No, not at all. I don’t think the Republican party, the far right, MAGA, and the Trump movement have any interest in supporting working-class people to build a labor movement, fight for their rights, or to do anything else than improve the coffers of corporate America. That’s their whole project. Just read their Project 2025 program — it’s pretty clear there that this is not a working-class agenda. It’s a corporate agenda masquerading as working class.

People like J. D. Vance are shrewd politicians. They will make moves such as the ones that you just mentioned to appear as if they back a genuine working-class program. They’re definitely trying to defeat the Democratic Party in the progressive direction that certain members want to push the party in.

They also want to delink the labor movement from historically backing Democrats. There’s a left critique of why that’s also a problem. But I think we have to be very clear that what J. D. Vance and his coconspirators are up to will not advance a workers’ agenda. J. D. Vance does not support organized labor. He does not support the PRO Act. He has not come out in favor of it. He has recently criticized unions that he probably considers “woke,” like Starbucks Workers United.

What he has in mind is a very mythic understanding of who the working class is. We’ve talked about the white working class for years, since the Trump movement took off. He’s built his entire identity and brand off of that. While there is a shift happening within the Republican Party, it’s not one that is leading to a broader working-class movement that supports broad organizing. But the game he’s playing is one in which certain unions are brought into the Republican Party’s open doors while entire segments of the working class — people of color, trans and queer folks — are thrown under the bus. And with it a whole other set of issues that unfortunately get branded as social issues or identity issues, but they’re not that. They are working-class issues, such as the right to reproductive health care and abortion and so many other issues, that get this kind of cultural branding, when in fact they are issues that matter to working-class people broadly, period.

I get why he did this. There are parts of the speech that are not things that are usually said at a Republican convention. It was interesting to hear him lay out what was a pretty anti-corporate agenda in his speech. I wouldn’t say the rest of the Republican Party is going to pick that up, necessarily.

It’s no secret that union membership as a whole, the rank and file, does not 100 percent line up behind one party or another. In my own union, about 30 percent of UAW members voted for Trump in 2016. That number slightly decreased in 2020. I take seriously what O’Brien said, which is that he wants a bipartisan coalition that fights for the American worker — keywords “American worker,” right? I understand where he’s coming from in the sense that he doesn’t want to alienate part of his base.

But the part that doesn’t quite work for me is that it still validates the worst part of our politics. That is still a stage of the Republican Party, which does not have a working-class agenda and is definitely looking to undermine organized labor and workers who want the right to unionize. Any union member who thinks that Trump and the far right is a path to working-class power is engaging in some wishful thinking at best. At worst, our unions, if they open the door to the Republican Party, are helping the billionaire class and the companies.

Absolutely. Trumpism is not a movement based in the working class and definitely not in organized labor and the rank and file of unions. It is based in those kinds of middle sectors of small business owners. One of the unions we represent here in New York, Local 259 — we represent the auto techs and repairmen across Long Island, New York City, and a few other states. Dealership owners are among the worst owners you can imagine to have to bargain with. They’re the biggest union-busters some of us have ever seen. They are vicious types. They hate organized labor with a passion and will do anything to get around the union contracts, and we often have to strike them. To me, that is the base of Trump.

The labor movement needs to think really seriously about the fact that we represent a minority of working-class voters. Our union density is so low, below 10 percent. We’re seeing the rise of interest in organizing and some high-profile campaigns. But we’re still building our power, and the [Joe] Biden administration has been helpful in many ways to do that, but we still have a long way to go. Unions have to do a lot more work to craft a progressive political program.

But we’re not actually speaking to the majority of workers at this point, because most workers are simply not in unions. There are millions of unorganized workers out there who do not have a political home and get their politics from right-wing news resources or have other affinities guiding the way they think. Our political education through our established institutions right now is not going to be good enough to actually overcome those other forces. It’s an organizing problem that the labor movement has to confront.

You have to remember that for a while our union was led by leaders who had no interest in actually fighting for the membership. Many of them ended up in prison. Many of them had to be kicked out of the union. We’re under federal monitorship now. Since then, we’ve had one member, one vote, and the election of Shawn Fain, and we took on the stand-up strike and struck the three auto companies, the Big Three, at the same time last year.

At this point, we have dramatically changed our union to become an incredibly progressive, democratic force in this country. We want to organize the South. We won at Volkswagen. We’re turning it around right now. As part of that comes the articulation of a progressive working-class agenda, a political program that’s advancing not just our members’ interests but the union movement as a whole and also the working class as a whole, the unorganized working class.

