Trump has a strange scapegoat when producing jobs disappear: Union Dues
President Donald Trump has spent much of this week talking about idling from General Motors' Lordstown, Ohio, manufacturing facility, some four months after national news was made. After promising no such plant would close on his watch, Trump turned to an unusual villain in a speech Wednesday: union quotas.
Tramp spoke to a crowd at another production facility in Lima, and portrayed to lurk Lordstown on the feet of the United Auto Workers Union. The UAW has represented workers there for decades, and Trump has publicly attacked Dave Green, President of the Union's Lordstown Local.
"You pay too much fee," Trump told workers. "As an example, they [the UAW] could have held General Motors. They could have kept it in the beautiful plant of Lordstown. They could have kept it. Lower your fees. Lower your fees."
It's not clear about Trump was explicitly owed to closure unions or lumpy arguments for charges to be lower because the facility was shut down and somehow UAW's fault.
Cleveland.com called Trump's statement "curious", given that the union is paid by workers, not companies, and would not have found out in GM's decision to idle at the facility. The company makes a strategic shift away from smaller cars ̵[ads1]1; the factory produced its Chevy Cruze there – and doubled on trucks and SUVs at a time of cheap gas.
UAW's fees are about 1.5 percent of the employee's earnings – quite a typical price. Dues is usually drawn directly from an employee's paycheck and goes against the cost of negotiating for a contract that represents employees and (if the worker permits) the association's political activities. Following the acquisition of fees several years ago, UAW issued a plan last year to reduce them.
It is more sensible – but perhaps equally wrong – ways to attempt to blame an association for the conversion of a facility. A more typical republican can claim that the good wages and benefits negotiated by the union made the labor costs too high. Instead, Trump opposed union quotas, although most of the anger in Ohio seems to be targeting GM, not UAW.
The Ohio languages were not the first time Trump took hold of unions in politically difficult productions.
When Carrier Corp, an air conditioning and refrigeration manufacturer, announced plans to change work from Indiana to Mexico in 2016, presidential Trump was dissolved in a public spit with a local union of United Steelworkers, representing Carrier employees. Then he raised the question of unions and said they were too burdensome:
Despite what he said in Ohio this week, he seems to understand who is following the bill for professional fees. When he was on the promotional track, he said he loves states with "right to work" laws, where no employee can be required to pay taxes to a union representing them.
"It's better for the people," Trump said then. "You don't pay the big fees to the unions. The trade unions get big fees. Many don't realize they have to pay a lot of fees. I'm talking about the workers. They have to pay huge fees to the association."
