A youngster holds up a pro-union sign at Laborfest in Milwaukee on Labor Day, Sept. 2, 2024. Both presidential nominees are trying to appeal to union members. (Erik Gunn/Wisconsin Examiner)
This five-day series explores the priorities of voters in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin as they consider the upcoming presidential election. With the outcome expected to be close, these “swing states” may decide the future of the country.
Wisconsin carpenter Efrain Campos just retired this summer after 30 years, working mostly in commercial multistory buildings — “from 15 floors and up,” he said. For him the last four years have been a boom period.
On Labor Day, Campos, 68, was among the thousands of union members and their families who turned out for Laborfest on Milwaukee’s festival grounds on the shores of Lake Michigan.
He had planned to vote for President Joe Biden for a second term in office, but when the Democratic Party pivoted to Vice President Kamala Harris as its candidate, he pivoted as well. “We need somebody to help the middle people,” he said, “so they can advance, get a little bit better than what we are now.”
Campos dismisses the notion that the Republican candidate, former President Donald Trump, is a pro-worker candidate, despite Trump’s populist appeal that grabbed a slice of the working-class electorate in 2016.
“Not at all,” he said. “It’s ignorant. He’s a rich man, he gets his way. That’s not what this country is about.”
As the Nov. 5 presidential election nears, Democrats are counting on union workers to deliver voters, particularly in the swing states of Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, where unions have remained an influential bloc, even as their strength has declined over the decades.
Many labor union leaders say they’re working as hard as they ever have to oppose Trump and elect Vice President Kamala Harris. The AFL-CIO, a federation of 60 unions that range from Major League Baseball players to firefighters to workers in the food industry, has endorsed Harris.
A growing share of rank-and-file union members, however, have been less likely to follow their leadership — some of them among Trump’s base.
“It has to be recognized that union members are not monolithic in terms of the party they support,” said Paul Clark, a professor of labor and employment relations at Penn State University. “Many unions have 30, 40, maybe 50% or more of their members who either are registered Republicans or are going to support Donald Trump in this election.”
Last week, International Brotherhood of Teamsters General President Sean O’Brien announced the union’s executive council would not endorse either ticket and cited the support of a majority of his members for Trump. (The Teamsters aren’t part of the AFL-CIO).
Other union leaders say their membership is behind Harris.
Nick Webber, a political organizer for the North American Building Trades Unions, said, “It’s unprecedented, the amount of interest in people in getting involved,” as he marshals union canvassers this fall for the Democratic national ticket. He said in his conversations he’s hearing union members say, “Not only, ‘am I going to be voting,’ and [that they’re] tuned in, but ‘how can I get involved’ and ‘doing my part.’”
Appeals to steel and culinary workers
When Biden dropped out July 21, the national executive council of the 12.5 million-member AFL-CIO endorsed Harris the next day “because we knew that the administration that has been fighting for working people for the last three and a half years, we know what they’ve delivered, and we knew that her record spoke for itself,” said Liz Shuler, national AFL-CIO president, in an interview with NC Newsline.
But the Trump campaign is continuing to try to reach union voters, even as union leaders argue his record as president and his rhetoric — such as suggesting in a conversation with Elon Musk that employers should fire strikers — should make him unacceptable.
In an appeal to United Steelworkers, the most powerful union in western Pennsylvania, Trump said in January he would block a potential acquisition of U.S. Steel by Japan-based Nippon Steel.
Nevertheless the union endorsed Biden, who said in a visit in April he also opposed the sale. Both he and Harris reiterated that stance during a Labor Day visit to Pittsburgh. “I couldn’t agree more with President Biden: U.S. Steel should remain in American hands,” Harris said.
Biden makes unions and steel the focus of his first 2024 visit to Pittsburgh
In Nevada, Trump held a rally in June where he proposed ending federal taxes on tipped income — an appeal aimed at the workers in the state’s largest industry, hotel-casinos.
Harris adopted the no-tax-on-tips position as well in a visit in August, a day after the powerful Culinary Workers Local Union 226, endorsed her. The union reports that its 60,000 members are 55% women and 60% immigrants.
In a return visit in August, Trump suggested his “no tax on tips” position would draw Culinary members’ support — “A lot of them are voting for us, I can tell you that,” he said.
