Never before have so few with so much promised to take away so much from so many, and then laugh their asses off as the so many with so little vote for the so few with so much.
– Kentuckian Jim Pence, union retiree and publisher of the Hillbilly Report blog.
The meme resonated with a trio of veteran Kentucky labor activists: “STOP CLAIMING TO BE A ‘PROUD UNION MEMBER’ THEN VOTE FOR SOMEONE THAT HATES UNIONS.”
“You can’t be both,” said Bill Londrigan of Waddy, president-emeritus of the Kentucky State AFL-CIO.
“This is the problem,” said Kirk Gillenwaters, a Bullitt countian, president of the Kentucky Alliance for Retired Americans and a Louisville United Auto Workers Local 862 retiree. “A lot of us hear it from members who claim to be ‘proud union members’ and vote for politicians who have the worst records on union issues.” He name checked Donald Trump.
“I really can’t figure it out, and I’ve damn near given up trying to figure it out because it drives me nuts,” said Louisvillian Steve Barger, Kentucky ARA secretary-treasurer and former secretary-treasurer of the Kentucky Regional Council of Carpenters.
Unions rate Trump one of the most anti-union presidents ever.
Of late, Trump has been trying to wipe out federal government unions. Maybe he figures “solidarity,” that old union byword, is dead and buried or that private sector unions don’t care that he’s busting federal employee unions as long as he leaves them alone.
But dozens of private sector unions-industrial, construction and professional, have issued official statements of solidarity with the American Federation of Government Employees and other federal unions Trump has in his crosshairs.
Trump’s holy war against private sector unions is part of his broad-front assault on organized labor that began after he was sworn in for the first time. He continues to show “his true colors as an anti-worker president,” wrote Century Foundation Senior Fellow Julie Su last month. “With each new action, the Trump administration exposes itself for what it is: hostile to the needs of America’s workers and willing to use every means to turn the clock back on the progress made to advance workers’ rights. Its latest announcement of upcoming rules is a corporate wish list of dangerous wage-cutting, discrimination-promoting, anti-opportunity, and injury-inducing actions that take a torch to hard-won worker protections. The Make America Great Again for Exploitation crowd may cheer, but the rest of us can’t let it happen.”
“Trump’s grip on the union rank-and-file”
Meanwhile, Trump is still claiming that most union workers on the job are in his corner. “Trump’s grip on the union rank-and-file” headlined a POLITICO story published shortly before he won again last year.
But post-election data belies that common media narrative reflected in POLITICO. A headline from the Center for American Progress pointed out: “While Other Voters Moved Away From the Democrats, Union Members Shifted Toward Harris in 2024.”
The subhead added, “Although many demographic groups shifted their votes to favor Donald Trump in 2024 compared to 2020, Kamala Harris increased [italics mine] Democratic support among union voters.”
The story crunched the numbers to back up the headline.
“Donald Trump is a scab!”
If you pack a union card — or even if you don’t — odds are you’ve probably heard self-described “proud union members” brag that they voted for Trump. “I’m 100 percent union,” a rank-and-file retiree in my neck of the deep western Kentucky woods boasted. The retiree is 100 percent Trump.
Gillenwaters often encounters guys like the MAGA union guy, sometimes when he is invited to speak to members of his old local. He doesn’t sugarcoat his message that Trump is a union buster. The UAW endorsed Kamala Harris and UAW President Shawn Fain declared “Donald Trump is a scab!”
“I tell them you’re the ones electing these [anti-union] individuals in office, not me,” Gillenwaters said.
Barger conceded that the so-called social issues — another veteran Kentucky building trades leader called them “The Three Gs: God, guns and gays” — beat out bread-and-butter labor issues with many union members. He cited a Democratic Jefferson County commissioner the Carpenters endorsed. The lawmaker was pro-union and pro-gay rights.
“Some of my folks called and asked me why we were supporting a ‘queer lover.’ The guy was 100 percent for us. But he was automatically a bad guy because he supported equal rights for gays.”
Unions endorse candidates on the issues, not party labels
Londrigan said unions endorse candidates based on where they stand on union issues, not on party labels. “We support candidates who support us, who support the right of collective bargaining, who support good wages and benefits for everyday workers, including healthcare and retirement security. Those should be the priorities of working people.”
Time was, they were. For decades, most union members voted their pocketbooks and overwhelmingly cast Democratic ballots, the trend starting in the 1930s with President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who championed unions as part of the New Deal program to fight the Great Depression. Most historians consider Roosevelt the most pro-union president, though Joe Biden might rival FDR for the title.
“If I went to work in a factory the first thing I’d do would be to join a union,” Roosevelt famously said. (The CIO even made a poster featuring the quote.)
Roosevelt signed into law the 1935 Wagner Act. Passed by a Democratic Congress, the historic measure safeguarded the right of workers to unionize, bargain collectively, and strike.
“History will tell you that the Democrats ramrodded every meaningful piece of legislation for the benefit of working people,” said the late J.R. Gray, a former Kentucky state representative, Machinists union official, and state labor secretary.
Gray, a Benton Democrat, was on solid historical ground, though there were once some pro-labor Republicans in Congress and in statehouses. They’re all but gone, especially in Washington, as the AFL-CIO’s Legislative Scorecard points out.
On a scale of 0 to 100 percent, the scorecard rates all U.S. representatives and all senators on where they “stand on issues important to working families, including strengthening Social Security and Medicare, freedom to join a union, improving workplace safety, and more.”
The latest scorecard is from 2023. The average score for all House members was 99 percent for Democrats and six percent for Republicans. Senate scores were even more lopsided: Democrats 100 percent; Republicans three percent.
Even so, since at least the 1980s, anti-labor Republicans have made significant inroads in working class households by pandering on the social issues, which today also include trans rights; Diversity, Equity and Inclusion; and “wokeism.”
In “Politics in America: The American Right,” her detailed account of how the corporate class strives to divide the working class, retired Wisconsin AFL-CIO research and policy director Joanne Ricca showed how the Religious Right allied itself with the corporate right. The former, she wrote, uses “scripture to mask Right Wing ideology.”
She explained, “Now they could convince sincere middle and working-class people to vote against their own economic interest by manipulating their religious faith. Now they would be beyond criticism. They could attack anyone who tried to expose the real pro-corporate, anti-democratic agenda as being anti-Christian.”
Thus, she wrote, “politics was no longer a case of ‘render unto Caesar’ among white Protestant evangelicals. The preachers-turned-political leaders ... urged people in the pews to become politically active” and proclaimed “that the road to salvation lay in the Bible and the ballot box.”
In talking with fellow union members, active and retired, Barger, Londrigan and Gillenwaters hit hard on economic issues. “When they say ‘Biden didn’t do anything for working people,’ I remind them of the American Rescue Plan and the Inflation Reduction Act,” Gillenwaters said. “I tell guys in the building trades they’re on the job right now because of the Inflation Reduction Act. Not a single Republican voted for either bill.”
He concluded. “I don’t want to hear anybody say he’s ‘100 percent union’ and a diehard Trumpster because you can’t be both.”
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