In his 2016 presidential campaign, President Trump sought the support of America’s “forgotten men and women”—i.e., the working class—and among union households, he outperformed every Republican presidential nominee since President Reagan’s second term in 1984.
In his bid to keep this voting block for 2020, Trump has tried to straddle the fence between labor and employers. While his administration has promoted a generally favorable regulatory environment for the construction industry, it has kept in place an anti-competitive Obama-era executive order on project labor agreements, requiring businesses to hire union labor and pay into union benefit plans on federal construction projects, and has also excluded the construction industry from a U.S. Department of Labor proposed rule on industry-recognized apprenticeship programs.
Democrats hoping to unseat President Trump in 2020 are now focusing on pulling in the union vote. In April 2019, six of the Democrats seeking their party’s presidential nomination spoke at the National Forum on Wages and Working People in Las Vegas, an event convened in part by the Service Employees International Union.
There, U.S. Senators Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), along with former U.S. House Rep. Beto O’Rourke (D-Texas), former Gov. John Hickenlooper (D-Colo.) and former U.S. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Julian Castro, pledged their support for union activist-supported policies including mandated union jobs on federal projects throughout the United States.
Two days later, former Vice President Joe Biden announced his run for the presidency in front of a crowd of union members in Pittsburgh, stating in no uncertain terms, “I am a union man.” Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-Vt.) has also vowed to upend right-to-work laws, which ensure that employees are not required to join a union as a condition of their employment and have been enacted in 27 states.
Democrats clearly view the union vote as critical to defeating President Trump, especially in states they typically have won in the past such as Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, and they are vying for union support on the campaign trail.
While the balance between unions and employers has been enforced under the National Labor Relations Act through the National Labor Relations Board for decades, union activists are fighting to rewrite this law to strip critical employee rights and usher in a one-sided, pro-union policy.
Since taking over the U.S. House, Democrats have pushed its members to support the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act (H.R. 2474/S. 1306), which is cosponsored by a majority of Democrats in the House and Senate, including every sitting senator currently running for the Democratic nomination for president.
Among the PRO Act’s provisions are the elimination of right-to-work protections, threats to workers’ right to a secret ballot in union elections, invasions of employee privacy and the codification of the National Labor Relations Board’s controversial joint employer standard, which small and local construction businesses have vigorously opposed. The PRO Act would drastically reshape the construction industry and America’s workplaces and represents the decades-long attempt by labor activists to increase dues-paying union members.
At a time when the construction industry supports an average hourly wage well above the federal minimum wage ($30 per hour in June 2019) and continues to see increased growth under a common-sense regulatory environment and supportive tax code that allows businesses to grow and hire more employees, construction industry groups such as Associated Builders and Contractors believe such aggressive proposals could bring this progress to a halt, costing jobs and money and slowing growth in the construction industry.
Instead, ABC supports 2020 candidates and policies seeking to:
- expand access to industry-recognized apprenticeship programs;
- eliminate government-mandated labor requirements;
- allow fair and open competition on federal and federally assisted construction projects; and
- create a pro-work, pro-growth economic strategy that will provide fair wages and high productivity.
