DETROIT and PITTSBURGH—From blocking overtime benefits for workers to cutting taxes on the rich, Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris spent Labor Day first in Detroit and then in Pittsburgh slamming the anti-worker record of her Republican foe, former president and current felon Donald Trump. She contrasted Trump’s record of disdain for workers with the labor movement’s record of aiding not just its own members, but everyone else.
“Everywhere I go, I tell people, ‘Look, you may not be a union member, [but] you better thank a union member for the five-day work week, you better thank a union member for sick leave, you better thank a union member for paid leave, you better thank a union member for vacation time and even for the weekend,’” Harris said.
“When union wages go up, everybody’s wages go up. When union workplaces are safer, every workplace is safer,” Harris continued. “When unions are strong, America is strong.”
“As we fight to move forward, Donald Trump is trying to pull us backward, including back to a time before workers had the freedom to organize,” Harris added in Pittsburgh.
Trump’s one-line answer was a tweet: “Happy Labor Day to all of our American Workers who represent the Shining Example of Hard Work and Ingenuity.” He then complained about rising gasoline prices and grocery prices—both of which have flattened or fallen in the past year. Then Trump sneeringly called Harris “Comrade Kamala.”
But the night before, in a pre-taped TV interview, Trump was even more incendiary, claiming he had a right to overthrow the government three and a half years ago, though he legitimately lost the presidency.
“Whoever heard you get indicted for interfering with a presidential election, where you have every right to do it, you get indicted, and your poll numbers go up,” he told a Fox “News” interviewer.
Trump is infuriated over the latest Ipsos poll that shows Harris winning nationally with 52 percent to his 46 percent, a lead for Harris which is outside the margin of error. The polls also show that among women under 45 the main issue is abortion rights with the economy coming in second. This is particularly troubling to Trump who has bragged often that he is responsible for killing the constitutional right to an abortion by virtue of the Supreme Court appointments he made when he was president.
Out of desperation Trump has been flop flopping all over the place on that and other issues. He even said over the weekend that the U.S. needs more immigrants, a stark departure from his prior position that he will round them up and put them in concentration camps.
Voters saw over the weekend a candidate In Harris who was pitting forward thoughtful positions on issues while Trump continued with either absurd statements on all kinds of matters or outright personal and racist attacks on Harris. Unable to make headway on issues his focus is to tear down Harris who is increasingly likely be the first African American, Asian and woman to enter the White House.
Harris drew large and enthusiastic crowds in both cities, Democratic bastions in the key swing states of Michigan and Pennsylvania. At least four union leaders—AFT’s Randi Weingarten, National Education Association President Becky Pringle, Laborers President Brent Booker and Auto Workers President Shawn Fain—joined her onstage in the Motor City for the first event. For decades, Democratic presidential campaigns have kicked off with Labor Day rallies in Detroit.
Fain wore his now-famous red “Trump’s A Scab!” T-shirt, setting the crowd there off chanting that slogan for several minutes before a smiling, waving Harris could finally start her speech.
When she did, she laid into both his past anti-worker record in the Oval Office and his future schemes, enumerated in the Republican platform, also known as Project 2025, the enormous tome crafted by dozens of Trumpite-officials-in-waiting at the radical right Heritage Foundation.
Trump plan would cost workers heavily
That includes his plans to “impose taxes on everyday products that would cost a typical American family an extra $4,000 per year” while giving a rerun big tax cut “to billionaires and big corporations.”
Trump’s anti-worker record is so bad, and so long, that Harris couldn’t get to everything. One prime omission: Trump stiffed his workers, union and non-union, of their wages when building his Trump Taj Mahal casino in New Jersey decades ago or serving on his staff now at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida.
Harris also blasted Trump in general terms, in keeping with her campaign’s forward-looking theme. “We won’t go back,” she declared.
“I think there has been a certain backward approach over the last several years, which is to suggest—some folks, them folks” as she waved towards offstage—“to suggest that the strength of a leader is based on who you beat down, instead of what we know: The true measure of the strength of a leader is based on who you lift up,” said Harris.
“Who you beat down” is a direct shot at Trump’s hatred of people of color, his rants against migrants, and his anti-worker actions, including abolition of one small union, for immigration law judges.
