Trump and Harris, whose records on labor issues are starkly different, are both courting union voters • Kansas Reflector

There is a neck-and-neck race for the White House between Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris and Republican candidate Donald Trump. Every voting bloc counts – including union members and other people in their households.

The majority of union leaders have supported Democratic candidates for generations, and this election is no exception. Although rank-and-file union members have historically supported the Democratic Party by a wide margin, that support has fluctuated for at least 45 years. In 2016, polls showed that voters from union households supported Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton over Trump by just 8 percentage points, compared to 18 percentage points in 2012, when Barack Obama was on the ballot.

Since Ronald Reagan's victories over Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale in 1980 and 1984, no Democratic presidential candidate had performed worse with union voters.

Union voters are particularly well represented in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Nevada, three swing states where the proportion of union voters is above the national average of 10 percent.

A late 2023 poll by The New York Times and Siena College in six swing states that Joe Biden won in 2020 – those three plus Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin – shows that Biden and Trump were tied at 47% among Union voters when asked who they would vote for in 2024. Another poll found Biden had an 8 percentage point lead among the same voters in 2020.

3 core topics

Union voters, like all Americans, are concerned about many issues. But they are more likely than most people to seriously consider a candidate's record on support for workers and unions. Union historians generally agree that the Biden administration has the second strongest pro-labor record after Franklin D. Roosevelt.

And I believe that historian Nelson Lichtenstein's claim that Trump's time in office was bad for unions is representative of how union experts assess his track record.

From my perspective as a labor studies scholar, there are three aspects of the candidates' track records that are most likely to sway union members one way or the other.

Federal employees

Trump signed three executive orders in 2018 that restricted the labor rights of about 950,000 unionized federal employees. In 2020, he signed another order, known as Schedule F, which the Washington Post said “aims to gut public sector worker protections.”

Biden repealed those orders. He also set up a White House task force to make recommendations on streamlining the process for unionizing federal employees. Harris chaired the task force. The number of unionized federal employees has increased by tens of thousands during the Biden administration.

Union elections

The rules governing how elections are held when workers express interest in forming a union date back to the 1930s, when Roosevelt signed the National Labor Relations Act. The National Labor Relations Board created by that act oversees union elections.

In 2019, when Trump appointees held a majority of the five seats on the NLRB, the panel overturned an Obama-era NLRB decision mandating a quick election. In 2023, when Biden appointees held a majority, the panel issued a pro-union decision reversing that Trump-era decision.

Today, if a majority of workers in a workplace want union representation, the employer must either recognize and negotiate with the union or seek an election. If the employer violates labor laws in the period leading up to the election, the election is canceled and the NLRB can order the employer to recognize and negotiate with the union.

OSHA

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration, an agency of the U.S. Department of Labor, is responsible for the health and safety of workers in the United States.

Fewer workplace inspections occurred during the Trump administration than during Obama's second term. This decline is largely due to the slow hiring of new OSHA inspectors to replace retiring inspectors.

The number of inspections is rising again. However, according to OSHA calculations, workplace accidents and deaths have also increased during the Biden administration.

The Trump administration failed to enact regulations to protect jobs from the coronavirus, putting hundreds of thousands of health care, grocery, meat processing and education workers at risk.

By comparison, two days after taking office in 2021, Biden issued an executive order establishing mask-wearing guidelines, and his administration made workplace health and safety protocols a high priority for the remainder of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Compared to the Trump administration's inaction during the COVID-19 pandemic, the Biden administration has been more proactive in proposing health and safety measures. In July 2024, it proposed rules to protect some 36 million workers from health risks associated with extreme heat. Public hearings on the bill will be held after a period for written comments.

When Trump tried to cut OSHA funding for 2018 by about $10 million, Congress blocked his efforts. The Biden administration is seeking a 3.7% increase in OSHA's budget for fiscal year 2025.

Legislative and gubernatorial records

Harris was a U.S. senator before becoming vice president; her running mate Tim Walz is the governor of Minnesota and previously served in Congress; and Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance is also currently a U.S. senator. Candidates' performance in these positions are also indicators of what they might try to do in the White House.

The AFL-CIO, the largest U.S. union, gave Harris an overall score of 98% for her votes in the Senate. Walz received an overall score of 93% from the AFL-CIO for his votes when he was in the House of Representatives. During his time as a high school teacher, he belonged to the National Education Association, the largest union in the country.

As governor of Minnesota, Walz signed a law providing paid sick days for the state's workers and a measure that made Minnesota the first state to establish a minimum wage for Uber and Lyft drivers. In 2023, Walz also signed a law establishing the Nursing Home Workforce Standards Board, which will oversee the health and welfare of nursing home employees.

The AFL-CIO union umbrella organization has given Vance a 0% rating for his Senate elections starting in mid-2024. Among other things, Vance rejected the nominations of several judges and government officials with pro-union pasts.

Address to the auto workers

Perhaps the most visible sign of Biden's support for unions came when he picketed striking members of the United Auto Workers in Michigan in September 2023. He was the first president to do so.

The next day, Trump showed up nearby, giving a speech at a non-union auto parts plant.

More recently, Trump did himself no favors with blue-collar voters and their allies when, in a highly publicized conversation with Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, SpaceX and Tesla, he praised Musk for firing employees who spoke out about workplace issues and tried to form a union.

How union households will vote in 2024 is still unclear, but there is no doubt that the Harris and Trump campaigns are convinced the vote will matter. That was the case in 2020, when Biden narrowly won Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania – and in 2016, when Clinton lost those states.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Robert Forrant is a professor in the history department at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. The Kansas Reflector's opinion section seeks to amplify the voices of people affected by policy or excluded from public debate. Information, including how to submit your own commentary, can be found here.