I wonder what my father, a butcher and diehard unionist, would think about the political situation in our country. Is it “morning in America,” as Ronald Reagan proclaimed? “American carnage,” as Donald Trump proclaimed? Or “have we nothing to fear but fear itself,” as Franklin D. Roosevelt put it?
Unions in the automobile, steel, rubber, and other industries played a major role in Roosevelt’s re-election in 1936. According to a poster printed during his term, Roosevelt said, “If I worked in a factory, the first thing I would do would be to join a union.” Whether he was serious or not, as a labor historian I have long noticed that the Democratic Party and unions at that time stuck together like peanut butter and jelly.
Unions donated their votes, money, and time to their preferred political party—volunteering to hold signs on Election Day, go door-to-door for candidates, and operate telephone switchboards to call potential voters. And Democrats pushed for policies that unions supported, such as enacting a minimum wage, creating a social security system, and establishing federal oversight of union elections.
“That is the job of the unions”
My father, Albert Forrant Jr., benefited from and participated in this coalition, planting trees as part of the Civilian Conservation Corps, a New Deal program for young people that provided jobs and a small salary in the late 1930s. After my father returned from World War II, he and my mother bought the single-family home I grew up in with a mortgage backed by the federal government. He then worked for 40 years as a butcher for a major supermarket chain.
Dad often took me to union meetings of the Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butcher Workmen of North America and sometimes talked during the car ride about the importance of sticking together.
“That’s the job of the unions,” he explained to me. “We help each other.”
Both sides took this connection for granted until Southern Democrats, fearing that unions would organize black workers across the South, joined their pro-business Republican colleagues in Congress in opposing pro-labor legislation. This led to the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947. The law cut union campaign spending, limited the effectiveness of strikes, and tightened organizing rules.
Eventually, union membership declined, putting further strain on the ratio. Fewer unionized households meant less influence, especially in states like Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania that were once the centers of powerful unions. Today, only one in ten U.S. workers is a member of a union.
Confusion in politics
I missed out on practical political instruction in my youth.
Later in life, I worked in a metal factory in western Massachusetts and it was there that I had a light bulb moment. I started as a machinist and then became a sales representative for my union. Many of the 1,000 workers in the factory reminded me of my father: They worked hard, focused on supporting their families, were scrupulously fair and lived on their paychecks to make ends meet. Their lives exemplified the quiet dignity that comes with hard work.
If my father were alive today, I don’t think he would understand that in some professions, nearly half of union members supported the Republican presidential candidates in the last election. Unions are an important voting bloc, and their votes are not necessarily based on economic self-interest, nor do they simply vote the way their union leadership tells them to. In other words, anyone who takes the workers’ vote for granted has failed.
So why are the political views of many workers so confused?
I think about this question a lot, especially as Americans prepare for an important election.
Predicting Trump’s victory in 2016
A week before the 2016 presidential election, I told students in my labor history class that I was fairly certain Trump would win that presidential election, and I gave them two reasons.
First, one of my former students at Michigan was doing groundwork for Hillary Clinton. She contacted me to express her concerns about the poor efforts in the Midwest to persuade union families in this key swing state to vote for the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate.
Second, a week before the election, I led a discussion in Greenfield, Massachusetts, a metallurgical town in a once-prosperous metallurgical region. I was with three former machinists, and they were angry and abandoned. Having not had a decent job for over two decades, they were hungry for almost any kind of change and seemed willing to bet on Trump.
I believe these fears are a key reason why working-class neighborhoods around the Great Lakes and other parts of the country became breeding grounds for the Republican presidential victory in 2016, the Republican near-victory in 2020, and Trump’s potential second election in 2024.
Fear at the dinner table
As the U.S. economy changed in the late 20th century, millions of manufacturing jobs disappeared. Still, in my view, the Democratic Party did more good for working families than Reagan, George HW Bush and George W. Bush, or Trump.
But relations between Democrats and the working class were frayed, in part because by the early 1990s most Democratic leaders seemed to have forgotten the party’s historic ties to unions.
President Bill Clinton was in office when many union members in the industry’s core regions were affected by job cuts.
The North American Free Trade Agreement, which he promoted and signed in late 1993, threw labor markets into turmoil. Economists disagree on how many jobs were lost. The Congressional Research Service concluded that fewer jobs were created and fewer were lost than predicted by supporters and opponents of the measure. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics found that between the entry into force of NAFTA and similar free trade agreements and 2010, a total of more than 4 million jobs were lost in the U.S. manufacturing sector.
The number of these jobs has since recovered slightly.
Economists and other scientists disagree about the role of automation and other technologies in this job loss.
Biden’s legacy: union halls activated
Too often, Democrats spoke rhetorically about the middle class building America. Pipefitters, construction equipment operators, hotel clerks, auto workers, and steelworkers did not see themselves in that picture. People like my father and the metal workers I worked with built the country and drove the economy that created the middle-class prosperity for generations that many Americans still enjoy today.
The Democratic Party’s platform, which I find somewhat clumsily worded, now states: “Democrats know that Wall Street did not build America. America was built by the middle class – and the unions built the middle class.”
Joe Biden is the first president to participate in a picket line, but for this union historian and many others, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal remains the gold standard for promoting the labor movement.
But it’s clear that the Biden administration has fought for laws that give everyone the right to organize for better wages, benefits, and working conditions, strengthen public sector workers’ collective bargaining rights, and guarantee domestic workers, farmworkers, and other unprotected workers the right to organize. And now the Harris-Walz team will continue to fight for that agenda.
The Republican Party, for its part, dedicated its 2024 political platform to “the forgotten men and women of America.” However, this document contains very little concrete support for workers’ right to organize.
In a show of strength, Liz Shuler, president of the AFL-CIO – the largest U.S. labor federation – and six other of the country’s most influential labor leaders spoke on the opening night of the Democratic National Convention.
By comparison, at the Republican convention, where Trump was nominated for the third time, only Sean O’Brien, the chairman of the Teamsters union, spoke.
One thing seems certain: Unlike in 2016, Democrats in 2024 are aware that they will have to make many stops at union halls on their way to victory.
