Rich Yeselson is a contributing editor at Dissent and worked in the labor movement for 24 years.

Late last month, when President Donald Trump talked with union leaders in the White House, it was something of an unexpected picture: On his first full workday in office, a billionaire Republican president meeting with the heads of major building-trades unions, smiles all around.

For the labor leaders at the table, the news from the White House was encouraging. Trump talked up his proposed infrastructure plan and his executive orders to restart the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipeline projects. Now, those measures, long trumpeted by the unions present as job-creating steps, were finally nearing fruition. “Today was a great day for America and for American workers,” concluded the statement released by the Building Trades Unions coalition after the meeting.


Many a Republican president has tried to split unions away from their home in the Democratic Party, with mixed and episodic results. Donald Trump might be the first to actually do it more permanently.

The Democratic Party should take this threat seriously. If Trump pulls it off, it will be not only because of his free-trade skepticism or appeal to unions reliant on construction projects, but also because he is exploiting longstanding divides within the labor movement. His incursion will indict Democrats for failing to protect their most important institutional connection to working-class voters, and it will make it that much harder for them to forge the multiracial coalition they need to win elections outside of their strongholds on the East and West coasts.

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To outside observers, an alliance between Trump and building-trades unions could seem an unnatural fit: Since the New Deal, organized labor and most of its membership have aligned with the Democratic Party and donated heavily to Democratic candidates. But the inchoate coalition between Trump and the building trades speaks to long-standing divides within labor by occupation, race and gender—divides that Trump has the opportunity to cleave wide open, to his political benefit.

In the world of organized labor, the building-trades unions have, historically, been the most conservative. For decades, many were legacy operations, in which white workers informally passed on their memberships to family and friends, keeping women and minorities out. Black and Latino activists and the federal courts have compelled changes in the past 25 years, but the logic of construction unionism—to tie contractors and unions together in cartelized operation and pass on the costs to the companies that hire the contractors—is largely unchanged. Over the past few decades, big corporations have responded by refusing to hire unionized contractors. The building-trades unions, whose membership after World War II represented 80 percent of construction workers, now also face determined opposition from these pressured contractors and are, as Harold Meyerson has noted in The American Prospect, increasingly reliant on government-funded projects.

For Trump, courting these unions is an obvious move, one he’s been preparing for his entire adult life. Before he became a ubiquitous brand, the real estate developer needed to cut deals to build buildings in New York City, and you couldn’t do that without the building trades. More recently, Trump agreed to end a fight with the powerful UNITE HERE coalition, signing contracts with the Culinary Union for his Las Vegas hotel and choosing not to oppose the ability of workers at his Washington, D.C., hotel to join a UNITE HERE local.

This is not to say that Trump supports unions generally or workers’ rights, specifically. In December, after Chuck Jones, the head of a small steelworkers local in Indiana, told the Washington Post that Trump’s deal with air-conditioning manufacturer Carrier saved far fewer jobs than the president-elect claimed, Trump torched the local leader via Twitter: “Chuck Jones … has done a terrible job representing workers. No wonder companies flee country!” More substantially, Trump’s nominee for secretary of labor, Andrew Puzder, has chronically violated labor laws as the head of the Hardee’s and Carl’s Jr. fast-food chains. Trump has not said whether he would support or oppose a national right-to-work law. He is noncommittal on upholding the Davis-Bacon Act, a Depression-era law that guarantees a high “prevailing” wage to construction workers on government-funded projects—a top priority of building-trades workers.

But Trump is, as he tells us all the time, transactional, and it’s no surprise that he has sought out the support of the unions with whom he is most familiar and whose membership most closely parallels the demographics of his base.

If Trump can split conservative unions off from the rest of organized labor, he can potentially weaken Democrats’ electoral chances by depriving them of the union money and organizational muscle they count on at election time. And although the building trades unions, particularly the Laborers, have more nonwhite members than ever before, Trump would further his ethno-nationalist project, dividing the predominantly white native and male portion of labor from the public and service-sector unions, which have far more female, immigrant and nonwhite members.

Trump is not the first Republican president to attempt this feat—it’s been tried time and again over the course of generations. And if the building-trades leaders looked at this history, they might notice that the weaker and more supplicating unions have become, the less substantive concessions Republican presidents need even bother offering them.

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In 1953, Dwight Eisenhower saw a powerful labor movement that he hoped to entice by offering tangible policy gains. As Eisenhower began his presidency, the power of organized labor was near its postwar peak. Roughly 35 percent of the nation’s non-farm workers were union members. Labor leaders like John L. Lewis, the Mineworkers’ imperious and eloquent president, and Walter Reuther, the fiery liberal head of the United Automobile Workers, were household names. And stories about worker strikes and organizing drives filled newspaper column inches and radio airwaves.

