By BERRY CRAIG
MSNBC’s Chris Matthews just made himself an enabler of Donald Trump’s apparent divide-and-conquer strategy against unions.
On his first full work day, the president invited a delegation of construction union officials and rank-and-file workers to the White House.
“I love the fact he met with construction trades guys, not public employees and all that stuff—but guys and women, I guess, who are going to build this new America,”gushed Hardball host Matthews in a softball interview with Trump counselor Kellyanne Conway.
She smiled approvingly.
The interview got worse. Trump ran on a platform supporting a national “right to work” law and favoring repeal of the 1931 Davis-Bacon Act, which requires the prevailing wage be paid on federal construction projects.
Matthews didn’t query Conway about RTW or PW. Nor did he ask her about Trump’s personal preference for RTW states or about his long and bitter battle against a union at his Las Vegas hotel.
Matthews fancies himself a gritty, working-class champion who stands up to powerful politicians and their flacks like Conway. More often than not, he goes after them.
In the Conway interview, he played lapdog, not watchdog.
Anyway, the construction union group seemed to think Trump’s overture to them was genuine. Other union officials suspect Trump is adopting a divide-and-conquer strategy against unions.
Larry Cohen, former longtime Communications Workers of America president, suggests the president might be following the union-busting playbooks of New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker. Republicans and Trump fans, they played off unions against each other to curb union power in their states, the Huffington Post’s Sam Stein recently wrote.
“If people abandon mutual aid, look out,” Stein quoted Cohen’s warning. “The lesson is clear: A party and a president that opposes collective bargaining rights will come for you. Either you stand together and build a resistance ... or you’re likely to lose out one day yourself.”
Stein also quoted Eddie Vale, a former AFL-CIO staffer and an officer with the firm New Partners: “[Trump is] … not bumbling through this accidentally. He is intentionally trying to pit unions and progressives against each other.”
Indeed, on the same day the construction union group huddled with Trump, the president issued an executive order pulling the U.S. out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and he announced a hiring freeze on federal workers.
Organized labor vehemently opposes TPP. But much of the federal workforce is unionized. Many federal workers belong to the American Federation of Government Employees—one of those “public employees and all that stuff” unions Matthews dismissed.
“This hiring freeze will mean longer lines at Social Security offices, fewer workplace safety inspections, less oversight of environmental polluters, and greater risk to our nation’s food supply and clean water systems,” AFGE President J. David Cox Sr. said in a news release.
“All Americans should be outraged that President Trump is gutting federal programs and funneling their taxpayer dollars into the hands of less-regulated private companies who answer to their corporate shareholders and not the American people.”
Almost all unions, even construction unions, endorsed Democrat Hillary Clinton over Trump. Though most union members voted for her, many sided with Trump.
Anyway, the president evidently figures that his upset win, helped by disaffected blue collar workers especially in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, has left organized labor desperate, disunited and, hence, an easy target for a divide-and-conquer campaign.
“Trump’s very first actions inside the White House ― including ordering the completion of the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines, which will bring work to the building trades ― were a perfect example of how he has courted some unions while alienating others,” Stein wrote.
Nursing, health and domestic care and public transport unions oppose the pipelines on environmental and health grounds. I guess they some more ”public employees and all that stuff” unions.
Apparently, Trump thinks some unions are so scared that they’ll take whatever they can get from him, even if it that means rejecting “solidarity,” that old union byword, and leaving other unions to fend for themselves.
“… Trump leads a party that’s ferociously hostile to unions,” Michael Tomasky wrote in The Daily Beast. “Certain conditions unions will demand as part of any infrastructure bill, like Davis-Bacon wage protections, are anathema to Trump’s party. When the union leaders who met with Trump asked about Davis-Bacon, he equivocated [italics mine].”
The day after Trump welcomed the construction unions to the White House, Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., introduced a bill to repeal Davis-Bacon rules on federal highway construction projects. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Speaker Paul Ryan support the act’s repeal—and a national “right to work” law.
Trump and the union representatives at the White House knew Flake’s bill was coming. Sean McGarvey, president of North America’s Building Trades Unions, brought it up to Trump. He told the president that the measure “would undercut wages and undermine the president’s campaign goal of producing good middle-class jobs,” according to Noam Scheiber of the New York Times.
Here was Trump’s chance to show the union group that the meeting wasn’t just window dressing. All he had to do was assure his visitors that he opposed Flake’s bill. But McGarvey said Trump’s response was noncommittal.
“He said he knows the Davis-Bacon proposal well, understands how it works,” Scheiber quoted McGarvey. But the Times scribe wrote that Trump, according to the union leader, “avoided taking a position [italics mine].”
Trump’s hedge on PW is a pretty big hint about what he’s really up to. (Matthews didn’t challenge Conway to defend the president’s hedge.)
Trump is, of course, still promising that under his administration, jobs—especially in construction and manufacturing--will fall like manna from heaven. Funny, though, I’ve never heard him say “union jobs.”
“Donald Trump has admitted before that when he has a choice between union and nonunion labor for his construction projects, he'd go with nonunion labor,”wrote the AFL-CIO’s Kenneth Quinnell last year.
Meanwhile, Trump’s inner circle is fiercely anti-union. He’s packing his cabinet with union-haters.
“Trump has already nominated a fast-food executive to be the nation’s labor secretary,” Stein wrote. “He will probably roll back Obama’s executive orders that were supported by unions and appoint members to the National Labor Relations Board who will make it much harder for unions to organize workers. Trump has said he supports right-to-work measures, and a federal right-to-work law could be disastrous for the labor movement.”
“Trump is going to be nominating a Supreme Court justice, and a lot of other federal judges, who will presumably be uniformly anti-union,” Tomasky also wrote. “The right-to-work interest groups have a pipeline of cases through which they want to chip away at unions. When those decisions are handed down, what is President Trump going to say about them, as every other Republican cheers?”