But now that he’s preparing to take office, it’s becoming clear Trump has no idea how to keep his promises. Presidents can’t save every job, but the federal government does have the power to stand up for workers. So far, though, Trump looks like he’s more interested in attacking labor unions than he is in helping the workers they represent.

Wednesday night, Trump sent out several tweets attacking an Indiana union, the United Steelworkers Local 1999, and its president, Chuck Jones. The tweets appeared to be a response to Jones’s accusations that Trump’s original announcement that he had saved 1,100 jobs at the Carrier plant in Indiana from moving to Mexico were heavily inflated. It now appears that only 730 of the production jobs would stay in Indiana, and Jones accused Trump of pulling “a dog and pony show on the numbers.”

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Based on these tweets, and many of the statements he has made about companies abandoning traditional high-paying union jobs, Trump might benefit from learning from recent history about what he can do as president to help workers.

In late 2009, Boeing decided to build its 787 Dreamliner factory in South Carolina instead of Washington state because of the militancy of union Boeing workers in Washington state. In April 2011, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) issued a complaint alleging that Boeing had violated workers’ rights by retaliating against them (by building in South Carolina instead of Washington state) for engaging in union activity.

In response, the Republican Party went wild. Congress held hearings. South Carolina Republicans, in particular, pushed back: Then-Sen. Jim DeMint announced from the Senate floor that the administration was “acting like thugs that you might see in a Third World country trying to bully and intimidate employers.” Sen. Lindsey O. Graham threatened to defund the NLRB’s Boeing complaint; then-Rep. Tim Scott introduced the Protecting Jobs from Government Interference Act, which sought to strip the NLRB of many of its powers to reinstate workers who have had their labor rights violated. Presidential hopefuls Rick Perry and Newt Gingrich proclaimed in a debate that the NLRB should be destroyed or defunded as a result of the Boeing complaint.

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While the political threats against the NLRB ramped up, Boeing and the Machinists entered into secret negotiations. Eventually they settled the case to both parties’ satisfaction, but it is not clear that such a settlement would have been possible in the absence of the NLRB’s actions.

Soon after the much-publicized Boeing case, General Electric (GE) tried something similar, but was far more successful because the NLRB did not act. GE has long had a factory in Erie, Pa., that produces locomotives and motorized wheel sets for off-highway vehicles. These jobs are the sort of high-paying manufacturing union jobs in the Rust Belt that people long for. However, starting in 2010, and continuing to today, GE began transferring many of these jobs to a new Fort Worth facility, which is nonunion, lower paid and less efficient.

The union representing the workers, United Electrical, Radio & Machine Workers of America, filed a charge with the NLRB that argued that GE’s actions violated labor law. Unfortunately, the NLRB declined to act, and many of these jobs that support the struggling city of Erie have been lost.

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Trump visited Erie in August, and he made promises to bring GE jobs back. And Trump won Erie, which has traditionally voted Democratic, and which President Obama carried by 16 points in 2012. I suspect that these workers in Erie, as well as those throughout the Rust Belt and Midwest, expect Trump to keep his promises and save their jobs.

But his campaign against Jones calls that commitment into question.

If Trump has any interest in keeping his promises to American workers, here’s what he can do. The “runaway shop,” where companies transfer work to nonunion facilities to save on labor costs, has largely been tolerated under American labor law. But the president-elect can show that he cares deeply about this issue by appointing NLRB members and a general counsel who believe labor law can effectively be used as a deterrent for such corporate decisions. Every union worker I’ve ever talked to who is facing the loss of their job because of the company’s decision to move to save on labor costs has connected the dots: They are being punished for exercising their rights to organize a union and secure a strong contract. The National Labor Relations Act protects workers in their rights to organize a union and bargain collectively, and if a company makes its decision to transfer work to save money on better paying union jobs, then the NLRB should investigate and issue a complaint. And it should not matter if those companies are moving to another state — usually southern right-to-work states — or to another country, because the effect is still to replace well-paying jobs for low-paying jobs.

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