At the time, American labor was largely grouped into one of two camps: the Congress of Industrial Organizations , and the American Federation of Labor. Of the two, the CIO was more militant and liberal, supporting equality for African-Americans and holding fast to the left wing of the Democrats’ New Deal coalition. The CIO was dominated by the steelworkers and autoworkers, the giant manufacturing unions at the heart of the American economy that had emerged during FDR’s presidency. The more conservative AFL was centered on racially exclusionary craft unions, and was more nationalist and less reliably Democratic—and in that, Eisenhower saw opportunity.

Ike assumed that Big Labor, as it could be called then without irony, was here to stay and, that, therefore, if the GOP wished to be seen as more than a party of the wealthy, it would have to woo some of the organized working class. In September 1952, in the midst of the presidential campaign, Eisenhower spoke to the AFL’s national convention in words impossible to imagine any Republican (and many Democrats) saying today: “I have no use for those—regardless of their political party—who hold some foolish dream of spinning the clock back to days when unorganized labor was a huddled, almost helpless mass.”

Ike’s effort at union outreach was to be more than rhetorical. Central to it was an attempt to placate the building-trade unions—some of which had actually endorsed him over the milquetoast, mildly pro-union Democratic candidate, Illinois Governor Adlai Stevenson. After defeating Stevenson, Eisenhower shocked his intraparty political rival, Senate Majority Leader Robert Taft (the conservative stalwart who sponsored the Taft-Hartley law of 1947, which limited union rights) by selecting Martin Durkin, the president of the Plumbers’ Union, as his secretary of labor. Durkin was a moderate Democrat with a close relationship to another plumber, George Meany, the president of the AFL. Ike’s idea was to work with Durkin to make revisions of Taft-Hartley that particularly appealed to the building trades, helping it in its rivalry with the CIO and making it easier for it to boycott construction sites. This might have driven a wedge between the building trades and the CIO’s powerful manufacturing unions, which were insisting on total political opposition to Eisenhower and had no expectations that he would deal with them.

Eisenhower’s plan almost worked. Ike tasked Durkin and his counterpart in the Department of Commerce, Sinclair Weeks, with forging a compromise between labor and management interests that would repeal parts of Taft-Hartley. But Weeks was a businessman and mainstream Republican; his team at commerce distrusted Durkin and was leery of making policy concessions to any part of labor. Still, Ike knocked heads and brought Durkin and Weeks to the verge of an agreement, which would have granted significant concessions to the AFL. Eisenhower was to present the proposal to Congress on August 7, 1953.

Then fate and malice intervened. First, Taft, who, at times, seemed open to revision of his controversial legislation, rapidly declined from a metastasizing cancer and died on July 31, before he could put his imprimatur on any deal. Then, just a few days after Taft’s death, on August 3, somebody leaked the pro-union draft of the proposal to the Wall Street Journal, triggering a vehement response from business and its political allies, including a freshman senator from Arizona named Barry Goldwater, who fretted that the proposal “would go a long way toward … granting monopolistic power to labor leaders.” Without Taft’s blessing and in the face of massive business opposition, the plan died. After only seven months as labor secretary, Durkin resigned, ending both his tenure and Ike’s attempt at labor outreach. Eisenhower’s appointments to the National Labor Relations Board proceeded to be conventionally pro-business and restricted unionism. And in 1955, the AFL and CIO merged into the AFL-CIO.

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Richard Nixon, Ike’s vice president and the next Republican president, came to office in 1969 in the midst of the greatest social turmoil in the U.S. since the 1930s. Months earlier, George Wallace, the racist governor of Alabama, ran for president, winning 13 percent of the national popular vote and five Southern states on a platform that condemned urban and campus violence. Wallace appealed to many white unionized workers in the North. Nixon wanted to soften Wallace’s abrasive edge and assemble what he called a “new majority,” a nationalist project that would include many millions of white men who were worried about rising black empowerment, changing cultural mores, and increasingly aggressive student opposition against the war in Vietnam. Since many of these would-be supporters were still unionized within manufacturing, mining, transportation and construction, Nixon would need to win over parts of the hostile now-merged AFL-CIO, which had supported one of the greatest labor liberals of the era, Hubert Humphrey, over Nixon in the 1968 election.

