Not surprisingly, the UAW doesn't have much respect for Donald Trump. In January 2024, the 400,000-member union endorsed Joe Biden for re-election, with Fain remarking that Biden "stood with the American worker", while "Trump has a history of serving himself and standing for the billionaire class". These remarks echoed Fain's comments of a few days before, when he called Trump "a scab" who "stands against everything we stand for as a union".
The AFL-CIO, which unites most of America's unions, delivered a similar appraisal in a press release ("Donald Trump's Catastrophic and Devastating Anti-Labor Track Record") the preceding September. "Trump spent four years in office weakening unions and working people," it maintained. "We can't afford another four years of Trump's corporate agenda to... destroy our unions."
If Trump expects significant union support this November, it's merely another of his many illusions.
Lawrence S. Wittner (https://www.lawrenceswittner.com/ ) is Professor of History Emeritus at SUNY/Albany and the author of Confronting the Bomb (Stanford University Press).
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