Trump and unions
"Authoritarian rhetoric has been central to Trump's political trajectory - and his time as president," NPR's Danielle Kurtzleben recently wrote.
She also pointed out that recently Trump likened his political foes to "vermin." Hitler and the Nazis often compared Jews to rats.
But if Trump is reelected, he won't stop at name calling, according to Kash Patel, a Trump loyalist who is likely to become an administration insider again. Trump plans to punish his enemies, real and imagined, "criminally or civilly," Patel warned. "We will go out and find the conspirators, not just in government but in the media. Yes, we’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections – we’re going to come after you."
Germany's "you" included the the country's powerful trade unions. No sooner did he take power than he duped, then destroyed organized labor.
American labor, too, has long been a bulwark against authoritarianism. The AFL-CIO has already endorsed Biden's reelection “There’s absolutely no question that Joe Biden is the most pro-union president in our lifetimes,” AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler said.
Will Trump, whose hostility to organized labor is well documented--click here, here,here,here and here--take a page from Hitler's book and suppress unions?
Hitler killed and imprisoned labor leaders. He replaced their free, independent unions with the Nazi puppet German Labor Front.
If Trump wins next November, the Republican party will likely hold onto the House and flip the Senate. So could he and a GOP Congress outlaw the AFL-CIO and replace it with a MAGA version of the German Labor Front?
Trump claims that while union leaders like Shuler oppose him, most rank-and-file workers are with him. Of late, Trump has been attacking Shawn Fain, the UAW president who led his unto to its biggest contract victory over the Detroit Big Three automakers in years.
During the strike that led to the contract win, Trump said, “the autoworkers are being sold down the river by their leadership, and their leadership should endorse Trump.” At the same time, he encouraged UAW members to "not pay your dues because" the UAW leadership was "selling you to hell. You’re going to be going to hell."
He name-checked Fain: "I think he’s not doing a good job in representing his union, because he’s not going to have a union in three years from now. Those jobs are all going to be gone, because all of those electric cars are going to be made in China. That’s what’s happening."
Fain name-checked Trump: “Every fiber of our union is being poured into fighting the billionaire class and an economy that enriches people like Donald Trump at the expense of workers,” UAW President Shawn Fain said in an emailed statement. “We can’t keep electing billionaires and millionaires that don’t have any understanding what it is like to live paycheck to paycheck and struggle to get by and expecting them to solve the problems of the working class.”
The UAW is part of the AFL-CIO but Fain's union has yet to endorse Biden. But Fain isn't a Trump fan. At the recent Kentucky State AFL-CIO convention Lexington Fain quipped that while the president "was out there on our picket line supporting UAW members, the other guy was in a nonunion plant having a union rally.”
Anyway, Hitler ostentatiously praised German workers. He declared May 1 a national holiday in their honor. Hitler invited more than 100,000 workers to Berlin's Templehof airport and "pronounced the motto of the day: 'Honor work and respect the worker.' He promised that May Day would be celebrated to honor German labor 'throughout the century,'" William L. Shirer wrote in The Nightmare Years, 1930-1940, the journalist-historian's first-hand account of how Adolf Hitler and the Nazis destroyed Germany's fledgling democracy.
“The next morning, May 2, the trade-union offices throughout the country were occupied by the police, the S.S., and the S.A. All union funds were confiscated, the unions dissolved, and the leaders arrested, beaten, and carted off to concentration camp.”
The Labor Front turned German workers into industrial serfs, according to Shirer's Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.
Under the Labor Front, the German worker was “bound to his master, the employer, much as medieval peasants had been bound to the lord of the manor,” Shirer writes. “Hitler decreed a law bringing an end to collective bargaining and providing that henceforth ‘labor trustees,’ appointed by him, would ‘regulate labor contracts’ and maintain ‘labor peace.’ Since the decisions of the trustees were to be legally binding, the law, in effect, outlawed strikes.”
Hitler named Dr. Robert Ley as Labor Front chief. Ley promised “to restore absolute leadership to the natural leader of a factory – that is, the employer." It's not hard to imagine the head of a Trump Labor Front making the same pledge--with the blessing of his boss in the White House.