Timothy Noah is the employment & immigration editor at POLITICO.

One year after an election it would like to forget, organized labor is taking it on the chin from a president who won more union households than any other Republican during the previous three decades. Labor leaders overwhelmingly supported Hillary Clinton. But for the union rank and file, pulling the lever for Donald Trump turned out to be a stunning betrayal of their own movement and its interests. Consider:

• The Republican-majority Supreme Court will this year likely outlaw “fair share” fees from union non-members, dealing a financial blow from which public-employee unions might never recover.


• The National Labor Relations Board, which recently acquired its first Republican quorum in 10 years, is poised to roll back a passel of pro-union decisions from the Obama years.

• The Labor Department is watering down a regulation that would have extended overtime coverage to more than 4 million new people.

• The Occupational Safety and Health Administration is weakening or postponing a variety of rules to protect workers’ exposure to hazardous chemicals like silica and beryllium.

• The Treasury and Congress are preparing a tax bill that may encourage the offshoring of jobs through reduced taxes on overseas corporate income and discourage construction by capping the mortgage interest deduction at $500,000, both serious blows to union workers.

Labor groups have fought all these moves, but they’ve lost so much power over the last four decades that their feeble protests have had a hard time gaining any traction. Their ranks have dwindled since their peak in the 1950s. And as their remaining members have drifted away from the Democrats over cultural issues and the growing urban-rural divide, they’ve helped fuel the rise of politicians who oppose unions as a malignant force that deducts dues from too-small paychecks, jacks up prices for consumers and drives employers out of business.

It should surprise no one that a Republican administration is enacting anti-labor policies. Republican politicians have for the past century pretty reliably resisted policies deemed favorable to unions, varying only in the vehemence of their opposition. The College Republican National Committee describes itself as “the counterbalance to the unions and leftist interest groups.” Ordinary Republicans are less stridently opposed, but they don’t much like unions either. An August Gallup poll found that only 42 percent of self-identified Republicans approved of labor unions (against 81 percent of Democrats)—and that was their highest level of support in a decade.

Many Republicans don’t even like the word “labor,” because it reminds them too much of labor unions. In 1995, when the GOP regained the House for the first time in 40 years, it re-christened the House Education and Labor Committee as the House Education and the Workforce Committee. When the Democrats snatched the House back in 2007, they changed it back to “labor,” only to see the Republicans remove “Labor” and reinstate “the Workforce” when they took over again in 2011. Virginia Foxx (R.-N.C.), who chairs that committee today, has said organized labor “lost its reason for being.”

Donald Trump was seen as a different kind of Republican. He denounced manufacturers for moving jobs south to Mexico and threatened steep tariffs on goods shipped back to the U.S., in language that could have been ripped from a United Auto Workers press release. He pledged to get tough on trade with China, whose low-wage workers put downward pressure on U.S. wages. He vowed to revive the coal industry by rolling back environmental regulations. None of this has actually happened, except for some rollback of environmental rules. Coal-sector employment is up only negligibly—around new 2,000 jobs—continuing a trend that began under President Barack Obama.

Trump threatened during the campaign to walk away from the North American Free Trade Agreement, and that might happen. Labor leaders support Trump’s tough NAFTA stance, but even here that support is far from wholehearted. Last month the AFL-CIO said in a written statement that it was “skeptical” of the Trump administration’s position in NAFTA renegotiation talks. “We’ve been told these talks will ‘get a better deal for our workers,’” the labor federation said, “but the negotiating goals seem to prioritize getting a better deal for corporations that want to offshore jobs and decrease wages.”

Hardly anyone denies that NAFTA hurt U.S. factory workers, but it’s less than clear 24 years on that withdrawing from the trade pact, with employment in manufacturing down by a quarter and an economic ecosystem grown reliant on NAFTA, would preserve more jobs than it would kill. The Motor and Equipment Manufacturers Association estimates that if NAFTA were repealed auto parts suppliers could lose as many as 50,000 jobs. These dangers may not seem obvious to labor leaders, but they were to many economic experts during the campaign.

