At the Democratic National Convention on Monday night, United Auto Workers (UAW) president Shawn Fain sported a shirt that read “Trump is a Scab,” making it clear that his union stood with Democratic nominee Kamala Harris and her running mate Tim Walz.
"For us in the labor movement it's real simple: Kamala Harris is one of us," Fain said in his speech.
His support isn’t surprising. Historically, most labor unions have supported Democrats. But this election season, Republicans has made a deliberate effort to appeal to the working class.
Teamsters boss Sean O'Brien, the head of America's largest union, became the first-ever union president to speak at the Republican National Convention last month.
“President Trump had the backbone to open the doors to this Republican convention, and that’s unprecedented. No other nominee in the race would have invited the Teamsters into this arena,” said O’Brien.
O’Brien’s appearance at the event was a shock to many, but it’s part of a larger campaign by Trump’s Republican Party to rebrand itself as pro-labor and move away from the Reagan-era economics of big business expansion that have marked the GOP for decades.
The rebrand was boosted by Trump's selection of JD Vance as his running-mate. The Ohio native has positioned himself as a champion for the working class who will help dismantle “the regime,” a term he and his peers use to describe liberal elites in the government, business and higher education.
Vance has become the face of a group of young Republicans known as the New Right, who believe current democratic systems have failed the United States and must be dismantled. Instead, Vance supports economic populism and the industrialization of America’s industries, which he says would bring more jobs back to low and middle-class Americans.
But despite the pro-labor image they’re pushing, Vance and Trump are anything but.
Last week, allegations surfaced that workers at a start-up funded by Vance faced “nightmarish conditions.” AppHarvest was a start-up designed to use new technology to grow vegetables at an industrial scale and deemed “the future of farming” in Appalachia.
But reporting from CNN revealed employees, many of whom were migrant workers, were subject to grueling working conditions inside greenhouses. Even after he launched his political career, Vance remained an investor in the company. AppHarvest went bankrupt last year.
The Ohio native also opposed the PRO Act, which would increase collective bargaining rights for millions of workers. Though he does support some unions, his support is dependent on the political stance of the union’s leadership. He has explicitly said there are “good unions” like police unions and “bad unions” like the Starbucks Workers United.
“I think it’s dumb to hand over a lot of power to a union leadership that is aggressively anti-Republican,” Vance told Politico.
Trump’s record too is staunchly anti-labor. Just last week, the UAW announced the union is filing federal charges against Trump for arguing that striking workers should be fired in a discussion with X CEO Elon Musk.
“Donald Trump will always side against workers standing up for themselves, and he will always side with billionaires like Elon Musk, who is contributing $45 million a month to a Super PAC to get him elected,” Fain said in a statement.
“Both Trump and Musk want working class people to sit down and shut up, and they laugh about it openly. It’s disgusting, illegal, and totally predictable from these two clowns,” he added.
Throughout his term as president, Trump restricted union rights to organize, weakened worker protections, refused to raise the federal minimum wage and appointed members to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) who have fought against unions.
In 2018, the Supreme Court also issued a devastating blow to public sector unions, making it easier for government employees to not pay union dues if their workplace is unionized.
Things could get worse if he’s elected in November. Project 2025’s plan for the Department Labor would make overtime pay for workers more complicated to navigate, recommends Congress consider abolishing all public sector unions and even recommends the teenagers be allowed to work in “dangerous jobs.”
“Some young adults show an interest in inherently dangerous jobs. Current rules forbid many young people from working in such jobs,” Project 2025’s labor document reads. “This results in worker shortages in dangerous fields and often discourages otherwise interested young workers from trying the more dangerous job.”
