President Joe Biden earned an endorsement from North America’s Building Trades Unions as he continues to make his case to be known as “the most pro-union president in American history.”
“Donald Trump is incapable of running anything,” said Sean McGarvey, the organization’s president, according to the Associated Press. “God help us if he gets anywhere near the White House in the future.”
Speaking to the unions’ national legislative conference in Washington, on April 24, President Biden accepted the endorsement and attacked former President Donald Trump for supporting a “right to work law” and making other decisions that “failed” union workers and the working class.
President Trump said he would veto the Protecting the Right to Organize Act of 2021, President Biden said. “Beyond that, he supports a national right to work law, for God’s sake.”
The crowd erupted in boos as President Biden called a would-be national right-to-work law “the single biggest killer that could happen” with respect to unions.
“Look, he might as well say he doesn’t support any union,” President Biden said of President Trump.
Introduced in the House of Representatives on February 27, 2023, the National-Right-to-Work Act would have repealed provisions of the National Labor Relations Act and the Railway Labor Act, allowing an employer to make a deal with a labor union that makes being a member of that union a condition of employment for all employees.
More than 25 states have already enacted their laws prohibiting employers from requiring employees to become union members.
President Biden also contrasted his term against President Trump, calling him out for putting “union busters” on the National Labor Relations Board and accusing him of undermining “union apprenticeships by lowering standards and lowering pay.”
“I worked on policy to save the building trades apprenticeship program because they’re the gold standard of the world,” he said.
Another example he gave was the passing of the Butch Lewis Emergency Pension Plan Relief Act, which, he said, “has already protected hard-earned pensions of over 1 million workers and retirees and counting.” Meanwhile, he said, President Trump “never even lifted a finger to try to get it,” despite promising it.
President Biden also criticized President Trump’s tax cuts and illustrated the choice between the two of them as being “either Scranton values or Mar-a-Lago values.”
“Trump and his rich friends embrace the same failed trickle-down policies that have failed working-class families and union families for over 40 years,” he said, referring to the former President’s home at Mar-a-Lago as “a competing vision of the economy at the heart of the election.”
However, while he argued that “the best way to grow an economy is from the bottom-up and the middle-out” and shared other examples of legislation that favored union workers over the past four years, the President did not appear to mince his words when describing his challenger.
“He looks down on us. I’m not joking. Think about it,” President Biden said. “Think about the guys you grew up with that you’d like to get in the corner and just give him a straight left. I’m not suggesting you hit the president. But we all know those guys growing up.”
The president had opened his speech by crediting the union workers in the audience for electing him president and said, with their help this year, “We’re going to make Donald Trump a loser again.”
As for the union members who may disagree with the official decision, Mr. McGarvey told MSNBC, “We’re not gonna waste a lot of time with some of our members that support Donald Trump, because we’re not gonna change their minds.”
From The Epoch Times