But the union responded by doubling down on its support for Harris, who on a visit months before had celebrated the union’s successful contract negotiations with the Las Vegas Strip’s largest gambling-resort corporations.
“Kamala Harris has promised to raise the minimum wage for all workers — including tipped workers — and eliminate tax on tips,” said Culinary Vice President Leain Vashon. Vashon said Trump didn’t help tipped workers while he was president, so “Why would we trust him? Kamala has a plan; Trump has a slogan.”
Making the case
For most union leaders, the case for Harris is the stark contrast they see between Trump’s record in the White House from 2016 to 2020 and that of his successor.
“When you talk about the politics of what’s at stake in this election, it’s very clear,” said Kent Miller, president and business manager for the Laborers Union Wisconsin District Council.
The 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law, the 2022 bipartisan CHIPS and Science Act and the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, which passed with only Democratic votes, opened the sluices to fund a range of investments in roads and bridges, clean energy and electric vehicle infrastructure.
Harris and Biden campaign in Pittsburgh as presidential race enters the home stretch
The programs include strong incentives for union labor and for the enrollment of new apprentices in training programs operated by unions and their employers.
Larry Davis, a Michigan United Auto Workers local president, said Biden-Harris administration policies helped boost the auto industry.
“I can just go from Detroit-Hamtramck, [which was] on the brink of closing, and now you have over 3,000 almost 4,000 workers in there now,” Davis said.
But the messages unions have been pushing about manufacturing growth, the infrastructure advances and jobs — even unemployment rates that have fallen to just over 4% nationally and 3% or lower in states such as Wisconsin — have been slow to resonate with voters who are focused on higher prices resulting from supply chain shortages.
“Part of that is the investment is still in the works,” said William Jones, a labor historian at the University of Minnesota. “It was slow to be distributed, and it depended largely on state and local government taking it up and creating jobs. It’s possible some people haven’t felt the full impact.”
Jones also suggests there may have been inadequate messaging from the administration — something that unions are trying to make up for in their member outreach.
Beyond what Miller and other union leaders see as those bread-and-butter accomplishments are other policy stakes in who holds the White House, such as the makeup of the National Labor Relations Board and who holds the post of general counsel, the principal architect of the agency’s legal perspective.
Those differences further underscore what most union leaders see as a sharp distinction between the two tickets. “We’ve seen both these movies before,” said Webber, of the electrical workers union.
Under the Trump administration, the NLRB veered to positions less favorable to unions, Miller observed. Under Biden, it has issued more decisions that have supported union positions.
How much does Trump appeal?
Can the former president succeed in once again carving out some support among union voters?
Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan, all previously reliable Democratic states with strong union political involvement, famously flipped to Trump by narrow margins in 2016, leading to Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton’s defeat that year. All three flipped back to help carry Biden to victory against Trump in 2020.
Jones said Trump’s criticism of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 2016 — enacted under Democratic President Bill Clinton in 1993 — “helped him among a certain demographic in 2016” — primarily working-class white men from rural and small-town regions.
When Teamsters President O’Brien announced the union wouldn’t make an endorsement this year, the union released a poll of rank-and-file members that found nearly 60% support for Trump compared with 31% for Harris. The union said the survey was conducted by Lake Research Partners, a Democratic polling firm.
O’Brien’s announcement followed his precedent-breaking speech to the Republican National Convention in July, where he called Trump “one tough SOB,” proclaimed a willingness to work with either political party and attacked business lobbies and corporations.
President of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters Sean O’Brien speaks on stage on the first day of the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee on July 15, 2024. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
“I think he feels that at least half of his members are Trump supporters,” said Clark, the Penn State professor, in an interview before the non-endorsement announcement. “And while I think he recognizes that Biden has been very pro-labor, you know, politically, I think he felt a need to sort of send a message to his members that he hears them.”
The outcome opened up a rift in the union, however. Within hours of O’Brien’s announcement, local, state and regional Teamsters bodies representing at least 500,000 members of the 1.3 million-member union endorsed Harris, including groups in Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
The pro-Harris Teamsters highlighted Biden’s role in signing legislation, included in the 2021 American Rescue Plan Act, that shored up the union’s Central States Pension Fund. The fund faced insolvency by 2026 after years of underfunding.
