Spending half a million to avoid giving his maids a tiny wage increase.

More bullshit from the Orange Bullshit Artist.

GOP presidential hopeful Donald Trump fashions himself a friend of union workers. He has bragged about having good relationships with labor unions. When the AFL-CIO recently endorsed his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton, Trump claimed it was he who deserved the labor federation’s coveted backing. * ** Before entering the voting booth, those union members might want to know how much money one of Trump’s businesses has spent in an effort to persuade low-wage workers not to unionize.

Trump co-owns the Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas with casino “magnate” Phil Ruffin. He and Ruffin spent the better part of this year fighting 500 culinary (housekeepers, guest service and restaurant workers), mostly Latino or Filipino, from starting a union. This small group of mostly women voted in December to join the Culinary Worker’s union, just like nearly all of their co-workers in Las Vegas casino hotels have done for years. Trump has lost every legal objection he’s made to their efforts, but that hasn’t stopped him from trying his damndest to bilk these dismally-paid maids who clean up the rooms, change the sheets and scrub the showers of his high-rolling patrons out of an extra three dollars an hour.

Most hotel workers on the Vegas Strip are unionized these days, but that’s not the case at the Trump International. The union claims housekeepers there on average earn an hourly wage that’s $3.30 less than what comparable housekeepers make at other hotels.

The CWU filed actions against the hotel alleging Trump and his partner committed a slew of unfair Labor practices, including threatening and intimidating workers who supported the unionization effort:

In addition to charges of employment discrimination, the union has complained of aggressive interrogation and “illegal surveillance.” To thwart the campaigners, according to the filings, the higher-ups reportedly once sent home workers seen donning pro-union buttons and confiscated union literature, and security aggressively questioned organizers in the parking lot. In one instance, managerial staffers “conspicuously greeted employees in the employee dining room and told them to vote No” to the union.

Labor Department records show that Trump and Ruffin hired a well-known “union busting firm,” Cruz and Associates (surely the irony was unintentional), in a series of payments totalling $560,000, half of it paid in December (after the union had already voted to unionize) in efforts to invalidate the workers’ vote.

Companies often enlist the services of anti-union consultants to deal with an organizing campaign. The consultants’ goal is to convince enough workers that forming a union would be against their best interests so that the union eventually loses the election. Unions derisively call these consultants “union busters.” Their tactics can be subtle or not so subtle.

Meanwhile, the “expert negotiator” of “the art of the deal” has refused to meet with the workers.

National Labor leaders such as the AFL -CIO have uniformly denounced Trump, who has expressed support for so-called “right to work” legislation introduced on behalf of big business to skirt unionizing efforts that would require them to pay higher wages. They are concerned, however, that the Republican nominees raw emotional appeal to racism and phony demagoguery on trade issues may be more motivational to union members than considerations of their own bargaining power, given the precarious economic state of many in the middle class:

We hear the same refrains all the time,” said Karen Nussbaum, executive director of Working America, which has high membership in the Rust Belt. “That people are fed up and they’re hurting. That their families have not recovered from the recession. That every family is harboring someone still not back at work. That someone is paying rent for their brother-in-law.” “And then a guy comes on the stage,” Nussbaum explained, “and says, ‘I’m your guy who will blow the whole thing up.’”

Labor leaders have pointed out that Trump’s working-class support diminishes when union members hear about Trump’s actual policies towards unions. AFL-CIO political director Mike Podhorzer:

“It changed the prism that they were looking at the election through,” Podhorzer told The Wall Street Journal. “From being this popular entertainment game show to ‘this is really going to affect my life.'”

Trump's rotten treatment of his own hotel workers speaks for itself.