Class Contradictions Were on Display as Democrats Courted Labor at the DNC

Differences could remain between unions and a potential Harris administration on Gaza and corporate allegiances.

By Jacqui Germain , 

Truthout/InTheseTimes

PublishedAugust 23, 2024

International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers members wave American flags during the final day of the Democratic National Convention on August 22, 2024, in Chicago, Illinois.Kevin Dietsch / Getty Images

The morning after a string of labor leaders took the Democratic National Convention’s (DNC) Monday night stage, Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) President Stacy Davis Gates was feeling optimistic. As Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson walked across the stage to open the DNC, she was reminded of his background as a middle school teacher and labor organizer. Remembering SEIU President April Verrett’s own organizing roots in Chicago’s labor landscape moved the CTU leader too, as did recalling Gov. Tim Walz’s early years as a high school teacher.

The whole evening felt “surreal,” Gates said.

“The Democratic Party, it feels like, is making a better choice in the direction in which it is marching,” says Gates. “Look, Kamala says, when we fight, we win. We literally hear that at every labor rally we attend. That is a significant symbol of our fight. And I think it’s also a recognition that the democracy that we want to protect in this country is only possible if we are in solidarity, if we are organized, and if we are fighting for the many. That’s what I left [Monday] night with — that in this struggle to compel the Democratic Party, the progressive wing — along with organized labor — are making a run at the platform.”

United Auto Workers (UAW) President Shawn Fain offered one of Monday night’s most memorable speeches, sporting a bright red UAW shirt with “TRUMP IS A SCAB” printed across the front. The pointed call-out at the former president comes a month after Donald Trump called for Fain’s firing, and a year after Trump deliberately tried to undermine the union’s historic Stand-Up Strike in 2023. Fain’s commitment to positioning Trump as an adversarial anti-labor figure for the working class could provide a winning path for the Democratic Party.

“On one side we have Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, who have stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the working class,” said Fain, who noted he was representing the UAW’s 1 million active and retired members on the DNC’s top stage.

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“On the other side, we have Trump and Vance, two lapdogs for the billionaire class who only serve themselves. So, for us in the labor movement, it’s real simple. Kamala Harris is one of us. She’s a fighter for the working class. And Donald Trump is a scab.”

The tens of thousands of Democratic National Convention attendees packing Chicago’s United Center couldn’t help themselves. Trump is a scab! Trump is a scab! Trump is a scab!

The declaration-turned-refrain caught on quickly. The insult evokes Scabby, the movement’s beloved, hideous rat, and serves as a reminder of the many strikes and boycotts the inflatable icon has watched over. It’s a well-known, age-old badge of shame and it’ll be tough for Trump to fight it off.

The DNC’s first night was in large part a response to the Republican Party’s attempt to claim working-class bona fides. Midway through the evening, half a dozen labor union presidents were welcomed to the stage to share joint remarks on organized labor’s support for the party: AFSCME President Lee Saunders, SEIU President April Verrett, LIUNA General President Brent Booker, IBEW International President Kenneth Cooper, CWA President Claude Cummings Jr., and AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler. (Teamsters President Sean O’Brien was notably absent. A Teamsters spokesperson reportedly told HuffPost the union hadn’t received a response to their request for O’Brien to speak at the convention.)

“This election is about two economic visions: one where families live paycheck to paycheck, where people have no right to join a union — a CEO’s dream, but a worker’s nightmare,” explained Shuler. “Or an opportunity economy where we lower the cost of groceries, prescription [drugs] and housing. Where we go after Big Pharma, corporate landlords and price gougers. Where there’s no such thing as a man’s job or a woman’s job or like Donald Trump would say, a Black job — just a good union job.”

The IBEW’s Cooper was greeted to the podium by a long, low Cooooooop! from the eager crowd. “She’s bringing back American manufacturing to forgotten places throughout our country,” he said of Harris, adding that she’d cast a key vote to protect the IBEW’s pension plans in California. “She’s lifted our apprentices up all over the nation, and guess what? She’s not afraid to use the word ‘union.’”

The tone throughout the evening and in conversations following the pro-worker symphony was overwhelmingly uplifting. A movement that had largely been set back on its heels for decades seemed to be in position to have major influence again.

“I’m 61,” says UCLA Labor Studies Professor Victor Narro, “In my lifetime, [the Biden] administration has been the most pro-union administration. It took all these years to finally have a president who actually walked the picket line, you know? I’m hoping it continues with the Kamala Harris administration really prioritizing the working class and the labor movement.”

