But Fain also put his heart and soul into trying to elect Kamala Harris president, because the partisan stakes have never been higher than they were in 2024. Unlike Obama, Biden lent stronger support to labor than any president since Harry Truman (possibly to a fault in halting Nippon Steel’s purchase of U.S. Steel on dubious national-security grounds). Trump, despite enjoying strong working-class support, had an unusually dismal record on labor during his first administration, even for a Republican, and of course he made it personal, saying, for instance, that then-AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka “represented his union poorly…. It is easy to see why unions are doing so poorly.” (For the record, the AFL-CIO is not a union, it’s a federation of 61 unions.)
One labor leader for whom Trump maintains a soft spot is Harold Daggett, the president of the ILA. Daggett is a Trump fan even though it’s virtually certain that had Trump been president during the October dock strike he would have used his powers under the Taft-Hartley law to halt it—something Biden refused to do. Daggett kept his union neutral in the presidential race, which (like Teamsters President Sean O’Brien’s same move after he was invited to speak at the Republican convention) amounted to a sotto voce Trump endorsement. Trump rewarded Daggett by endorsing Daggett’s anti-automation stance in contract negotiations. Now Daggett is saying Trump “gets full credit” for averting the second dockworkers’ strike.
That’s a bald-faced lie. The truth is that the Biden administration, in hammering out an agreement, averted the dockworkers’ threat to go out on strike a second time on January 16, four days before Trump’s inauguration. It wouldn’t astonish me to learn that Trump’s team told Daggett that if he didn’t credit Trump then Trump would denounce the deal as yet another Biden sellout, killing Daggett’s chances of securing the necessary ratification from ILA’s rank and file. I have no evidence that this happened, but we all know Trump routinely stoops that low. Since National Economic Council director Lael Brainard, Acting Labor Secretary Julie Su, and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, who played a central role in hammering out the maritime deal, don’t likely feel at liberty to say the following to Trump, allow me to say it for them. You’re welcome, asshole.
