UAW strike is exposing the fraud that GOP is the party of the working class

Republicans woke up on Nov. 4, 2020 looking for the silver lining behind a cloudy election. Sure, the GOP’s leader, Donald Trump, was on his way to losing the White House, but he’d racked up a surprising 74 million votes, and Republicans had won some key House races. The reason, party leaders crowed, was a surge in support from the working class — mainly white folks, but more Latino blue-collar voters and even some African Americans.

“We are a working-class party now,” Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley had tweeted on Election Night. “That’s our future.”

Hawley’s political lack-of-soul-mate, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, laid it on much thicker that winter when he spoke to the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). Cruz is a graduate of Princeton and Harvard Law School who’s married to an investment banker and had just returned from Cancun, while his working-class constituents were freezing in a massive power outage. Yet Cruz declared that the GOP will be “the party of steel workers and construction workers and pipeline workers and taxi cab drivers and cops and firefighters and waiters and waitresses and the men and women with calluses on their hands who are working for this country.”

He left out auto workers. Maybe that was foreshadowing.

Last week, United Auto Workers members at three Midwestern factories walked out on strike, as the vanguard of a historic effort by their 145,000-member union to win higher pay, enhanced retirement and overtime, and a shorter work week from the Big Three automakers — Ford, GM, and Stellantis (formerly Chrysler) — that are posting billions in profits. The UAW strike is a proxy war for whether the working class in America can be saved — by reversing decades of income inequality that soared as union membership plunged.

It feels like a moment for the epic labor song written in the depths of the Great Depression by an organizer for the United Mine Workers in Kentucky’s bloody Harlan County, “Which Side Are You On?” If you are a Republican running to get elected president in 2024, you are not on the side of America’s auto workers. It turns out that the best and brightest of the new “party of the working class” just can’t quit their love affair with billionaire CEOs.

“We’re all going to suffer from this,” Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor, told (who else?) Fox News when asked about the UAW strike. Haley occasionally tries to position herself as a more compassionate conservative in the crowded GOP primary field, but she holds no compassion for union workers. She bragged in the interview that she is a “union buster,” and that she brought jobs to the Palmetto State without what she sees as the scourge of organized labor.

Yet Haley didn’t go as far as her fellow South Carolinian, Sen. Tim Scott, who told a campaign event in Iowa: “Ronald Reagan gave us a great example when federal employees decided they were going to strike. He said, ‘You strike, you’re fired.’ Simple concept to me. To the extent that we can use that once again, absolutely.”

It’s also a simple concept that’s illegal under U.S. labor law — employers can’t fire a union member for striking — but facts weren’t as important for Scott as espousing what even his fellow conservative, the New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, called “zombie Reaganism,” the perfect term for an idea that is not just brain-dead but increasingly past its expiration date.

» READ MORE: Biden, Dems make big bet that labor unions can bring back America’s middle class | Will Bunch

One poll showed that 75% of Americans are supporting the UAW strikers over management, which suggests that even a lot of Republicans support the picketers. More broadly, a Gallup Poll this summer found that 67% of the public are supportive of unions, consolidating a trend that began when the economic crisis of 2008-09 dramatized how far the pendulum of inequality had swung toward corporations and billionaires, and away from the U.S. worker.

“When looking at these strikes that have been happening recently, it becomes very clear where their loyalties lie and their priorities lie,” Ken Jacobs, who chairs the University of California, Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education, told me about the modern GOP. “Some Republican commentators have argued that Republicans should find a way to be more a party of the working class, but when you dig down into their proposals, they are still anti-union or anti-working people.”

You could argue the current state of affairs began on May 8, 1970, the date of the notorious Hard Hat Riot, when union workers attacked a rally of anti-Vietnam War protesters in lower Manhattan. The GOP‘s Richard Nixon seized the moment, inviting New York union leaders to the White House to herald a new strategy of playing on the resentments of the college-educated New Left to peel away blue-collar votes. The plan worked, at least among a white working-class that became Reagan Democrats in the 1980s and full-throated Republicans when Fox News arrived to amp up a culture war.

So is the GOP the party of the working class? Yes, and no. In the 2022 midterms, Republicans captured a record 55% of “non-college voters” — a not totally accurate proxy for the blue-collar electorate — by continuing to pull in two-thirds of whites without a diploma, and gaining votes from non-college-educated Latinos. But Democrats are increasing votes in specifically union households — 55% in 2022 balloting.

No wonder the GOP is aggressively putting the union movement down.

South Carolina, the home state of both Haley and Scott, is instructive. It may indeed be — as Haley boasted to Fox News — the most anti-labor state in America, with just 1.7% of workers carrying a union card. It’s not a coincidence that a survey this year by the business network CNBC ranked South Carolina the fourth-worst state for workers, writing: “South Carolina is an unhealthy state, both at home and on the job. The state has the nation’s fifth-highest rate of occupational deaths and it finishes in the top 10 for frequent physical and mental distress overall. Legal protections for workers are limited ... ”

Gee, if only there was some kind of organization that could fight for safer factories and warehouses, a less stressful workplace, and codified employee protections, not to mention increasing paychecks (since South Carolina also is the 10th-worst state for poverty). The problem for the GOP is that more and more voters see what’s happening here.

This is not 1970, or 1984. Culture warring begins to lose its impact when blue-collar workers realize how far they’ve fallen behind over a half-century, or connect GOP policies with the fact that CEOs now make nearly 400 times as much as their workers.

The epitome of the labor conundrum for the Republican Party is the man much more likely than a Haley or Scott to be its 2024 nominee: Donald Trump. The 45th president may be a corrupt autocratic narcissist, but his political instincts aren’t quite as dumb as the South Carolina brigade. He’s threatened to visit a UAW picket line in Michigan while his distant rivals are debating next week in California. But even Trump can’t help but get drawn back into anti-unionism, having made remarks critical of the UAW just days earlier.

The reality is that Trump had four years in the Oval Office to prove that Republicans are the party of the working class, and he whiffed, badly. His administration specifically weakened the right to organize in the workplace and made it easier for companies to fight unions. POTUS 45 also signed a tax cut enriching billionaires and corporations, sent to him by a GOP Congress that refused to raise the minimum wage. Perhaps that’s not surprising, considering that as a developer, he’d built his landmark Trump Tower with non-union, undocumented workers.

Look, labor issues are politically complicated. Just ask President Joe Biden, whose sentiments — both personally and politically — are clearly pro-union, and yet is hampered by the fact he also wants a short strike and needs to negotiate with both sides. GOP candidates have no such burden and can say whatever they want, and what most want to say is that “the party of the working class” despises unions — the only people out there fighting for the working class to have a better life.

I hope that Trump does try and walk the picket line in Detroit next week, because it may not be the lovefest that he fantasizes about from his castle at Mar-a-Lago. The longer that the UAW’s fight for a fair deal goes on, the more that those Americans with calluses on their hands are realizing that the frauds of the Republican Party are not on their side.

» READ MORE: SIGN UP: The Will Bunch Newsletter