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Will America’s labor unions be endorsing a Republican for president this year?
If that sounds like a crazy idea, be aware that we are in a political environment, and have a Republican president, unlike any other.
Last week’s endorsement of Trump by the National Association of Police Officers (NAPO), which had twice endorsed Barack Obama, could open the floodgates of union endorsements that would radically change the electoral equation on Nov. 3, and the future of labor in America.
NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF POLICE ORGANIZATIONS ENDORSES TRUMP, AFTER BACKING BIDEN AS VP IN '08, '12
Since the days of FDR, unions like the AFL-CIO and Teamsters have lined up firmly with the Democratic Party, while Republicans are generally seen as the tools of big business and enemies of organized labor.
Donald Trump is the first Republican president who could decisively reverse that trend.
In the end, however, it’s not so much the labor unions who will save Donald Trump. It’s Trump who may save the labor unions.
Today’s unions find themselves in a precarious position. Their share of the American workforce has been steadily falling for decades. Meanwhile, the organized labor spotlight has been taken over by public sector unions like SEIU and NEA, which have a political agenda far to the left of the average AFL-CIO or Teamsters member.
Even so, union leaders have tended to stick with Democrats — that is, until they meet Donald Trump.
He’s spent his entire career working with unions in New York; he also speaks “blue-collar” better than any Republican since Abe Lincoln.
He came to the presidency blasting the trade deals with China that doomed America’s manufacturing base. As president, he renegotiated NAFTA, another union sore point. His trade and manufacturing advisor Peter Navarro is a proven friend of labor, who has advocated restoring our defense industrial base and shipbuilding industry—both strongholds of organized union labor.
By comparison, Joe Biden’s record is a political train wreck.
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Even though candidate Barack Obama enthusiastically courted Big Labor support, and Biden likes to pretend he’s got the unions’ back, when Obama and Biden ran the White House unions actually lost half a million members. Overall, the Obama years saw some 300,000 manufacturing jobs get swept into oblivion — jobs that, as Obama famously said at a town hall in June 2016, “are just not going to come back.” He even scoffed that Donald Trump would need a “magic wand” to make that happen.
Well, Trump found that wand. A 2018 Texas Public Policy Foundation study found that compared to the last 21 months of the Obama administration, the first 21 months of the Trump presidency boosted manufacturing employment by 3.1 percent — meaning that ten times more manufacturing jobs were added under Trump, compared to the Obama-Biden years.
Of course, labor unions still show declining membership, which is at its lowest ebb since 1983—while the onset of COVID-19 and the Great Lockdown has put paid to much of that manufacturing surge.
Still, a second Trump term bolstered by union support would mean an economic resurgence geared toward those industries where union members are crucial, from our defense industrial base to infrastructure projects.
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By contrast, a Biden presidency promises labor only more unemployment checks, especially in the energy industry which is a specific target of Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal. According to a study by the National Ocean Industries Association, Biden’s offshore drilling ban alone could cost 200,000 or more jobs.
Even worse, the radical turn among Democrats has fomented violence in the streets and sustained attacks on police departments and America’s heritage, as well as imposing a state-by-state lockdown to cripple Trump’s economic rebound.
All in all, Democrats in 2020 offer a hard-left agenda that ought to worry workers of every color, creed and industry, including those belonging to unions.
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It’s not too late for Trump to seek out union support for major portions of his agenda, from reshoring manufacturing and decoupling from China to basic law and order issues.
The question is, whether the unions realize that their future may also be at stake in November, not to mention the country’s.
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