What Would a Harris-Trump Presidency Mean for Union Members?

While union members have traditionally been loyal Democrats, Trump has gained ground among rank-and-file members, raising fears that a once-stable demographic is disappearing.

“The Democratic Party took the working class vote for granted in 2016,” said Robert Forrant, a labor historian. “They just took it for granted that voters, that working class and union voters, would stay loyal to the Democratic Party. It doesn’t work that way anymore.”

While most major labor unions have endorsed Harris, the influential Teamsters and the International Association of Fire Fighters have yet to endorse a candidate. And beyond the endorsements, rank-and-file members are more than welcome to thwart their leadership when it comes to voting.

Despite all the focus on appealing to working-class voters in this election, Harris and Trump presidencies would mean very different things for union members, experts told Business Insider. They agreed that a Harris-Walz administration would be far more supportive of organized labor than a Trump-Vance White House.

Experts stressed the importance of the National Labor Relations Board, the independent federal agency that oversees labor relations and protects workers’ rights. Presidents are allowed to appoint a general counsel and board members, who together decide which issues to prioritize and investigate.

“They really go back and forth from one administration to the next,” Harry Holzer, a former chief economist at the U.S. Department of Labor and a professor of public policy at Georgetown University, said of the appointments. “They’re like the Supreme Court of labor law. Their interpretations and where they choose to do investigations — that’s very important.”

Holzer said the officials appointed by Biden and Harris were significantly more pro-union and more willing to investigate claims of labor law violations, compared to Trump’s officials.

“Broadly speaking, under Trump, the NLRB limited the reach of unions and union protections, and under Biden, those decisions have been reversed and the role of unions has been restored, or in some cases further expanded,” Deborah Kobes, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute’s Center on Labor, Human Services, Population, told Business Insider.

Kobes said Trump’s appointments restricted union elections, on-site picketing and the way dues are collected. She also noted that the Biden administration increased funding for the NLRB and significantly increased the rehiring rate for illegally fired workers.

While Biden has a longstanding relationship with unions and the working class — he was dubbed “Scranton Joe” during his years in the Senate and White House — Harris doesn’t benefit from the same history. Still, experts said she has a solid pro-union record and expect her to pursue relatively similar policies to the president.

“In the spirit of how they think about the role of the labor movement and the right to collective bargaining, there is no daylight,” said Sharon Block, a member of the NLRB under Barack Obama and current executive director of the Center for Labor and a Just Economy at Harvard Law School. Block said Harris’ decision to choose Walz, a former union member, as her running mate also reflects her focus on workers’ rights.

As a senator, Harris worked to strengthen protections for workers in extreme heat, and as vice president, she briefly led a task force focused on worker empowerment. In her role as chair, she led an effort to ease federal barriers to organizing, which Block said indicates “she believes strongly in the right to collective bargaining.”

Trump has focused rhetorically on protecting workers. Since September, he has said at rallies that he wants to support the American working class. However, experts are skeptical that his policies are consistent with his words.

As president, he enacted a series of executive orders restricting collective bargaining among federal workers, but Biden quickly rolled them back, Forrant said. Several experts pointed out that neither he nor Vance support the Protecting the Right to Organize Act, a piece of legislation stalled in the Senate and considered the crown jewel of pro-union efforts.

“It really explicitly lays out its goal of expanding various labor protections with respect to workers, rights to organize and bargain collectively in the workplace,” Kobes said. “It has a variety of provisions that would really work toward that, whether it’s prohibiting companies from having mandatory anti-union meetings, or instituting sanctions for companies that violate workers’ rights.”

Holzer and Forrant both said the PRO Act is the top legislative priority for labor. Harris supports the bill, which is also part of the Democratic Party platform. In addition to the NLRB appointments and the PRO Act, Holzer said the Biden-Harris administration has incorporated pro-union positions into legislation like the infrastructure bill.

Trump also has policies that aren’t explicitly related to unions but still affect members. Holzer said some of his economic policies risk undermining union power in the future: the proposed tariffs would likely be inflationary and recessionary, and the mass deportations would upend the economy overall.

“Most economists would say that the things Trump thinks are good for union members are not necessarily bad for the economy or the labor market,” Holzer told Business Insider.

The power of unions extends beyond union members. Kobes says there is ample evidence that raising their wages also raises the wages of non-union members.

The experts Business Insider spoke to concluded that a Harris administration would be better for union members. Some even said a second Trump term could be worse for workers’ rights than a first.

“There were at least some guardrails in the first Trump administration,” Holzer said. “I think they would probably go away, both in domestic policy and foreign policy.”

He fears that the NLRB appointments will be “more punitive” and that Trump will take “retaliatory measures” against union leaders who support Harris.

“I think we also have to remember that union members still voted overwhelmingly for President Biden and I have no reason to think that Vice President Harris won’t do as well or better with union members in this election,” Block said. “She’s running as part of an administration that rightly calls itself the most pro-union administration in history, or at least since the Roosevelt administration.”

Despite their assessments, Trump still retains a hold on some members of the party, for both cultural and economic reasons.

“People haven’t done enough detailed polling, but I suspect part of it has to do with religion, with evangelical voters who are union members and workers, but also vote with respect to cultural issues, religion, abortion, that sort of thing,” Forrant said. “I think part of Donald Trump’s appeal also comes from the very hard line he takes on immigration.”