Trump says he supports workers, but his history shows otherwise

Donald Trump spoke in Detroit on Wednesday, evidently seeking some political benefit from the autoworkers’ strike, saying he has always had workers’ backs.

But Michigan’s workers – indeed, all workers – should remember that in his four years as president, Trump and his administration did far more to stab workers in the back than to have their backs.

Trump rolled back Obama-era protections that would have extended overtime pay to millions more workers. He didn’t lift a finger to raise the federal minimum wage, which has remained at a low $7.25 an hour since 2009.

Trump got one important piece of legislation through Congress: $1.5 trillion in tax cuts that went overwhelmingly to the rich and corporations, while giving peanuts to typical workers like the UAW members on strike.

As for unions, Trump doesn’t really support unions – what he supports is having union members support him. Trump has often sought to turn union members against their union leaders – a move that weakens unions and their ability to stand up to corporations and demand better pay and conditions.

In recent weeks, Trump has all but declared war on UAW leaders, saying that union members “are being sold down the river by their leadership.”

Trump even called on union members to stop paying union dues, a statement that would only come from someone who wants to cripple unions rather than strengthen them.

Trump’s nominees to the National Labor Relations Board repeatedly favored corporations over unions, often acting in ways that made it harder for workers to unionize.

Trump likes to boast that under him we had the best economy ever – something many other presidents, not to mention economists, would quarrel with. Job growth, for instance, has been far slower under Trump than Biden. In Biden’s first 31 months in office, through this past August, the nation added 403,000 jobs a month on average; in Trump’s first 31 months, it added 181,000 a month (that was before the pandemic hit).

Workers shouldn’t be fooled. When Trump tells workers he has your backs, it’s like a fox telling the hens, “I have your backs.”

Steven Greenhouse is a senior fellow at The Century Foundation, a think tank, and the author of the book, “Beaten Down, Worked Up: The Past, Present, and Future of American Labor.” This column first published in the Detroit Free Press.