Big Labor’s $2 Billion Cancels Out Worker Votes

In Key States, Most Union Household Members Backed Donald Trump

For weeks now, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka and other top union bosses have been publicly claiming that their massive political machine, which is fueled largely by dues and fees unionized workers are forced to fork over as a job condition, made the difference in the 2020 presidential election.

Were it not for the Big Labor political machine, which is estimated to pump more than two billion dollars into electioneering and lobbying in every campaign cycle, Joe Biden would not be heading into the White House now, say Mr. Trumka and company.

Top union bosses may well be responsible, as they boast, for making Mr. Biden America’s 46th President.

But one feat they surely didn’t accomplish is convincing a majority of union household members in the key battleground states of Pennsylvania and Ohio that he was preferable to President Donald Trump.

Pittsburgh Union Boss Admits: Joe Biden Wants ‘To Do Away With My Job’

At a triumphal press conference held inside the D.C. Beltway two days after voters across America went to the polls, Mr. Trumka specifically claimed the credit for the expected outcome in the Keystone State, which ultimately pushed the Biden-Harris ticket over the 270 electoral votes it needed to win.

As Law360 reported, according to Mr. Trumka, union bosses’ forced dues-funded “efforts to get out the vote in key swing states” like Pennsylvania were critical in determining how the race turned out. 

Absent, however, from Mr. Trumka’s report was any mention of nonpartisan exit polls showing that, in the words of Bloomberg’s Ian Kullgren, “a majority of union households backed President Donald Trump” in Pennsylvania and in neighboring Ohio. 

While Big Labor political operatives poured vast sums of forced-dues money into phone banks and get-out-the-vote schemes in both states, the Buckeye State’s 18 electoral votes went to Mr. Trump.

The exit polls conducted for major news organizations by Edison Research are based on phone interviews with mail-in voters, as well as in-person Election Day surveys.

They confirm that Joe Biden’s public insistence that the U.S. must “transition from the oil industry” provoked a backlash among the union rank-and-file in states where vast numbers of workers’ jobs depend, directly or indirectly, on a flourishing oil-and-natural gas market.

In Pennsylvania, even a number of local union bosses admit they personally find Mr. Biden’s stance unpalatable. Joe Biden “wants to do away . . . with my job,” laments John Hughes, business manager of Pittsburgh-based Local 154 of the International Brotherhood of Boilermakers union.

Big Labor Invariably Opts For ‘Pro-Forced Union Dues’ Over ‘Pro-Worker’

According to Mr. Kullgren, statewide Pennsylvania AFL-CIO chief Rick Bloomingdale also acknowledges that the Biden message on the extraction and use of fossil fuels “likely failed to resonate with some rank-and-file union members.”

National Right to Work Committee Vice President Mary King commented: 

“One may well ask why high-ranking union bosses like Richard Trumka and Rick Bloomingdale opposed the 2020 presidential candidate that rank-and-file unionists clearly believed had a better stance on protecting and expanding good jobs for blue-collar workers in states like Pennsylvania.

“The obvious answer is that it remains the case today, as it has been for many years, that when union bosses have a choice to pour forced-dues treasury money into a candidate who will help workers, or a candidate who backs more coercive power for Big Labor, they routinely opt for the latter.

“The fact that Joe Biden had pledged to push for passage of Big Labor’s ‘PRO’ Act, a package of new special privileges for union monopolists, including the evisceration of all 27 state Right to Work laws that are currently on the books, was obviously key for people like Mr. Trumka and Mr. Bloomingdale.

“Top union bosses lavishly spent forced-dues money forked over by workers and their families in states like Pennsylvania and Ohio to amass as many votes as they possibly could, wherever they could, for the Biden-Harris ticket.

“Effectively, in millions of cases, they used forced union dues and fees extracted from workers to cancel out the votes cast by those same workers in the 2020 presidential race.

“This is a scandal. And it illustrates why Committee members are fighting with determination for passage of a national Right to Work law prohibiting all forced union dues and fees.”