because the UAW claims the
following among other; Mercedes fired a union supporter diagnosed with stage 4
cancer who previously had been exempted from the company policy against the use
of cell phones so he could check on the availability of a particular
chemotherapy. The UAW commented that the union supporter’s supervisor has
recently been known to intimidate union supporters. This gravely ill person,
the UAW stated that the supervisor informed him that they had zero tolerance
policy when it came to cell phones and then dismissed him.
It is imperative that the working-class voters
such as the members of the UKIP get to know about such issues. Unluckily, most
of them do not read the news, although the latter does not give much emphasis
on labor regulation.
This week, the nonprofit association In Union
and political strategist Mike Lux published a report where they stated that
among all the working-class voters, a fairly large share of them are double
haters, meaning that they despise both Biden and Trump, third-party enthusiasts
or voters that are still undecided. “Their voters have recently comprised a
large number of Democratic supporters,” Lux noted, “These are favorite and
contestable DEMs, and we should allocate much effort onto them.”
The challenge is identifying a person to pass
this message with these voters having confidence and trust in him. “That could
be friends,” Lux responded; “it could be organizations they developed liking
and trust for, such as labor unions they value.” If these voters care about
labor unions, then they should know how actively Good, Allen, Foxx, and Trump
are pushing to harm labor unions. There is nothing more crucial in 2024 because
unless the working-class majority stands up for him Biden cannot win.
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