The building trades, which have always been more conservative than other unions, are friendlier than other unions to the Trump White House, in large part in anticipation of infrastructure spending (including a southern-border wall) that may never materialize. Their influence might be the reason Trump dropped early talk of repealing the Davis Bacon Act, a 1931 law that guarantees “prevailing” (often union-scale) wages on federal construction projects. But if that’s what the building trades got out of cozying up to Trump, says Rich Yeselsen, a former union strategic campaigner, they struck a bad bargain, because Davis-Bacon repeal doesn’t have enough Senate votes to overcome a Democratic filibuster. Meanwhile, the building trades will suffer, along with the home-building industry, if the tax bill caps the mortgage interest deduction at $500,000.

Trump took care during the 2016 campaign never to demonize labor unions. “I have great relationships with unions,” he told Newsweek’s Matthew Cooper in July 2015. “The union people, the people in unions, they seem to really want to vote for me,” he told the South Carolina Radio Network in Feb. 2016. “I can live with unions in certain locations.” Even that tepid level of labor solidarity was unusual for a Republican presidential candidate. Perhaps Trump noticed how little traction Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker got in the primaries with an anti-union message.

But Trump never supported pro-union policies during the campaign. In that South Carolina Radio Network interview, Trump also said, “I like right to work,” meaning he favored state laws that prevent private-sector unions from charging fees to union non-members in their bargaining units in order to cover their portion of collective bargaining costs. “My position on right to work is 100 percent,” Trump said. The recent spread of right-to-work laws into the industrial Midwest—six states have adopted it since 2012, most recently Missouri this past February—poses a deadly financial threat to labor unions, who have fought the measures tooth and nail.

Trump also said in an interview with Circa that he favored “rolling back the overtime regulation,” which his administration is now in the process of rewriting. The Obama administration’s overtime rule would have extended overtime coverage to an estimated four to five million additional people, according to government calculations. (The left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, which helped develop the rule, put its estimate higher, at 12.5 million.) The Trump administration’s rewritten rule—assuming it’s ever completed—will likely extend overtime coverage only to a fraction of that number.

On the federal minimum wage, an issue of great importance to the Service Employees International Union, which bankrolled the movement to raise state hourly minimums to $15, candidate Trump was all over the map. Initially, Trump opposed any increase over the federal hourly minimum of $7.25, saying “having a low minimum wage is not a bad thing for this country.” Then he said American wages were “too high.” He later clarified that he’d meant only that the minimum wage was too high. Then he said he didn’t want to raise it. Then he said he was open to raising it. Then he said it should be raised only at the state level, and appeared to suggest there shouldn’t be any federal minimum at all. Then he said he favored an increase in the federal minimum. Finally Trump said he favored a $10 federal minimum wage. But there’s no support for such an increase in the Republican-controlled Congress, and Trump never proposed any.

Trump’s election was, the pro-labor journalist Harold Meyerson wrote shortly after Nov. 8, an “extinction-level event for American labor,” quoting an unnamed union official. The proportion of U.S. private-sector workers who belong to a union has dwindled to 6.4 percent. The decline is often said to have begun with the spread of globalization in the 1970s—and globalization has certainly damaged labor unions in all advanced industrial democracies. But on a percentage basis, union density peaked in the U.S. at about 35 percent way back in 1954. The decline came especially early in the United States, and was especially steep, as a result of the 1947 Taft-Hartley Amendments to the National Labor Relations Act. Over President Harry Truman’s veto, a Republican Congress passed Taft-Hartley amid fears of galloping postwar inflation. The law imposed strict limits on organizing that the labor movement ever after fought, unsuccessfully, to reverse—most recently through the Employee Free Choice Act, which in 2007 failed on a Senate cloture vote, 51-48. Crucially, Taft-Hartley allowed states and territories to vote in right-to-work laws.

The labor movement might have disappeared entirely were it not for the postwar rise of government employee unions. Today a robust 34 percent of public-sector workers are unionized, led by schoolteachers and police. But public-sector unions have come under heavy political attack in recent years from education reformers and anti-union Republicans like Wisconsin’s Walker, who in 2011 passed legislation that all but eliminated collective bargaining for the state’s public employees. Since passage of that law and a subsequent right-to-work law affecting Wisconsin’s private-sector workers, union membership in the state is down nearly 40 percent.

