Amid UAW strike, Trump pretends to support workers. He's used to stabbing them in the back. | Opinion

n an unusual move, Donald Trump spoke to workers in Detroit Wednesday night, evidently seeking some political benefit from the auto workers’ strike, saying he's always had workers' backs.

"Just get your union guys, your leaders, to endorse me and I’ll take care of the rest," Trump told the crowd at Drake Enterprises, a nonunion manufacturer in Clinton Twp.

The former president was unarguably seeking to woo Michigan workers. But Michigan’s workers — indeed, all workers — should remember that in his four years as president, Trump and his administration did far more to stab workers in the back than to have their backs.

Trump rolled back Obama-era protections that would have extended time-and-half overtime pay to millions more workers. He didn’t lift a finger to raise the federal minimum wage, which has remained at a low $7.25 an hour since 2009. His administration pushed to ease safety requirements for oil rig workers and relax rules for safety inspections in coal mines. Trump also eliminated the ban on a toxic pesticide, chlorpyrifos, that causes acute reactions in farmworkers and does nerve damage to children.

Trump boasted repeatedly of his huge infrastructure plans, trumpeting one infrastructure week after another. But that became a running joke as he, unlike Joe Biden, utterly failed to enact an infrastructure plan and create the jobs that many construction workers were eager for. Trump got one important piece of legislation through Congress: $1.5 trillion in tax cuts that went overwhelmingly to the rich and corporations, while giving peanuts to typical workers like the UAW members on strike.

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As for unions, Trump doesn’t really support unions — what he supports is having union members support him. Whether it was his recent attack on UAW president Shawn Fain or his broadside against Richard Trumka, the late, highly respected AFL-CIO president, Trump has often sought to turn union members against their union leaders — a move that weakens unions and their ability to stand up to corporations and demand better pay and conditions.

In recent weeks, Trump has all but declared war on UAW leaders, saying that union members "are being sold down the river by their leadership." Trump even called on union members to stop paying union dues, a statement that would only come from someone who wants to cripple unions rather than strengthen them. In a statement that UAW President Fain saw as a betrayal of workers, unions, and the State of Michigan, Trump once recommended that auto plants in Michigan move to lower-wage states to remain competitive.

When nominating U.S. Supreme Court justices, Trump chose people who were far friendlier to corporations than to workers. One of his appointees provided the deciding vote in Janus v. AFSCME — the most important anti-union decision in decades. That decision substantially hurt labor unions and their treasuries by ruling that teachers, police officers and other government employees could opt out of paying any dues whatsoever to the unions that fight for them and win raises for them. That 5-4 decision overturned a unanimous 1977 decision that was a victory for the Detroit teachers’ union, and made sure workers paid their fair share to their union. Trump’s nominees to the National Labor Relations Board repeatedly favored corporations over unions, often acting in ways that made it harder for workers to unionize.

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Trump deserves credit for making good on one promise he made to workers: that he’d fight hard on trade. He improved NAFTA, although, until Nancy Pelosi and labor unions stepped up the pressure, the changes he won had failed to ensure the agreement would have an effective enforcement mechanism to protect Mexican workers’ rights.

As for China, Trump laudably stood up to China’s stealing our trade secrets and its improper subsidies to industry. But Trump’s go-it-alone, America First strategy was less successful in pressuring China to mend its ways than it could have been if he had lined up powerful allies like Europe, Japan and Canada to join us in pressuring China.

Trump likes to boast that under him we had the best economy ever — something many other presidents, not to mention economists, would quarrel with. Job growth, for instance, has been far slower under Trump than Biden. In Biden’s first 31 months in office, through this past August, the nation added 403,000 jobs a month on average; in Trump’s first 31 months, it added 181,000 a month (that was before the pandemic hit).

Workers shouldn’t be fooled. When Trump tells workers he has your backs, it’s like a fox telling the hens, "I have your backs."

Steven Greenhouse is a Senior Fellow at The Century Foundation, a think tank, and former labor reporter for the New York Times, where he worked for 31 years. He is the author of the book, “Beaten Down, Worked Up: The Past, Present, and Future of American Labor.”

This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Trump's Detroit speech will claim he champions workers. He doesn't