Days after the inauguration, the leaders of several building trade unions met with President Donald Trump at the White House, outraging those on the left who want organized labor to lead the resistance to the president’s anti-worker policies. The building trades cited Trump’s call for infrastructure investment and their warm personal relationship with him as reasons to be optimistic about his presidency. As reported in The New York Times, Sean McGarvey, president of North America’s Building Trade Unions, stated, “We have a common bond with the president. We come from the same industry. He understands the value of driving development, moving people to the middle class.” Laborers International Union of North America (LIUNA) President Terry O’Sullivan talked of Trump’s “commitment to creating hundreds of thousands of working-class jobs.”

The next day, Trump announced that he would reverse former President Barack Obama’s decision to reject the Keystone XL Pipeline and that he would restart construction on the Dakota Access Pipeline. He also said he would go through with his campaign promise to build a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border. The building trades were enthusiastic. O’Sullivan wrote victoriously, “President Trump has shown that it is not difficult to put country above politics and create an energy-independent America. He has shown that he respects laborers who build our great nation, and that they will be abandoned no more.” In the same breath, he lambasted Obama for caving to “environmental extremists.”

The building trades’ support of anything that creates a job, no matter the cost to the nation or the environment, has given the union movement a bad name in progressive circles. The pipeline battles have galvanized the left to fight for indigenous rights and against climate change. From the outset, O’Sullivan has been contemptuous of the rest of the progressive movement. Moreover, he has bullied other unions to stay out of the question of pipeline construction—seemingly forgetting that all of us have to live in a world plagued by dirty energy. And if the building trades keep this up, they will damage themselves by alienating the allies they need to survive the Trump era.

This kind of behavior is hardly new. The building trades have long aligned themselves with racist and exclusionary forces. The labor movement’s first major legislative victory in the United States was the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which originated with California workers angry about Chinese competition. The trades consistently supported immigration restriction well after the Immigration Act of 1965 reopened America’s borders to the world’s tired and poor. The Congress of Industrial Organizations, founded in 1935 by United Mine Workers of America President John L. Lewis to organize the millions of workers in the nation’s industrial sectors, was necessary because the trades not only refused to allow women, Asian-Americans, African-Americans, and unskilled workers into their unions, but also opposed any effort by other unions to organize them.

The building trades have long aligned themselves with racist and exclusionary forces.

In 1970, the New York building trades organized to beat up antiwar protesters. Richard Nixon rewarded Peter Brennan, who headed the New York building trades, by naming him secretary of the Labor Department. Combined with the AFL-CIO’s refusal to endorse George McGovern in 1972, a decision supported by many of the building trades, this ruined the reputation of organized labor among the left for a generation.