Obama butters up labor — because they're about to lose on trade Unions aren’t happy the president is going to cut a deal with Republicans on fast-track authority.

If you think President Barack Obama has been going out of his way recently to say nice things about unions, you’re not wrong.

The timing isn’t a coincidence: He’s about to have a fight with them over trade, which the labor groups are going to lose.


Obama wants to smooth over the bad feelings as much as possible. So the White House is looking for every opportunity it can find for Obama to emphasize the issues where they’re on the same page – including Obama’s statement smacking Scott Walker around last week, his frequent reminders of the importance of unions, and his speeches that call for stronger labor laws.

The goal: Remind labor groups about all the issues they have in common, even though Obama is going to try to cut a deal with Republicans on fast-track trade authority and the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which unions vehemently oppose.

“When you know you’re about to have friction on one issue, it’s only right to remind them about all the other issues you agree on. It’s the smart thing to do,” said one White House official.

So far, there’s no indication Obama’s overtures are doing any good. Labor groups believe trade agreements cost U.S. workers jobs, and are so furious over Obama’s willingness to deal with Republicans on trade that it will probably take more than a few presidential shout-outs to ease the tensions.

Besides, some labor officials say, it doesn’t matter if Obama gives lip service to their issues if he can’t get Congress to pass them.

“It’s the difference between what we say and what we actually do,” said Larry Cohen, president of the Communications Workers of America. “Our problem with the president is, we agree with his agenda, but [trade] is not his agenda. This is the part that will get enacted.”

As another labor official put it: “He’s our best friend when it doesn’t matter.”

The problem, labor experts say, is that unions have a long list of frustrations with Obama that go beyond the trade issue. They’re furious at parts of Obamacare that they believe will hurt their workers, including a tax on generous health insurance plans that begins in 2018. They also believe Obama hasn’t put a high enough priority on their issues generally, and hasn’t actually accomplished anything that helps them with organizing or collective bargaining.

It also won’t help Obama’s relationship with labor groups that a trade agreement could be his biggest accomplishment with a Republican Congress. They don’t think any of the labor protections would be enforceable, and they don’t see any way to prevent a loss of jobs like the aftermath of the North American Free Trade Agreement.

“I’m really pleased to see that the narrative has become more pro-worker, more pro-middle class, more pro-wage growth, and somewhat more pro-union,” said Harold Schaitberger, general president of the International Association of Fire Fighters. But fast-track trade authority, he said, “would be a disaster, and it’s not going to help us with what we’re trying to get turned around, which is 20 years of stagnant wages.”

Other labor officials noted that the AFL-CIO’s recent announcement that it will withhold contributions to congressional Democrats ahead of the votes on fast-track captures the depth of labor’s frustration with Obama’s trade proposals.

“My sense is, they certainly welcome the president’s criticism” of legislation in Wisconsin and other states that would weaken unions, said a former senior Obama administration official who talks frequently to labor groups. “But at the end of the day, that rhetoric doesn’t organize any workers, it doesn’t help unions to win at the collective bargaining table, and it doesn’t bring a stronger foundation to the collective bargaining process more generally.”

Obama certainly has been trying to mend fences – rhetorically, at least. He took a shot at Walker last week on the day that the Wisconsin governor signed right-to-work legislation into law, saying in a statement that “the rise of the middle class in America coincided in large part with the rise of unions” and blasting Walker for claiming “victory over working Americans” by signing an “anti-worker law.”

That statement drew a round of questions about whether Obama was trying to get involved in the 2016 presidential race, but the White House official said that was the wrong way to read it. The point was to speak out against Walker because he signed a right-to-work law – which frees workers from having to pay dues to unions that bargain on their behalf – and emphasize Obama’s common ground with labor, not to dump on Walker for the sake of commenting on the 2016 race, the official said.

The president has thrown other lines into his speeches about the importance of organized labor, drawing a round of applause at the Democratic National Committee’s winter meeting last month when he declared that “we’ve got to stand up for unions.”

Obama has also included vague references to strengthening labor laws in his speeches, an issue that may not mean a lot to outsiders but has strong significance to labor groups.

In his January State of the Union address, Obama declared that “we still need laws that strengthen rather than weaken unions, and give American workers a voice.” He elaborated later that month in an interview with Vox, explaining that “around the ‘70s and ‘80s … workers increasingly had less leverage because of changes in labor laws.” What’s needed, the president said, is “ways that we can increase the bargaining power” of workers. “And that’s where issues like labor laws make a difference.”

The president was almost certainly referring to revising the 1935 National Labor Relations Act. The White House is reportedly waiting for the AFL-CIO to propose revisions to the NLRA; the results may be unveiled as early as next month.

There was even a moment last week when Vice President Joe Biden, pushing the boundaries on the administration’s pro-labor rhetoric, accused labor’s opponents of looking for “blackshirts” to break up unions.

The catch, some labor officials say, is that the proposals to strengthen unions and other initiatives that labor groups like – such as Obama’s call for legislation to make community college free for two years – aren’t going to go anywhere in a Republican Congress, while Wisconsin and other states are enacting right-to-work laws now.

“I would do anything to get free community college for two years. The problem is, there’s no path for getting it done,” Cohen said.

Any proposal to rewrite the labor laws is likely to be entirely symbolic. The NLRA hasn’t been amended meaningfully since 1947, when a Republican Congress passed, over President Harry Truman’s veto, the Taft-Hartley Act, which rolled back many labor protections. Since then, Democrats have attempted periodically to tilt the NLRA’s balance of power back toward labor, but they’ve never succeeded. The last such attempt was the Employee Free Choice Act (“card check”), which cleared the House in 2007 but was killed off in the Senate by a Republican filibuster.

Several labor officials who have spoken out against Obama’s trade proposals declined to comment for this story, including AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka. But at a recent lunch with reporters, Trumka underscored how serious the trade disagreement is, even though Obama may be on their side on most other issues.

“Somewhere between the president’s heart and the negotiating table on trade, that’s getting lost—or they’re misconstruing what they’re doing,” Trumka said. “It will adversely affect the way working people view this administration and the Democratic Party for a long time.”

Schaitberger noted that Obama had a chance to make a stronger push for the Employee Free Choice Act in 2009, when he first took office and both the Senate and the House were controlled by Democrats. But “nobody really put any shoulder behind it,” he said.

Now, Schaitberger said, “he’s talking about rewriting labor law at a time when we have the largest GOP majority since 1928 … The reality of moving any kind of legislative proposal in this environment is something short of nil.”

That’s why Cohen and some labor allies, including Democratic Rep. Tim Ryan of Ohio, are urging Obama to focus on labor priorities that could create jobs and might actually pass in a Republican Congress — like a surface transportation bill — before making any moves on trade.

“You want to do something that will pass? Pass that,” Cohen said.

Timothy Noah and Edward-Isaac Dovere contributed to this story.