Gideon Resnick at The Daily Beast details the reaction to Donald Trump’s attacks on union leader Chuck Jones:
[O]n Thursday, a number of unions throughout the country, who had kept close watch on the situation, expressed disappointment and anger with a future leader of the free world using his position to bash one of their own. After all, Trump put up the best numbers in union households since Ronald Reagan won his second term in 1984.
“The attacks on Chuck Jones, president of United Steelworkers Local 1999, must stop immediately,” Elaine Kim, of 32BJ SEIU, the largest building service workers union in the country, said in a statement to The Daily Beast.
“Jones was doing his job defending working men and women and the families that depend on them by speaking out and sharing the facts about the deal with Carrier. To attack Jones and his family is not only beyond the pale but anti-worker and un-American. To speak the truth is a freedom generations of Americans died for, and worth defending today and forever. We call on those who cherish that freedom, including those in positions of influence, to join us in standing with Chuck Jones, loudly and publicly.”
The message of solidarity was apparently heard loud and clear.
Steven Greenhouse at The Los Angeles Times is up with an excellent takedown of Trump:
In Trump’s two tweets, it was unclear whether he was blaming Jones, the steelworkers union or unions in general for the fact that companies were fleeing the country. It was a doubly confused attack because the Donald J. Trump Collection, which is nonunion, has had many shirts produced in Bangladesh and China and suits made in India and China. Moreover, Trump was wrong to suggest that it’s only unionized factories that flee the country. American companies have also closed many nonunion factories — think apparel and furniture — and outsourced those operations.
Trump’s second tweet had an enigmatic phrase: “spend more time working-less time talking.” There, it was ambiguous whether he was referring to the steelworkers union or to unionized workers in general. If he meant the latter, by asserting that Midwestern workers toil too little and talk too much, he was essentially insulting many of the blue-collar workers who voted for him. If Trump was saying the union itself should spend less time talking, that seems to contradict his assertion that the steelworkers hadn’t done enough to save the Carrier plant. To save it, the union presumably would have needed to talk more, not less, with Carrier.