In a statement, Bill Carroll, president of the union’s Council 39, representing about 15,000 Wisconsin Teamsters, said Harris would also build on Biden’s pro-union record. “In contrast, Donald Trump tried to gut workers’ rights as president by appointing union busters to the NLRB and advocating for national right-to-work,” Carroll said. “Trump’s Project 2025 would go even further, attacking the ability for unions to even have the ability to organize.”
The labor-related provisions in The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 document — billed as a blueprint for the next Republican White House — include proposals that experts have said would eliminate public sector unions nationwide, make forming private sector unions more difficult and allow states to opt out of federal labor laws. Other proposals would reduce federal protections for workers whether unionized or not.
Union messaging to members has emphasized the document and its ties to Trump, despite his repeated disavowal of the agenda and claims of ignorance about its contents.
“It is absolutely his plan,” the AFL-CIO’s Shuler told NC Newsline. “He’s had over 100 former administration officials and The Heritage Foundation basically writing the blueprint for his next term, which would eliminate unions as we know it.”
Reaching out to members
Union leaders say they’re trying to make sure their members are seeing the campaign the way they see it.
In Nevada, where the Culinary’s canvassing and get-out-the-vote effort is regarded as one of the state’s most formidable, the union boasts that during the 2022 campaign cycle, it knocked on 1 million doors.
This year, UNITE HERE says it is once again mobilizing its members and plans to knock on more than 3 million doors in Nevada, Arizona, Pennsylvania, Ohio, North Carolina and Michigan “to ensure that Kamala Harris wins the presidency.”
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In Wisconsin, the Laborers are building political messaging into a union project to engage members more closely, “connecting union members with other union members,” Miller said, to explain how negotiations affect wages and health and retirement benefits, as well as the importance of increasing union representation.
“We’re a jobs club,” Miller said. The message to the union members, he adds, is that “at the end of the day it’s everybody’s right to decide who to vote for — but we want to let you guys know these are the issues at stake in this upcoming election.”
Experienced union members are holding one-on-one conversations, particularly with newer and younger members. “We’re not just doing phone calls, we’re doing job site visits, and member-to-member doing doors,” Miller said.
Webber’s work with the building trades group is similar. “We’ve been doing a lot of reaching out and making sure to have those conversations,” he said — on job sites and during union meetings.
The message: “These jobs don’t come out of thin air,” Webber says. “There’s been strategic, intentional investment for a need in the community.”
The communications don’t just focus on other union members, either, he said. “You need to be sure people on the periphery of the union hear [the message],” said Webber. “Union household members are a huge part of these conversations — a partner, a spouse or child.”
On Monday, the United Auto Workers union unveiled a national YouTube video aimed directly at members who might still see Trump through the lens of his attacks on NAFTA in his first presidential campaign.
The UAW has endorsed Harris. In the 3 1/2-minute video, UAW President Sean Fain finds both Democrats and Republicans culpable for NAFTA and the factory closings over the quarter-century since it was enacted. In 2016, Fain says, “All of that pain had to go somewhere. And for a lot of working-class people, it went to voting for Donald Trump.”
The video, however, portrays Trump as a con man, highlighting his 2017 tax cut as favoring the wealthy and the USMCA, the trade law Trump enacted, as no better than NAFTA, which it replaced.
While emphasizing that “both parties have done harm to the working class,” Fain said that under Biden and Harris, “we’ve seen the tide starting to turn.”
Under Biden there’s been “more manufacturing investment in this country than at any point in my lifetime,” he says, and under Harris, “the Democratic Party is getting back to its roots.”
Paula Uhing is president of the local Steelworkers union at a suburban Milwaukee factory. She’s another enthusiastic Harris supporter, but said she and other labor leaders “know that we still have a lot of work to do” to pull more union voters behind the vice president.
“We have so many union members that vote against their own interests,” Uhing said. “It’s just because they’re not paying attention, they’re not listening to the right people.”
She describes herself as “optimistically cautious,” though. One reason has been some of the conversations she’s had with co-workers.
“There are people at work who are not necessarily turning away from the Republican Party altogether, but they are considering the Democratic ticket,” Uhing said. “They’re looking at it in a completely different way than they did last cycle, which is a good thing.”
Kim Lyons, Pennsylvania Capital-Star; Hugh Jackson, Nevada Current; Rob Schofield, NC Newsline; and Andrew Roth, for Michigan Advance, contributed reporting for this story.