United States | A riveting relationship

Donald Trump woos the labour unions

But they may not jump the way he wants

|WASHINGTON, DC

“DID you ever think you’d see a president who knows how much concrete and rebar you can lay down in a single day?” Addressing an annual gathering of North America’s Building Trades Unions, in Washington, DC, on April 4th, Donald Trump felt at home. The assembled union bosses, mostly burly white men squeezed into business suits but plumbers and pipe-fitters at heart, were like the men he learned his world view from, working on his father’s construction sites in Brooklyn and Queens. “I had the support”, he supposed, harking back to last year’s election, “of almost everybody in this room.”

Manly guffaws and boos rippled around the auditorium. The building trades endorsed the president’s rival, Hillary Clinton, and most of its bosses voted for her. (“It’s arrogant of him to say we voted for him,” muttered a delegate from Ohio. “We didn’t.”) Yet Mr Trump had been invited in part because many of their members, charmed by his talk of protectionism, new infrastructure and jobs, did vote for him. Exit polls suggest he won 43% of voters from union households, the best result for a Republican since Ronald Reagan in 1984. And in a few midwestern states, he did even better: union voters in Ohio picked him by a 9% margin.

Mr Trump has since tried buttering up some of the main union bosses, by inviting them to meetings at which he has reiterated his campaign pledges. “He intends to do the work on the issues he discussed during the campaigns,” Sean McGarvey, head of the building trades, told reporters after being summoned to the White House. “It was by far the best meeting I’ve had [in Washington].” If Mr Trump can sustain that enthusiasm, he could profoundly reorder American politics, not least because of the traditional importance of union activists and cash to his Democratic opponents. The federation of unions that includes the building trades, the AFL-CIO, donated around $16m to Democratic campaigns last year. The cautious support which some of its most powerful members are nonetheless giving Mr Trump’s economic agenda is, in addition, an intriguing way to measure its progress.

Mr Trump’s success is built on a long-standing fissure within the labour movement—broadly speaking, between industrial and construction unions, whose members tend to be conservative and white, and the services and public-sector unions, whose members are more diverse. Reagan, and before him Richard Nixon, profited from the same division. Yet Mr Trump, unlike his Republican predecessors, is attempting this at a time when the electorate is feverishly polarised and the unions both depleted and assailed by his own party, all of which might be expected to make them more resistant to his charms. In 1980 20% of American workers belonged to a union; now 11% do. The slide is mostly for structural reasons, including the outsourcing and automation of unionised jobs in manufacturing. Yet it has been exacerbated by Republican efforts to reduce the unions’ power of collective bargaining, which in many states has been restricted to modest wage negotiations, and by the “right-to-work” laws introduced by Republican law-makers in 28 states. These allow non-unionised workers to enjoy union-negotiated benefits, creating an obvious free-rider problem.

Such measures are intended to deprive the Democrats of support, and they are working. Forthcoming research by Alexander Hertel-Fernandez of Columbia University suggests that limits on collective bargaining, which are mainly aimed at public-sector unions, made government workers in Indiana and Wisconsin less likely to take part in political campaigns, or to vote. In a study of 111 border counties in Indiana, Michigan and Wisconsin, he also calculates that the right-to-work laws they introduced between 2012 and 2016 could account for two percentage points of Mrs Clinton’s underperformance in those states compared with Barack Obama in 2012. Given that Mr Trump’s victory in the electoral college was based on a combined total of 70,000 votes across Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, that could have cost her the presidency.

By attempting to woo union voters even as his party is attempting to smash the unions, Mr Trump, by design or otherwise, is placing an extraordinary burden on his populist agenda. If it does not live up to the hopes of union voters, they would have good reason to turn tail fast. Yet it is unclear, three months into his administration, whether Mr Trump’s economic policies will amount to much of what he promised. A draft outline of his administration’s plans for the North American Free-Trade Agreement, leaked to the Wall Street Journal, suggests it may envisage only modest changes to a pact he describes as “the worst trade deal, maybe ever”. His ambition to slash corporate taxes has been complicated by Republican opposition to a proposed border-adjustment tax that had been expected to pay for it. The spectre of an unfunded tax cut this conjures up makes it even harder to imagine the administration splurging hundreds of billions of dollars on new bridges and roads—the main hope of the building unions.

Yet even if Mr Trump’s prospects of pulling off an enduring realignment are in doubt, his success with union voters has already forced their leaders to reconsider their political methods. A few minutes after the president concluded his speech to the builders, Richard Trumka, the AFL-CIO’s trenchant boss, with whom the president shares little more than a syllable, delivered a more revealing address in Washington. It was in part an attack on Mr Trump: “If you say you are with us and then attack us, you will fail.” But Mr Trumka also signalled that henceforth the Democrats would have to work much harder to win the unions’ support: “We will not be an ATM for any political party.” The shrinkage of organised labour may be terminal; but it will go down fighting.

This article appeared in the United States section of the print edition under the headline "A riveting relationship"

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