For Unions, A ‘Which Side Are You On’ Moment
American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten says that union members haven’t just cooled on Trump—they’ve turned on him.
Randi Weingarten says there’s an upside of being a year and a half into the most anti-organized labor administration in modern history and just two months removed a Supreme Court decision which socked union power and finances: clarity.
Union leaders and members now “know who the bad guys are,” says Weingarten, the longtime head of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) — President Donald Trump and the five justices who signed on to the court’s Janus decision in June.
Early on, Trump’s support among organized labor was at astronomical levels for a modern-day Republican, with November 2016 exit polls showing him with the support of more than 40 percent of union households. A March 2017 Reuters-Ipsos poll gave him a 62 percent approval rating among union members, but by spring 2018, it had dropped to 47 percent. The union members who ruled out voting for Hillary Clinton don’t appear to be sticking around as the president actually moves forward on his trade war and economic agenda.
The combination of an antagonistic administration and hostile high court has driven union members to the barricades, Weingarten says. And though she acknowledges that the AFT and its allies may now be in a fight for their existence, at least they’re in the fight.
To Weingarten, that’s a key difference between now and the past 20 years, which labor leaders spent distracted from the basics of organizing and engaging members while instead focused on incremental fights that were harder to activate around. The result was unions that either atrophied or saw their members drift toward the politics like Trump’s.
She hates that Trump is president, but she clings to the silver lining.
“We’re seeing, in terms of our membership, that things are holding because people are talking about values, and they’re engaged with each other,” Weingarten told me in an interview for the latest episode of POLITICO’s Off Message podcast. “But we’re also seeing huge activism against this kind of cruelty that you see from the Trump administration, against the kind of faux populism.”
Weingarten’s proof is in last week’s lopsided defeat of Missouri’s proposed “Right to Work” law in a statewide referendum. Pushed too far, she says, unions, union members and union supporters have started to actually fight back — even in a state under heavy Republican control, and where Sen. Claire McCaskill is a top GOP target for defeat.
Weingarten is a committed Democrat, so deeply involved in the party that she was seriously considered for the appointment to Clinton’s New York Senate seat in 2009. Still, she says the opposition to Trump has moved far beyond the usual partisanship, and other labor leaders —including AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka, who earlier this month floated an Continue reading: For Unions, A ‘Which Side Are You On’ Moment - POLITICO Magazine
Weingarten is a committed Democrat, so deeply involved in the party that she was seriously considered for the appointment to Clinton’s New York Senate seat in 2009. Still, she says the opposition to Trump has moved far beyond the usual partisanship, and other labor leaders —including AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka, who earlier this month floated an Continue reading: For Unions, A ‘Which Side Are You On’ Moment - POLITICO Magazine