Nixon tried honey, not vinegar. Though he did support one key policy wish of labor in 1970—the creation of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration—Nixon mostly schmoozed and flattered. He did not respond aggressively to a massive wave of strikes in the early 1970s, and he sought to engage labor leaders—for example, bringing 60 union presidents to the White House for dinner on Labor Day in 1970. And he courted Meany, the crusty former AFL head who now led the AFL-CIO. Though Meany and Nixon disagreed on economic issues—Nixon, like most Republicans, was trying to figure out ways to lower union wages, while Meany was an old-fashioned Keynesian—they did share many of the same resentments toward the New Left and the black and women’s activists who flocked to the 1972 campaign of George McGovern, which they famously groused about together over occasional rounds of golf. When Nixon was first elected in 1968, Meany feared he would be as dangerous to labor as Senator Taft had been a generation earlier. But over the course of Nixon’s first term, Meany’s rage at the young protesters, African-Americans and feminists whom he feared were taking control of the Democratic Party got the better of him. Rather than connect the great movement of the '30s to the new movements of the '60s, Meany lashed out.

In the 1972 election, the AFL-CIO announced its neutrality in the McGovern-Nixon race—the only time in its history it did not endorse the Democratic candidate. Nixon received a majority of the union vote that year, the only time in modern history that a Republican has done so.

In 1973, at the start of his second term, Nixon, just as Eisenhower had done, named a building-trades leader, Peter Brennan, as his secretary of labor. Brennan, the head of the New York’s Building Trades Council, was a nominal Democrat, but he had organized a massive pro-Nixon/pro-Vietnam War protest in May 1970—one of the so-called “hardhat demonstrations,” a series of sometimes-violent construction union events in New York that spring. Brennan told Nixon aide Chuck Colson that the construction workers “admired [Nixon’s] masculinity. The ‘hard hats,’ who are a tough breed, have come to respect you as a tough, courageous man’s man.”

Why did Nixon succeed? Unlike Eisenhower, who was trying to find a way to provide some policy concessions to construction unions, Nixon did come through with OSHA. But Nixon’s pitch—as described in Stayin’ Alive, Jefferson Cowie’s essential analysis of the white working class in the 1970s—was mostly and deliberately cultural and symbolic. It was awash in images of hypermasculinity and jingoism—an “appearance of action,” as Cowie put it.

Ultimately, Meany and other union leaders broke with Nixon over wage policies and the monumental constitutional outrages of Watergate. And, despite the demonstrations that pitted workers against anti-war demonstrators, millions of working-class people came to oppose American involvement in Vietnam. But Nixon’s gendered “appearance of action,” for a time, captured a large segment of organized labor.

Ronald Reagan also tried a variation of Nixon’s “appearance of action,” but his actual actions belied his sunny affect. Reagan often reassured white ethnic workers in the Midwest and East that he would be the first American president to also have served as a union president (the Screen Actors Guild in 1947). Reagan too sought to galvanize working-class white men around an image of patriotic optimism. During his 1984 reelection campaign, he famously declared that it was “morning again in America,” and transformed “Born in the U.S.A.,” Bruce Springsteen’s dark vision of alienated, unemployed Vietnam war veterans, into a “message of hope.” But Reagan’s fealty to management’s prerogatives could not be gauzed over. In 1981, he fired 12,000 striking air-traffic controllers (members of a union that had endorsed Reagan in the previous year’s election). This triggered a wave of aggressive bargaining by corporations seeking contract concessions from unions already reeling from membership losses caused by automation and globalization. Yet, in the midst of a growing post recessionary economy, Reagan did well with the union household vote in 1984, capturing 46 percent of it in his landslide victory that year.

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The GOP’s outreach to unions has changed dramatically since Eisenhower’s presidency. Ike sought to recognize and undergird the role of organized labor in the political economy. He saw more conservative unions as, potentially, political partners. By contrast, Nixon and Reagan did not provide institutional support for unions; they appealed to an optimistic nationalism that was, paradoxically, undercut by its crude racial and gendered boundaries.

Trump, too, is promising a circumscribed kind of American dream for white men who build roads and buildings. (He is also promising a manufacturing initiative and has invited Richard Trumka, the president of the AFL-CIO, to a meeting on the topic.) But in the decades between the Reagan and Trump elections, much has changed in America—which gives us a sense of the upward limits of Trump’s possible success in wooing unions. Simply put, Trump can’t do as well as Nixon and Reagan did with white male unionized workers because there are a lot fewer white male unionized workers.

While Ike, Nixon and even Reagan tried to peel away some union members from Democrats, today’s GOP has found it easier to simply crush labor and ignore its declining membership. Yet the Republican Party Trump inherited—and its corporate allies, such as the Koch brothers—correctly see even an emaciated labor movement as a bulwark of the Democratic Party, still a critical source of funding, lobbying and—in selected states in the Midwest, East and West—votes.

