Labor launches initiative to pressure Trump, inform his base

Bill Knight column for Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday, Sept. 4, 5 or 6

Donald Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign made appeals and promises to U.S. workers, but as the BS factor has become increasingly apparent, unions and their allies in recent weeks started a campaign to turn workers against a White House that’s betrayed them on jobs, trade and modest pro-worker gains enacted by the Obama administration.

A two-week “Pickup Truck Tour” organized by the Good Jobs Nation coalition and helped by pro-worker politicians has been calling Trump’s bluff in key states where many union members and Obama voters supported Trump in November.

“Trump ran as a working-class hero, so let’s look at the results,” said Good Jobs Nation’s director Joseph Geevarghese. “We’re seven months into his administration, and wages are flat. People are still getting pink slips.”

Labor leaders are concerned that Trump will take credit for slight improvements in jobless numbers, inflation-adjusted pay and consumer confidence – results of President Obama’s last Fiscal Year budget and policies, Democrats argue – but fail to take action that could increase wages and expand job opportunities.

An Aug. 21 Indianapolis rally, featuring U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), exposed one of Trump’s early claims to help workers, a $700,000 deal that Carrier would lay off just a few workers at its Huntington factory. However, Carrier is cutting more than 600 jobs — more than Trump said.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration has tried to work with Congress’ Republican majorities to backtrack on Obama-era regulations on business, claiming that job growth will result – the old “trickle-down economics” refrain that’s failed for decades.

The Trump administration has eliminated, scaled back or failed to defend regulations labor sought and achieved with Obama, including the requirement that companies disclose labor-law violations before bidding on government contracts and a Labor Department rule that made 4 million more workers eligible for overtime pay if they work longer than 40 hours a week.

“People feel, appropriately, that the political and economic Establishments have left them behind,” Sanders told the Washington Post. “They ignored people while jobs went to Mexico. We’ve got a chance to be heard, and we’ve got to use that chance to explain what a progressive economic agenda is all about. We want a $15 minimum wage. Donald Trump has said wages should be lower. That’s our point.”

The Good Jobs Nation tour, co-sponsored by the Communications Workers and the independent Our Democracy group, also stopped in Racine, Wis., featuring labor organizer and Democrat Randy Bryce, who’s running against Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan.

After Indianapolis, the tour moved on to Bloomington, Ind. Aug. 23, Racine Aug. 28, Kalamazoo, Mich., Aug. 30, Dayton, Ohio, Aug. 31, Canton, Ohio, Sept. 1, Youngstown, Ohio, Sept. 2 and Lorain, Ohio, Sept. 3, before finishing in Erie, Pa., on Labor Day.

Trump carried all four Midwestern states and Pennsylvania.

Labor warns that coming soon in Trump’s economic agenda – essentially a reverse Robin Hood approach, robbing from the 99% to give to the most wealthy and powerful Americans – are several harmful measures:
* A tax overhaul labeled “reform” looks to package tax cuts benefiting the rich and corporations even as it adds to the deficit;
* a lack of attention to workers’ take-home pay, which has stagnated since the Reagan administration;
* more financial deregulation, which contributed to the nation’s exploding income inequality that boosted top incomes at the expense of everyone else. (Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman in the New York Times wrote, “Other wealthy countries, just as exposed to the winds of global change, haven’t seen anything like America’s headlong rush into a new Gilded Age.”); and
* the ongoing assault on organized labor, made clear in circumstances affecting truck drivers, whose pay has declined by about a third in the last few decades, mostly due to deteriorating power at the bargaining table.

Workers are suffering and will continue to suffer under Trump, Krugman said.

“As long as he’s in office, he retains a lot of power to betray the working people who supported him,” he wrote. “And in case you haven’t noticed, betraying those who trust him is a Trump specialty.”

[PICTURED: Retired Steelworkers Local 1999 president Chuck Jones speaks as U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders looks on. Photo from Good Jobs Nation.]