Since the beginning of the organized labor movement, the American worker has been fighting to secure ever greater prosperity, workplace rights, and opportunities. With President Trump, working men and women finally have a genuine ally in the White House helping to advance their cause.
As we approach the third Labor Day weekend of the Trump administration, a holiday instituted to commemorate the achievements of the American labor movement, it’s a perfect time to recall that — before anything else — the MAGA movement that put Donald Trump in the White House is about delivering the best possible results for American workers. That’s what President Trump ran on in 2016: more jobs, better pay, more choices, and genuinely fair-trade deals that put America on a path to lasting prosperity.
In 2016 American workers across this great nation put their faith in Donald Trump and his message, propelling him to victories in states a Republican candidate hasn’t won in decades. Blue collar Independents and disaffected Democrats were key to winning Ohio and other industrial states. This year, workers can look forward to the best Labor Day for American working men and women in a generation, secure in the knowledge that they made the right choice.
In that time, Trump’s leadership has created more than six million new jobs. Unemployment is hovering near a 50-year low — 3.7 percent at last report — and wages are rising at the fastest pace in over a decade. But even those numbers don’t fully reflect the economic renaissance that has taken place over the past two and a half years.
The rapid job creation is coming from a full-scale rebirth of the traditional American economy — the one that created the middle class as we know it in the aftermath of World War II.
AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka has obviously taken notice, because lately he’s been begging the Democrat presidential candidates to take the interests of union members seriously, rather than trusting that party affiliation alone will deliver them the votes of organized labor.
“If you support us, and I mean really support us, we will support you,” Trumka stated recently. “But you better come with more than platitudes and a party label.”
Based on Trumka’s own criteria, there’s only one candidate in the 2020 presidential race who deserves the support of organized labor, and that’s Donald J. Trump.
The American labor movement has been fighting to bring manufacturing back to our shores for decades. Establishment politicians, Republican and Democrat, told them time and again that it wasn’t possible. Those jobs “are just not going to come back,” President Barack Obama said famously.
The liberal New York City elite’s court economist, Paul Krugman, was even more explicit, mocking the notion that President Trump could offer anything more than “service sector” jobs — a category that, in the minds of many working class Americans, generally describes low-paying retail and food service jobs that offer little opportunity for advancement.
The naysayers have all been proven wrong. President Trump has delivered the manufacturing renaissance he promised. In his first two years in office, the manufacturing sector added about half a million jobs, and we’re on pace to add another half million by the end of Donald Trump’s first term.
Those jobs — not just in manufacturing, but in energy, construction, tech, and more — give the American worker more power, more leverage, and more options than at any time since the boom days of the 1980s and ‘90s. It’s the best time ever to find a good job, transition to a better one, or even change careers.
Unlike the Democrats, who talk about helping working men and women while promoting policies that hurt American workers, President Trump is sincerely committed to advancing the interests of American labor. Union members were critical to his victory in 2016, and the Trump Campaign is determined to turn out even more union members to help re-elect the president in 2020. We will devote the time, energy, resources, and attention to expand the coalition of rank and file union members who know a good job when they see one.
The prosperity that workers are currently enjoying didn’t come out of thin air; it came from the president’s pro-growth agenda of middle-class tax cuts, deregulation, and genuinely fair trade. The good times could slip away like the waning days of summer if we reverse course now, though.
The Democratic Party’s presidential candidates not only want to repeal the tax cuts that saved taxpayers an average of $1,400 last year and restore the regulatory overreach that crippled American businesses during the Obama era, they’re also urging surrender in the seminal trade negotiations that are still underway between the Trump administration and the Chinese.
The president kept his promise to kill the disastrous Trans-Pacific Partnership and kept his promise to renegotiate NAFTA and secure a better deal for American workers. He also reached a spectacular trade deal with our ally Japan just this past weekend. President Trump will do the same with our rival China — unless his Democratic opponents are able to take the White House back and give Beijing a free pass to resume its abusive, illegal trade practices for another generation.
The Democrats have plenty of other nasty surprises in store for working Americans, too. Their outrageous “Medicare for all” proposal, for instance, would eliminate the private health insurance plans that workers earned at the bargaining table.
While the Democrats seek to take away the victories that previous generations of union members struggled so long to achieve, however, President Trump has been keeping his promises to uplift the working men and women of this country. That’s going to make all the difference when the time comes to cast our ballots next year.
Bob Paduchik is a Senior Advisor to the Trump 2020 Campaign and is the former co-chairman of the Republican National Committee. He resides in Genoa Township in Delaware County.