Much of this anti-union work is happening on the state level. Twenty-eight states now have right-to-work laws, which permit workers not to pay union dues or their equivalent while still receiving the benefits of union representation. When right-to-work laws were first passed following Taft-Hartley’s legalization of them in the late 1940s, conservatives sought to prevent a then-powerful labor movement from increasing wage rates and thwarting company prerogatives. Now, with unions weakened, GOP-controlled states are enacting right to work to empty union treasuries, and thus defund Democratic and progressive campaigns.

While such laws have taken a toll on union membership, a larger economic shift has exacted a heavier burden. Millions of jobs from the core unionized sectors of mid-20th-century America—coal, railways, steel, auto manufacturing, dock working—have been lost to either automation, globalization or a combination of both. Recent figures released from the Bureau of Labor Statistics peg union membership at just 10.7 percent of the non-farm workforce, the level it was in 1930, before the great militant labor upsurge of the New Deal era and the rise of public-sector unionism in the 1960s.

Trump’s approach to unions is mired in an earlier era. It’s no coincidence that the unions he met with at the White House are overwhelmingly white and male—this is his idea of what a “real worker” in the proverbial abandoned coal mines and steel mills and the big construction sites must look like. Like Nixon, Trump has made a lot of cultural noise about beleaguered white men without actually wanting to support policies that would protect unions and aid their growth.

Organized labor today is not only much smaller than it was in the era of Reagan and Nixon, its composition—and the sectors of the economy it represents—is vastly different. Today, the average union member is much more likely to be a female nurse’s aid or public school teacher or a black government worker or a Latino building service worker than a white male steel or construction worker. The latest BLS figures show that black workers are more unionized than are whites. In construction and manufacturing, union density stands at 13.2 percent and 9.4 percent, respectively. It is law enforcement (a Trump bulwark), firefighters, teachers and public-sector workers who today have the greatest union density, each at around 35 percent. Moreover, the changing composition of the workforce now includes many smaller workplaces—thousands of Wal-Marts, for example—even when the company behind them is a vast multinational enterprise, making it more difficult to organize an entire industry.

In 1958, the sociologist Daniel Bell wrote that American unions could be seen as existing in two contexts, “as a social movement and as an economic force (market-unionism), and accordingly playing a different role in each.” Trump’s play is to appeal to market unionism—to exclaim about large construction projects, and thus, seduce the union leadership whose members are dependent upon such projects.

The limit for Trump is that those unions are fairly homogenous—overwhelmingly white and male—while today’s most creative unions are also the most heterogeneous (e.g., the Service Employees International Union has many women and nonwhite members and a female president and has been the key force behind the increasingly successful “Fight for $15” minimum wage campaign). Even without this latest pipeline-fueled overture, Trump probably already had the votes of most white building-trades workers; there’s no real opportunity for growing beyond his base of support. So we’ve seen versions of Trump’s move before, but there is far less in it for him in 2017 than there was for his GOP predecessors in 1953, 1972 or 1984.

Indeed, there is probably a larger upside for Democrats than for Trump in fighting for the social unionism that Bell wrote about. It is understandable in calculated political terms why many Democrats today don’t support a weakened labor movement with the same fervor that some of their ancestors used to support a strong one. Yet there are still good reasons for them to do so. Democrats should do so because unions, despite their long decline, still provide more human and financial resources for the domestic policy goals of liberals than any other private institution. They should do so because union decline is linked by economists to the rise of inequality, especially among the same white men whom Trump now so powerfully appeals—it is hard to see how inequality is mitigated without stronger unions. And they should do so because, despite all of their flaws, unions—including some of those increasingly integrated building trades unions—are organizations that bring women and men of all races together in a common project of economic and political empowerment.

In South Carolina, for example, a multiracial group of 3,000 workers is trying to organize a Boeing plant in the state with the lowest union density in the country, and one that was also an extremist bulwark of the Confederacy and Jim Crow. These Boeing workers and their union, the Machinists, have a different vision of labor and America than Donald Trump’s. And it is their generous civic nationalism that Democrats should uphold rather than Trump’s crabbed and blustery ethno-nationalism. It is also precisely the kind of union fight that Democrats should promote, support and join.

Trump’s faux love affair with the construction unions ought to be a warning to Democrats and other labor unions. But it is also a challenge to renew a different building project, one that might redeem the promise of a cosmopolitan and egalitarian America.