Can Trump secure his inroads into organized labor?

Kevin McCaffrey stood behind a podium at a German beer hall on Long Island and prepared to deliver the bad news. It was October, three months before the Teamsters Local 707 pension fund would run dry, leaving 4,000 retirees with only a third of their promised retirement benefits. McCaffrey quieted the roomful of truckers and dock and warehouse workers. He decided to get it over with quickly.

“I came right out and said that the International had come to a decision and would be supporting Hillary Clinton,” McCaffrey recalls. “I got booed off the stage.” The Teamsters had announced the endorsement in August, but the reminder still chafed.

McCaffrey is not the only local union leader who witnessed the disconnect between the politics of labor leaders, nearly all of whom are headquartered snug in Washington, D.C., and their rank-and-file members back home in the Rust Belt. Frank Sirianni, president of the Pennsylvania Building & Construction Trades Council, says that Trump’s support among the working class is a legitimate political force, one that lay dormant in the opening years of the 21st century. Sirianni, a glazier by trade, represents 136,000 union workers and 3,500 contractors — roughly one-third of the state’s total construction work force. Trump’s nomination intrigued his membership; local union officials, he says, “were telling me throughout the year that there was a lot of support from our rank and file.”

Trump “hit the right triggers to stimulate support from our members,” Sirianni continues. “You look at the list in his [October 22] Gettysburg speech — trade, pipelines, infrastructure, oil and gas — each item benefits our members.”

Trump campaigned as a champion of the working man and traditional manufacturing. Along the way, he cast aside the received wisdom of generations of free-market conservatives and neoliberal Democrats, vowing to renegotiate NAFTA, kill the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement, open up the gas and oil pipelines sidelined by the Obama administration, shut down the inflow of cheap immigrant labor, and spend $1 trillion on infrastructure. These promises — all in line with desires organized labor has had for decades — netted him just two endorsements: the Fraternal Order of Police and the Border Patrol union.

Organized labor spent $195 million on the 2016 elections, 86 percent of it going to Democrats, but many rank-and-file members defected. Trump won union households — those with at least one union member — outright in Ohio, …, and closed the Republican deficit by 20 points in Michigan and Wisconsin, according to exit polls. He lost union households by 8 percent nationally, equal to Ronald Reagan’s performance in 1984, and a ten-point improvement on Romney’s national showing.

“He’s a different kind of Republican,” the White House official says. “There’s going to be outreach to union leaders, but, more so, there’s going to be outreach to the rank and file.”

If you want to understand why this official and other GOP observers are bullish about Trump’s prospects with organized labor, look no further than Trump’s Day One meeting with leaders of several hard-hat unions. The new president opened with his most important policy announcement to date.

“This is a group that I know well whether personally or just because I have hired thousands and thousands and thousands of you,” Trump said. “We just signed, just officially terminated TPP, and I just signed a document, just signed a powerful document.”

The applause was polite. The union leaders stayed for about an hour. Afterward, Sean McGarvey, president of the AFL-CIO’s Building & Construction Trades Department, addressed reporters with the pleasantly baffled look of a Michelin restaurant critic who had just tasted his first McRib.

“We just had probably the most incredible meeting of our careers,” he said. “It was by far the best meeting I’ve had.”

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