Vice President Kamala Harris addresses union supporters Friday at a rally held in the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers union hall in Janesville, Wisconsin. (Erik Gunn | Wisconsin Examiner)
If the speech Vice President Kamala Harris delivered one week before Election Day on the Ellipse in Washington, D.C., was her presidential campaign’s closing argument, her talk Friday to a packed Wisconsin union hall was a sequel — a closing argument directed at the working class.
Harris made an unapologetic pro-union message that equaled the one President Joe Biden has delivered throughout his four years in the White House. In the process, she set herself — and the Democratic ticket — apart from Republican former President Donald Trump.
“We have an opportunity in this election to turn the page on a decade of Donald Trump, who has spent full time trying to have the American people point fingers at each other. Full time trying to divide us, have people be afraid of each other. And folks are exhausted with this stuff,” Harris said.
The shoulder-to-shoulder crowd inside the headquarters of International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 890 in Janesville clapped and cheered.
“That’s who he is — that’s not who we are,” Harris continued. “Nobody understands better than a union member that as Americans we all rise or fall together.”
By the time Harris took the stage, just before 3 p.m, the standing-room-only audience was thoroughly warmed up.
Peter Barca, the Democratic candidate mounting an uphill challenge to U.S. Rep. Bryan Steil, the Republican 1st District congressman, urged the crowd not to be complacent.
He reminded the union members of Act 10, former Republican Gov. Scott Walker’s surprise attack on labor that stripped public employees of most union rights. And he warned that Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation proposal for the next Republican administration, threatens to end unions for public workers nationwide and cripple private-sector unions.
Democratic Gov. Tony Evers also spoke, giving a shout-out to union workers who built Milwaukee’s baseball stadium 25 years ago and who are refurbishing it with state funds. He highlighted new legislative maps — drawn by Evers’ team and enacted by Republican lawmakers — that have undone a 13-year GOP gerrymander in Wisconsin and which will get their first test at the ballot box on Tuesday.
“We can flip the state Assembly,” Evers declared, adding that a Democratic resurgence would set the stage for undoing Act 10 and other union-restrictive legislation enacted when Republicans controlled all the branches of state government. Evers urged the audience to call, text or otherwise connect to friends and family “and tell them your ‘why’” for making their choices at the polls.
Following Evers in the Janesville union hall, Sen. Tammy Baldwin, in a close race for reelection, evoked Wisconsin’s “long and rich history as a pro-union stronghold of the Midwest” where unions and workers are now fighting to restore labor rights lost in the last decade. Baldwin pointed to her push for “buy American” requirements in legislation such as the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law.
“Now, when we’re building roads all across this country, we’re using American steel and American concrete to do it,” Baldwin said. “That means union jobs in our state — but all of that progress is absolutely on the line right now with this election.”
A full-throated pro-union message
When Harris addressed the crowd in Janesville, she held up union members as leaders for fair pay, benefits, workplace safety, the five-day work week, paid vacation and family leave, “because it is union members that work and put blood, sweat and tears into raising the conditions of the American worker, wherever they work.”
In contrast to “the disparity in power” between workers with no unions and their employers, collective bargaining enables workers “to join together, as a collective, and then negotiate to better ensure one simple thing — that the outcome is fair,” Harris said.
Harris outlined an industrial policy agenda building on themes that have been central to the Biden administration’s economic policy: continuing federal investment in domestic manufacturing, with local hiring and union participation, particularly to build up technology and clean energy. She vowed to strive for “good paying jobs that do not require a college degree,” to remove by executive order “unnecessary degree requirements for federal jobs” and to challenge private employers to do likewise.
Harris reiterated her promise to sign the PRO Act, legislation that unions have been seeking to remove obstacles to union organizing, and to oppose threats to retirement benefits.
She cited economic analyses that have said Trump’s economic plans “would bankrupt Social Security in the next six years.” And she contrasted Trump’s claim when he ran in 2016 that he would restore American manufacturing jobs with his record in office.
“America lost nearly 200,000 manufacturing jobs when he was president, including thousands of jobs right here in Wisconsin,” Harris said. “And let’s be clear — those losses started before the pandemic, making Donald Trump one of the biggest losers of manufacturing jobs in America.” The crowd hooted and cheered.
Those losses, Harris observed, included six U.S. auto plants, after Trump had run promising the industry “would not, quote, lose one plant during his presidency.”
She paused. “Janesville” — where General Motors shut a plant in 2008 that had been the city’s industrial mainstay for 90 years — “you know what those closures mean,” she said, describing the loss of well-paid union jobs and the ripple effects bringing down small businesses in the community.
‘Union-buster his entire career’
Harris mocked the Foxconn project in Mount Pleasant that failed to live up to Trump’s promotion and charged that the 2017 tax cut Trump signed “cut taxes for corporations that shipped 200,000 American jobs overseas during his presidency.”
Trump “has been a union-buster his entire career,” she said, mentioning a Trump description of union leaders as “dues-sucking people,” his support of right-to-work laws that weaken unions, and a conversation Trump had with Elon Musk in which Trump affirmed Musk’s suggestion that striking workers should be fired.
“While he was president, he lowered labor standards and made it easier for companies to break labor laws and then get federal contracts,” she added.
GET THE MORNING HEADLINES.
Harris tacitly acknowledged that Trump’s supporters appear to include a swath of working-class voters, some of them union members.
“And so part of why I’m here is to ask all the leaders here — let’s remind all the brothers and sisters of Labor about who Donald Trump really is. Because he’s got a lot of talk, but if you pay attention to what he’s actually done, if you pay attention to who he actually stood with when people needed a defender and a friend, you’ll see who he really is. And we’ve got to get the word out about this,” Harris said.
“Donald Trump’s track record is a disaster for working people and he is an existential threat to America’s labor movement.”
After the rally, Stacy Farrington, a Rock County employee, said acknowledgement of how public sector union rights had been lost resonated with her. “We don’t have a voice,” she said, adding that the rally invoked “hope that we have to get back to that.”
Tom Brien, who worked for 43 years at the Janesville GM plant until its 2008 shutdown, said the warnings about Trump’s likely labor agenda were important to hear.
“Kamala supports unions, and we’ll be a whole a lot better off with her versus her opponent,” Brien said. Nevertheless, he’s cautious about the outcome.
“It’s definitely going to be close,” Brien said. “I don’t think it’s going to be a runaway. But we’ll hope for the best.”
