Kirk Gillenwaters wasn’t surprised to hear that Donald Trump trotted out fake firefighters at a recent Pennsylvania rally.
“Let us be reminded of 2023 and the UAW,” said Gillenwaters, the Kentucky Alliance for Retired Americans president and a retired member of the UAW. “Joe Biden walked a picket line. Trump showed up at a non-union plant.”
The media has been all over the Trump con in the Keystone State. “Another voting bloc advertised as pro–Donald Trump has turned out to be a bust,” wrote Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling in The New Republic.
She reported that the rally in Scranton, President Joe Biden’s hometown, included a “crowd of people holding signage that read, ‘Scranton Firefighters for Trump.’” As it turned out, she added, “the Scranton Fire Department firefighters’ union had absolutely nothing to do with the initiative, and the people waving the signs at Trump’s campaign event were not, in fact, firefighters.”
The International Association of Fire Fighters union didn’t endorse the Republican Trump, who wants his old job back, or Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democrat aiming for the White House. Following the lead of IAFF international, Scranton Local 60 isn’t backing either candidate, though Minnesota and California firefighters are behind Harris. She’s a former California attorney general and U.S. senator. Her running mate, Tim Walz, is Minnesota’s governor.
The Trump campaign denied printing or distributing the signs. “But that doesn’t mean that Trump didn’t try to reap the rewards of the signage’s confusing appearance there,” Houghtaling wrote.
Trump has been trying to scam union members “since he came down that golden escalator in 2015,” said Gillenwaters, a member of Louisville UAW Local 862.
Gillenwaters doesn’t mince words for anybody who packs a union card and might be leaning Trump-ward: “In the event that Donald Trump wins the White House and the Republicans get control both houses of Congress, one of the first pieces of legislation is going to come from our U.S. Sen. Rand Paul – a national ‘right to work bill.’ It will be passed and signed by Donald Trump.”
On the campaign trail in 2016, Trump came out for RTW. “Gotta have right to work,” he said. “Gotta have right to work. I like ‘right to work.’ I mean my position on ‘right to work’ is 100 percent.”
After he was elected, Trump signaled he’d sign a sign a national RTW measure. “The president believes in right to work,” said White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer.
Trump was one of the most anti-union presidents ever. His running mate, Republican Ohio Sen. JD Vance, could hardly be more hostile to organized labor. He rated a flat zero on the current AFL-CIO Legislative Scorecard, which grades senators and representatives on a 0 to 100 percent scale based on how they voted “on issues important to working families, including strengthening Social Security and Medicare, freedom to join a union, improving workplace safety, and more.”
Gillenwaters urges Trump-tilting union members to look at the Biden-Harris labor record.
“Think of all the federal building projects around this country that the building trades are working on right now because of the Inflation Reduction Act, and how so many of these projects in certain states will be in jeopardy because of payback. Trump has said there will be retribution. There would be cancellations of those projects in states he didn’t win.”
Gillenwaters challenged union members to look at who voted for the legislation so beneficial to working people and who didn’t. “Zero Republicans voted for the American Rescue plan, and zero for the Inflation Reduction Act.”
Gillenwaters also pointed to the significant growth of unions under Biden and Harris. Petitions seeking union representation have doubled on their watch, according to the Associated Press. “This marks the first increase in unionization petitions during a presidential term since Gerald Ford’s administration, which ended 48 years ago,” wrote the AP’s Josh Boak.
“Look at what we have been able to accomplish with our ability to organize,” Gillenwaters said. “More people are joining unions because they have the ability to do it under the NLBR.”
On the other hand, Trump will again name an anti-labor secretary of labor and pack the board with union despisers, Gillenwaters warned.
Gillenwaters said Trump is not the first anti-labor presidential candidate to fool a slew of union members into voting for him. “Donald Trump is a false prophet for the working men and women of this country like Ronald Reagan.”
On Aug. 3, 1981, Reagan, who claimed to be the blue collar champion, crushed the Professional Air Traffic Controllers union, which ironically had endorsed him over President Jimmy Carter. (The AFL-CIO endorsed the Democrat.) “It took us years to recover from what Reagan did with PATCO,” Gillenwaters said.
While the IAFF, Teamsters, and Longshoremen declined to officially endorse Harris or Trump, the overwhelming majority of American unions are in Harris’s corner. (Several Teamster locals, including Louisville Local 89, came out for Harris.)
The AFL-CIO unanimously switched its endorsement from Biden to Harris after the president announced he was ending his bid for a second term.
“From day one, Vice President Kamala Harris has been a true partner in leading the most pro-labor administration in history,” said AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler. “At every step in her distinguished career in public office, she’s proven herself a principled and tenacious fighter for working people and a visionary leader we can count on. From taking on Wall Street and corporate greed to leading efforts to expand affordable child care and support vulnerable workers, she’s shown time and again that she’s on our side. With Kamala Harris in the White House, together we’ll continue to build on the powerful legacy of the Biden-Harris administration to create good union jobs, grow the labor movement, and make our economy work for all of us.”
She added, “The AFL-CIO is proud of our early and steadfast support for the Biden-Harris administration, and now we’ll ratchet up our mass mobilization of union workers to elect Vice President Harris as president,” Shuler continued. “Like Harris, the labor movement doesn’t back down – and we’ll never shy away from a tough fight when the future of workers and unions is on the line. Together, we will defeat Donald Trump, J.D. Vance, and their devastating anti-worker Project 2025 agenda in November.”
Gillenwaters warned union members not to fall for Trump’s phony promises that he’s pro union. “Vote your own self-interest and not for another false prophet.”
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Cross-posted from the KY AFL-CIO site.
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