At the same time, we’ve seen decades of job losses, plant closures, concessionary contracts. As a rank-and-file member, you can imagine if you’re seeing your union leadership not fight for you, not organized well, agreeing to concessionary contracts, not fighting back against plant closures, and they’re still hand in hand with the Democratic Party that also is not advancing an agenda to directly confront those political economic problems, then you are going to be looking for an alternative. That’s what that 30 percent is about. It’s a 30 percent rooted in finding some other culprit for the issues that are facing them, whether it’s China, whether it’s Mexico, whether it’s trade policies. And honestly, in a lot of ways, those moves wouldn’t be wrong. The Democrats did champion free trade policies that did immiserate their working conditions and lead to record job losses. Now we’re starting to turn that around, but it’s still a long way to go.

The UAW has long been a union that represents a ton of different sectors. I think obviously the momentum right now in organized labor is in sectors such as higher education. A lot of grad workers and postgraduate researchers and faculty are joining the UAW in record numbers. Autoworkers still make up the majority, and they are the biggest sector within the UAW and the sector with the most power in this country. So when we have a stand-up strike, like we did last year against the Big Three, that has national implications.

But what we’re seeing in the UAW because of the diversity of different industries and sectors and kinds of workers we represent is a really interesting project in cross-sector solidarity, in the formation of a class-based political program and agenda. The higher-ed workers are learning from some of the awesome advances in the Big Three and what it means to have a fighting, powerful, high-density sector. That has been built historically since the ’30s.

At this point, the autoworkers, especially through the organizing drives, are also learning about what it looks like to have really disciplined, committed, member-led organizing drives. The Volkswagen election and future organizing drives are also building off the momentum that we’ve built through our organizing team in higher education.

He’s going to get away with it if we don’t have a just transition, if we don’t have a plan that actually is able to [protect] our membership in the traditional manufacturing sector, if that transition is chaotic and leads to displacement and job losses and the shuttering of towns and cities that depend on these jobs. These transitions are happening whether he likes it or not. That’s where the global economy is going, that’s what different states are preparing for. And the point right now is going to be whether or not that’s going to be a just transition that’s going to have working-class people at the center of it.

We made a breakthrough in our Big Three fight last year in creating a path to that by guaranteeing that a lot of these jobs are going to be in the master agreement: GM [General Motors] for example, joint ventures with South Korean companies, for example. We’re organizing other electric vehicle (EV) companies at the moment. This transition to EV is going to come down to whether, number one, we have the power to organize [those companies], and two, the political pressure to make sure that we’re not just giving handouts to these companies, but actually putting conditions on them and ensuring that union standards are respected and that unions have the opportunity to organize these companies and there won’t be legal roadblocks put up against them.

Our nonendorsement of Biden when Shawn Fain took office was based on the fact that a lot of the money — the subsidies going to companies to start this transition, to build up these new battery plants across the country — was being [given out] with very little consideration of labor and no conversations about what the standards and health and safety standards would be, or whether wages would match the cost of living. Once we intervened in that process, it put us on the right path.

As a labor movement, we have to be absolutely clear about what our priorities are. Why didn’t the Democratic Party stand up and take on a working-class agenda, revolving around the issues that affect working-class people, union and nonunion alike, equally: the cost of living, retirement security, health care. Our union proudly stands for universal health care, for instance — we don’t want a private regime of good health care for our members and nothing for anyone else.

But also that just means a progressive agenda. More broadly, that’s protecting the right to vote and democracy. It’s restoring Roe v. Wade and expanding Social Security and Medicare, and ending medical debt and passing the PRO Act, affordable housing, and child- and eldercare — and of course, clean energy and a just transition. We have to be leaders and actually ensure that we’re not only working to create a more sustainable planet but actually making sure that working-class people have sustainable lives through that process and are not displaced by it.

It’s because for us, this is a fight for and led by the working class, period. If there’s going to be a labor movement worth fighting for, it’s going to be one that’s leading on all of these issues. We have to be clear about what our priorities are.

And we need to have a program that’s really based on what our members and workers as a whole are demanding. We need to create the political home for those folks to come to us, whether that’s in our unions or other organizations. If we’re not doing this, if all we’re talking about is how to protect our pension plan and our contracts, then we’re not serving our role. Our role is to fight for the best contracts possible and organize more and more workers. But it’s also to be the visionary leaders of what a country that is actually led by and for the working class looks like.