“Trump intends to pull us back to a time before workers had the freedom to unionize,” Harris said, restrictions taken straight from the GOP playbook. Actually, she understated the case: Project 2025 proposes abolishing state and local government worker unions entirely.
“As president, we will always remember Donald Trump blocked overtime benefits from millions of workers and opposed efforts to raise the minimum wage,” Harris said. “He appointed union busters to the National Labor Relations Board, and he supported so-called right-to-work laws.”
The union-busters included at least one Republican board member, William Emanuel, a senior partner at one of the nation’s top anti-union law firms. The NLRB’s ethics officer had to throw Emanuel out of at least one board ruling due to conflict of interest. The result was a tie and the company lost.
And Trump appointed Peter Robb as the NLRB’s General Counsel, its chief administrator and top enforcement officer. As a young Justice Department official, Robb created Ronald Reagan’s excuse to fire all of the nation’s air traffic controllers, who struck for safety reasons. That busted their union, PATCO and gave a green light to the criminal corporate class to try to destroy workers and unions.
Project 2025 doesn’t go quite that far, but it says Trump and the Republicans should amend labor law to “treat national employment laws and regulations as negotiable defaults.” In other words, minimum wages, health care and pensions all suddenly don’t have to be bargained. The platform would also allow company unions.
Harris also pointed out how when unions make gains for their members, everybody else benefits—an effect shown at several non-union automakers, most of them in the South, after UAW’s successful Stand Up strike against the Detroit automakers last year.
Won raises wiping out losses
UAW won raises that wiped out the wage losses of the last fifteen years, better pensions for part-timers, an accelerated promotion scale to top-of-scale pay, abolition of the hated two-tier wage system, and more. Several non-union car firms scrambled to match the raises, though not the rest.
It also won the Detroit automakers’ written contractual commitment to make all electric vehicle plants, including parts plants, union plants. Stellantis, formerly FiatChrysler, however, recently broke that section at the to-be-reopened Belvidere, Ill., plant. That triggered both unfair labor practices filings and a strike threat from the union. The new pacts allow strikes over such grievances.
In Pittsburgh, Harris, joined by her boss, Democratic President Joe Biden, reiterated their opposition to the sale of iconic, though shrunken, U.S. Steel to a Japanese steel company. The U.S. Steel board, ignoring the Steelworkers’ support of a competing U.S.-based firm’s bid, approved the Nippon Steel takeover.
Biden promised Harris could “make Donald Trump a loser again.” Biden beat Trump in November 2020. Opinion polls show Harris with slight leads but some within the margin of error.
“We know this is going to be a tight race to the very end. So let’s not pay too much attention to those polls, because as unions and labor knows best, we know what it’s like to be the underdog,” Harris said.
Campaigning in another swing state, Wisconsin, Harris’s running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, cheerfully rebutted Republican chants that he is “in the pocket of unions.”
“Republicans came up to me in one of my campaigns and they said, ‘Tim is in the pocket of organized labor.’ I said, that’s a damn lie. I am the pocket,” Walz told Laborfest in Milwaukee. “And I told them, if you want to attack me for standing up for collective bargaining, for fair wages, for safe working conditions, for health care and retirement–you roll the damn dice. I’ll take my chances on that.” The audience roared.
One candidate for the nation’s top two offices, Sen. J.D. Vance, R-Ohio, laid low on Labor Day, but AFT’s Weingarten, in a statement issued while she was in Detroit, didn’t let Trump’s hard-right running mate off the hook. The week before, Vance put his foot in his mouth, blasting “childless cat women… trying to brainwash the minds of our children.” He later singled out Weingarten.
“Randi Weingarten, who’s the head of the most powerful teachers’ union in the country, doesn’t have a single child,” Vance said. “If she wants to brainwash and destroy the minds of children, she should have some of her own and leave ours the hell alone.”
Weingarten is a step-mother to her spouse’s child.
“It was just a bizarre thing for him to double down on it now because every parent and every teacher and every kid in August and September are thinking about the new [school] year and what it means and that engagement,” Weingarten told MSNBC’s Jen Psaki. “So he must really be disconnected from life.
“And we have 50 million kids in the United States, and they are our future. Whether you go to public school or parochial school or private school, this is that moment that parents and teachers and kids are all bonding together, like it’s that moment of engagement. It’s that moment of the teachers trying to create safe and welcoming environments.”
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