AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka told a group of reporters on Wednesday that there is little hope for labor unions to find common ground with the Trump administration, with a White House that’s divided into two factions: aides who “turned out to be racist,” and “Wall Streeters.”
“You had one faction that actually had some of the policies that we would have supported on trade and infrastructure but turned out to be racist, and on the other hand, you had people who weren’t racist, but they were Wall Street.”
—Richard Trumka, AFL-CIO
“You had one faction that actually had some of the policies that we would have supported on trade and infrastructure but turned out to be racist,” Trumka said at a roundtable hosted by the Christian Science Monitor.
“And on the other hand, you had people who weren’t racist, but they were Wall Street,” he said. “And the Wall Streeters began to dominate the administration and have moved his agenda back to everything he fought against in the election.”
Asked which side he thinks the president is on, Trumka responded: “Which day?” before adding: “I don’t know. I wish I had the answer to that. I think a lot of people wish they had the answer. He has shown a remarkable ability to do a 180 on a dime.”
Trumka’s comments are significant, notes Axios‘ Shane Savitsky, because it is “startling language from the country’s most powerful labor leader, who resigned from Trump’s manufacturing council after Charlottesville, and a sign that the ‘Trump coalition’ that included blue collar workers in states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, could be breaking down.”
Recent polls and studies show that portions of Trump’s base that carried him into office, including blue-collar workers, are now moving away from the president. “While Trump’s support has been on the decline since he entered office in January,” Common Dreams reported, a CNN poll (pdf) conducted earlier this month revealed that “the president’s popularity among his previously-solid base is shown to be crumbling.”
Even before Trump’s controversial charge that “many sides” were to blame for the violent white supremacist demonstrations in Charlottesville, Virginia, calls for impeachment were mounting, along with speculation that he will resign before his term ends.
But his approval ratings hit an all-time low in the wake of his Charlottesville commentary, and he was forced to disband his two business councils after triggering a mass exodus of leaders like Trumka, who said he left the manufacturing council after consulting with union members who saw Trump’s remarks as a “spirited defense” of white supremacy.
However, Trumka also said the council “never was a vehicle to provide real policy solutions. In fact, the committee never met.” Instead, he said, it became a way for the administration to encourage deregulation, and “they didn’t have any solutions for helping manufacturing.”
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