We Can't Abandon the Building Trades Unions to the Right
BY
PAUL PRESCOD
Both Richard Nixon and Donald Trump have made cynical but shrewdly strategic appeals to building trades unions and their members. The Left needs a plan to win those workers back.
The educated people and the leader class no longer have any character, and you can’t count on them,” Richard Nixon snarled in the summer of 1971. “When we need support on tough problems, the uneducated are the ones that are with us.” I thought of that quote after Trump said to a crowd of building trades union members in 2016, “I love them [the building trades], and they’re great, and their people are fantastic … And it’s time that we give you the level playing field you deserve.”
The list of differences between the political styles of Richard Nixon and Donald Trump is long. But the similarity they share is perhaps the most important feature of their political careers: both figures had a keen understanding of the importance of appealing to blue-collar working-class voters and how to do it effectively. The building trades were the focal point for both presidents and seemed to encapsulate their vision of the type of “working man” they wanted on their side.
Their strategies went beyond simply wanting more votes in order to win. Both recognized — Nixon in a more coherent way — that building this support disorients the traditional working-class base of loyalty usually enjoyed by the Democrats. Nixon was exploiting the cracks in the New Deal coalition, and Trump is looking to deliver the final nail in the coffin.
Examining Nixon’s and Trump’s strategic appeals can help us on the Left recognize how we’ve lost ground and how we can win it back. Failing to do so, in a time when so many working-class people feel forgotten and abandoned by mainstream liberal politics, will doom our chances of building a viable, mass socialist movement.
https://jacobinmag.com/2020/03/donald-trump-building-trade-unions-politics
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Building trades unions run more than 1,600 training programs that allow thousands of apprentices to earn as they learn. This relieves apprentices of crushing student loans and allows them to immediately step into secure, well-paid union jobs after they graduate. Trump’s proposed change would put this crucial safety net in jeopardy — and severely weaken building trades unions. The fact that Trump is pushing these changed regulations offers us a key opportunity to make the case to the building trades that Trump is their enemy, not their ally.
In this piece it talks about Davids Bacon,.......................I support this law, what I hate is Taft-Hartley.
I was trained in Joint Apprenticeship training program in a town while I lived in Wyoming and this new, Industry-Recognized Apprenticeship Programs (IRAPs), will weaken union's in a lot of ways.....................this program is another National Right to Work for Less Bullshit plan..........................