Trump could split labor
From his very first words, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka snapped heads across the Democratic coalition when he appeared on Fox Business Network last week to assess President Trump’s first speech to Congress.
“I think it was probably one of his finest moments,” Trumka told Maria Bartiromo. Over the next five minutes, Trumka criticized some aspects of Trump’s agenda. But mostly he emphasized his agreement with the new president on issues such as trade and immigration.
With his surprisingly warm appraisal, Trumka — who also met privately with Trump on Tuesday — captured how the administration’s disruptive agenda is accelerating the class inversion reshaping American politics. Both on cultural and economic grounds, Trump’s brusque, racially tinged nationalism is generating broad resistance among college-educated voters of all races. But that same message continues to demonstrate enormous appeal for working-class whites. And although there’s little evidence that it has done so yet, Trump’s aides hope his “America First” agenda will eventually attract blue-collar African Americans and Hispanics, too.
Even without those inroads, November’s cresting wave of white blue-collar support for Trump already carried him deeply into union ranks. In 2012, President Obama beat Mitt Romney among households that included a union member by 18 percentage points. Trump cut that margin exactly in half, losing to Hillary Clinton in union households by just nine points; Trump actually carried most whites in such households.
That history seemed to sit heavily on Trumka’s shoulders. He denounced elements of the agenda that Trump and congressional Republicans are advancing, such as their plans to cut corporate taxes.
But on trade, he praised the president for promising to reopen the North American Free Trade Agreement and abandoning Obama’s proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership. He said he was “pleasantly surprised” to hear Trump say that legal immigrants, not just those in the country illegally, are worsening the situation for American workers.
While many Democrats view Trump’s browbeating of individual companies to invest more in the United States as something between symbolism and a shell game, Trumka vouched for its value. “You can look at the jobs he didn’t save,” he said, “or you can say, if he saved one job by speaking out, to that one family, that’s the most important thing in their lives.” Likewise, while many Democratic strategists believe that an appeal to racial resentment was central to Trump’s victory, Trumka readily agreed with Bartiromo that the president won because voters felt left behind economically.
In other words, even with the occasional jab at the president, Trumka’s interview offered plenty of clips that presidential advisor Stephen Bannon would be happy to insert into Trump 2020 commercials in Ohio, Michigan and Pennsylvania.
In an interview, AFL-CIO spokesman Josh Goldstein walked back one point from Trumka’s remarks. During last week’s speech, Trump proposed tilting future admission of legal immigrants toward a “meritbased system” that favors skilled workers and deemphasizes family reunification, which he suggested imports too many unskilled people. Goldstein said the AFL-CIO opposes reorienting legal immigration in this way, and that Trumka was referring to a program that imports high-skilled workers on temporary visas.
Even with that qualification, a high-ranking labor official who spoke anonymously to candidly discuss internal federation politics said that Trumka’s sunny interview reflects a larger reality: Although labor can unify to fight Trump on issues that directly affect its core interests, it is unlikely to denounce him as systematically as other cornerstone Democratic groups.
Behind the hesitation is a fundamental split between two groups — the craft, building trade and industrial unions where Trump generated significant support, and the service, teacher and public-employee unions where he’s anathema. “The nature of how diverse the labor movement is would make the resistance posture untenable,” the official said, noting that 50% of some unions’ members voted for Trump. “The federation has a very difficult job of straddling that and the unions where 70% voted for Clinton.”
Richard Nixon promoted affirmative-action programs for construction projects partly to split the Democratic coalition by pitting organized labor against African Americans. The unions could soon face another such wedge: While the AFL-CIO has opposed Trump’s plan to build a wall at the U.S.-Mexico border, it has not moved to pressure unions to boycott the project. Participating in construction would infuriate Hispanic leaders, including those within labor’s ranks, but as journalist Harold Meyerson has observed, a boycott would trigger opposition from building trade unions where Trump ran well.
As organized labor grows more racially diverse, the blue-collar whites most drawn to Trump are shrinking, just as they are in the overall electorate. Unless Trump succeeds in attracting skeptical working-class blacks and Hispanics, Trumka will face increasing pressure to more firmly oppose the president. But forcing unions to hedge their bets on opposing Trump, even temporarily, can only increase the GOP’s odds of avoiding losses in 2018 — and holding the White House in 2020.
Ronald Brownstein is a senior
editor at the Atlantic.