The Republican-appointed majority on the Supreme Court was widely expected in 2016 to rule public-employee fair-share fees unconstitutional on free-speech grounds. But the untimely death of Justice Antonin Scalia in February of that year gave government unions a reprieve, leaving the court deadlocked on the issue. Had Hillary Clinton been elected president, it’s near-certain she would have replaced Scalia with a justice who would reaffirm the Supreme Court’s 1977 decision upholding fair-share fees. Instead, Donald Trump became president and installed Neil Gorsuch, who almost certainly will deliver the deciding vote to abolish them later this term in Janus v. AFSCME.

Trump was elected with strong support from a white working class that’s voted Republican pretty consistently in presidential elections for nearly half a century. “You can’t steal something you already possess,” I wrote in March 2016 by way of arguing that working-class voters were in no position to deliver the White House to Trump. That proved wrong for a variety of reasons, including more Latino support for Trump than for Mitt Romney in 2012—an outcome that seemed inconceivable—and poor turnout by African Americans. But another reason Trump won the presidency was that 43 percent of all union households, and a 52-percent majority of white union households, voted for Trump. No Republican had done so well with union households since Ronald Reagan’s landslide re-election in 1984.

Union households are the only working-class constituency that still gives a pretty reliable majority to Democratic presidential candidates. It’s a much smaller constituency than it used to be, so it’s more important that Democrats win it by a big margin. But it’s also more Latino and African American than it used to be—though still majority-white—making it easier for Democrats to win big. But Clinton didn’t win it big; she won it with 51 percent. That’s three percentage points fewer than the historically unsuccessful Mondale in 1984, when union households were—again—much whiter, and when white people in general were absolutely wild about Reagan. (Sixty-six percent of them voted for the Gipper that year, a 10-point bump over 1980 and eight points more than Trump.)

On closer inspection, the union-household results in 2016 were less a story of Trump winning than of Clinton losing. Trump won 43 percent of union households, but that was only three percentage points more than Romney in 2012 (and three percentage points less than Reagan in 1984). More significant was that Clinton’s 51 percent share of union households was seven percentage points fewer than Obama’s in 2012 and eight points fewer than Obama’s in 2008, John Kerry’s in 2004, and Al Gore’s in 2000. To find a Democrat who won a smaller share of union households than Hillary Clinton you have to go all the way back to Jimmy Carter’s 48 percent in 1980.

“Hillary just bled votes over to third party candidates,” observes Washington University sociologist Jake Rosenfeld, author of the 2014 book “What Unions No Longer Do.” Among all voters, third-party candidates Gary Johnson of the Libertarian Party and Jill Stein of the Green party won a trivial 2.5 percent of the vote. But among union households, Rosenfeld and Washington University postdoc Patrick Denice pointed out in an April blog post, fully 6 percent said they voted for neither Trump nor Clinton, which in most cases likely means they voted for Johnson or Stein. Between 2012 and 2016 “there was a tripling of the union household vote that voted for third party candidates,” Rosenfeld told POLITICO, “and it all came from Hillary’s side.”

Polling by the AFL-CIO, which measured 2016 votes by union members rather than union households, similarly indicates that Trump didn’t over-perform so much as Clinton under-performed. Among union members, Trump got four percentage points more than Romney to Clinton’s 10 points fewer than Obama. “The phenomenon, at least as we saw it in action, was a late shift of people not wanting to vote for her,” observes AFL-CIO Political Director Michael Podhorzer.

Why did so many union households hesitate to vote for Hillary Clinton? The lateness of the shift lends credence to Clinton’s own theory that James Comey’s public reopening of the FBI’s email investigation cost her the election. Or perhaps a lot of union members, who like other working-class voters tend to be culturally conservative, couldn’t bring themselves to vote for a woman, or another Clinton. She didn’t talk much in 2016 about how to shore up labor unions, but nor have most Democratic presidential candidates in recent years. Maybe union members decided abruptly in 2016 that they were tired of being taken for granted.

Whatever the reason, the rank and file neglected their interests as union members in 2016, and the reckoning is underway. By 2020 there could be a lot fewer of them.