And yet, the Democratic Party remains full of class contradictions. For all the working-class imagery smartly threaded into speeches — and even the identifiable economic measures that have led to real financial gains for people across the country — the Democratic Party still maintains its own long-standing corporate allegiances.

Just 24 hours after their pro-labor showcase, the Democratic Party welcomed former American Express CEO Kenneth Chenault, who expounded on Harris’s “pro-business and pro-worker” stance. On Wednesday, the party invited Uber’s Chief Legal Officer Tony West to the stage for brief remarks. West, who is also Harris’s brother-in-law and an unpaid adviser to her campaign, is often viewed as an enemy to workers, both for his role in protecting Wall Street elites from accountability in the wake of the 2008 mortgage crisis, and for his role in Uber’s aggressive anti-worker efforts across the country.

Outside the bubble of the convention, the Biden-Harris administration hasn’t been able to push Congress to raise the national minimum wage, despite voters in both Democratic-led and Republican-led states successfully passing minimum wage increases at the state-level across the country for years. President Joe Biden appointed a National Labor Relations Board that has delivered crucial rulings in favor of unions amid labor disputes.

Often cited as the most pro-union president of our lifetime, Biden made history by walking the UAW picket line in 2023; the year prior, he kept with the historical function of the vast majority of U.S. presidents by helping break the railroad workers’ strike. After two years of negotiations and working without a contract, railroad workers’ unions began consolidating support and votes to escalate for the first time in decades. Instead, under the powers of the 1926 Railway Labor Act, Biden intervened by appointing a Presidential Emergency Board to produce a settlement for both sides to re-negotiate around, effectively neutralizing a labor fight many workers appeared to be hungry for.

The UAW is also reinforcing its footing as a fighting union. Fain might not describe himself as antagonizing his membership’s employers, but he certainly believes in leverage and in using it collectively to extract wins for everyone. The UAW’s decision to publicly support a ceasefire — the result of months of internal organizing on the part of rank-and-file workers — has also cultivated a new, energizing front. On Thursday, the UAW was a major force of support when it backed the Uncommitted campaign’s demand that the DNC allow a Palestinian American to speak on the convention’s main stage:

“If we want peace, if we want real democracy, and if we want to win this election,” reads the UAW statement, “the Democratic Party must allow a Palestinian American speaker to be heard from the DNC stage tonight.”

The UAW’s stance on a ceasefire and support for the Uncommitted movement’s push to bring Palestine to the forefront of the DNC stage may appear to put the union at odds with a Democratic Party that would likely prefer to think of organized labor and foreign policy as separate issues. In the end, the party ultimately spurned the request to feature a Palestinian speaker at the convention.

Fain has also taken the lead on calling on organized labor to coordinate their contract dates for May 1, 2028, in the hopes of consolidating enough labor leverage across industries to be the catalyst for major working-class change. Of course, if Democrats win, that May Day would fall under a Harris-Walz administration. And if the DNC’s Monday night lights and speeches are to be believed, the Biden-Harris administration was, and the Harris-Walz administration will be, a willing and enthusiastic partner in that decidedly pro-worker direction.

“If you have a White House that’s very pro-labor, it really does help so much — and especially in that kind of activity where they call for something that resembles a general strike,” says Narro.

Between now and then, there’s certainly time to build enough buy-in from both organized labor and those workers not yet unionized to offer a considerable show of labor strength, leverage and discipline. A Trump-Vance administration would most likely be not just opposed to, but pointedly hostile towards workers engaged in the kind of mass organized labor defiance. Many in the labor movement believe a Harris-Walz administration would be obviously better; Narro guesses the administration would, at the least, use the podium to support the right to strike and urge employers to come to an agreement with workers while keeping their pro-business priorities intact.

Depending on which wing of the labor movement you ask, you’ll get different perspectives on what it means to be pro-worker. Some argue being pro-worker doesn’t necessarily require an oppositional stance; positioning employers as labor’s necessary partners produces compromises and concessions that allow for benefits on both ends. Others argue that being pro-worker necessarily means being anti-big business. Being willing to be confrontational with an employer clarifies the union’s labor leverage and their readiness to use it to extract pro-worker wins. Broadly speaking, the history of organized labor itself is marked by different periods when unions found themselves on either side of the spectrum. The question remains: Which version of a revived labor movement would the Democratic Party, and a possible future Harris-Walz administration, be receptive to?

But more importantly, which version of a revived labor movement do workers envision for themselves?


Jacqui Germain is a journalist and poet living in St. Louis, Missouri. She’s the author of Bittering the Wound, her debut poetry collection about the Ferguson Uprising.