Donald Trump Wants to Poison the Soul of the Labor Movement

With Trump all but certain to be the Republican nominee in this year’s presidential election, he is ramping up his attempts to convince workers they have ​“no better friend” than him, including by courting International Brotherhood of Teamsters General President Sean O’Brien in an attempt to secure the union’s endorsement. Speaking to reporters inside Teamsters’ national headquarters immediately after a meeting with O’Brien on January 31, Trump characteristically spewed vitriol at migrants. ​“I can tell you, they come from jails and prisons, they come from mental institutions and insane asylums, and they’re terrorists. They have a lot of terrorists coming too. And we don’t want them,” the former president said, standing in front of a Teamsters flag. ​“The unions and the Teamsters, if they don’t have [the southern border] closed down, they’re not gonna exist. They’re not gonna be able to exist.”

If Trump’s failed ploy to undermine the UAW strike last year wasn’t enough evidence of his anti-worker convictions, his presidential track record tells a similar story.

During his four years in the White House, Trump stacked federal agencies and courts with corporate lawyers, union busters, wealthy donors, corrupt CEOs, and anti-labor judges who, among other things, made millions of workers ineligible for overtime pay, made workplaces less safe, made it harder for workers to unionize and advocate for themselves, and made it easier for bosses to cheat their employees out of tips and wages. He opposed any increase to the minimum wage, celebrated a massive tax giveaway to the rich, and never offered a word of support to workers on strike. By shutting down the government for 35 days in 2018 and 2019 in what was widely seen as a political stunt, he forced 1.8 million federal employees and contract workers to go a month without pay.

But besides Trump’s clearly boss-friendly policies, he is bad for workers on a deeper level. As his response to the UAW’s stand-up strike illustrates, Trump is determined to poison the soul of the labor movement itself through his relentless efforts to impede working-class solidarity.

Just as more and more U.S. workers are correctly identifying the billionaire class as the source of their economic woes, Trump tells them their real enemy is their fellow workers from other countries, like migrants desperately seeking asylum, or Chinese workers making electric vehicle batteries.

Similarly, just as U.S. workers are rapidly organizing, using their collective power to take on corporate greed and urging peace and diplomacy in world affairs, Trump tells them to stand down because all they really need is his protection against foreigners through high tariffs, sealed borders, and an ever more bloated military budget.

During some of the ugliest chapters in its history, the mainstream of the U.S. labor movement embraced xenophobia, racial exclusion, jingoism, and militarism to benefit a small, privileged stratum of the working class at the expense of the vast majority of workers, both at home and abroad. But thankfully, organized labor in this country has gradually become more inclusive and dedicated to social justice, while socialists and progressives continue pushing the movement in a more class conscious and internationalist direction—including by successfully pressing major unions to call for a cease-fire in Gaza.

Trump’s mendacious appeals to working-class voters are designed to pull key segments of the labor movement backward — particularly union members in manufacturing — by blaming their troubles not on the rapacious greed of multinational corporations and the politicians who give them free rein, but rather on China, immigrants and efforts to protect the planet from ecological disaster.

That’s why it’s important that union organizers and labor leaders not only call out Trump’s obvious lies about his supposedly pro-worker positions, but also challenge the underlying premise of his message. Just as UAW members disregarded Trump’s faux pro-worker posturing last year and struck a blow against unequal wage tiers at the Big Three, U.S. labor more generally should stand with workers everywhere to fight against an unequal global economy that pits workers against each other to the advantage of wealthy bosses like Trump.

Fain recently put this approach on display, telling UAW members, ​“Donald Trump is a scab. Donald Trump is a billionaire and that is who he represents. If Donald Trump ever worked in an auto plant, he wouldn’t be a UAW member, he would be a company man trying to squeeze the American worker.”