Mike A. Sabat III: Here’s why union members support Biden
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When Tenaris idled its Beaver County pipe-making plant and laid me off this spring, I walked out the door with a lifeline — six months of employer-paid health insurance that enabled me to keep providing for my family.
The owners of Tenaris didn’t provide this crucial health care coverage to my co-workers and me out of the kindness of their hearts but only because my union, the United Steelworkers (USW), negotiated it.
It’s important to remember that the federal officials we elect Nov. 3 will wield enormous power over the right of Americans to join unions and the ability of unions to effectively represent the millions of workers who depend on them.
At stake are not only fair wages and benefits, but also safe working conditions, discrimination-free workplaces and even the decent treatment of workers furloughed during recessions like the one America faces right now.
In his column “Steelworkers union aglow for Biden-Harris” (Oct. 8, TribLIVE), Grove City College professor Paul Kengor asked how “union guys” like steelworkers could support Joe Biden for president when Donald Trump imposed tariffs that he promised would protect America’s steel industry.
The real question is, how could union members support a president who’s spent the past four years attacking workers — eroding our rights — at every turn?
Trump turned the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) against the very people it was created to protect. The board’s corporate-friendly majority, nominated by Trump and confirmed by Senate Republicans, derailed workers’ organizing campaigns, allowed employers to change working conditions in the middle of a contract and empowered companies to misclassify employees as contractors to avoid complying with labor laws.
Through its general counsel, Peter Robb, a notorious union buster since the failed Reagan administration, the NLRB even supported the firing of health care workers who raised covid-19 safety concerns.
These attacks on workers occurred as a growing number of Americans, including professors like Kengor, seek the benefits and protections that unions provide.
Time and again, Trump showed nothing but scorn for workers’ safety.
When the covid-19 pandemic hit, unions insisted that the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration implement an emergency, temporary infectious disease standard requiring employers to take specific steps to protect workers.
But the Trump administration callously opted to let employers devise their own procedures instead. As a result, thousands of workers died because of safety lapses at nursing homes, meatpacking plants, grocery stores, warehouses and other workplaces.
Now, Trump refuses to use his clout with Senate Republicans to push through a stimulus bill restarting $600-a-week federal unemployment benefits and ensuring health care for millions of Americans who lost jobs because of the recession. The Democratic-controlled House passed legislation providing this relief months ago.
Long before the pandemic, Trump broke his promises to workers. While he enacted tariffs, as Kengor pointed out, the president not only failed to implement them effectively but also refused to take the other steps necessary to rebuild America’s manufacturing base.
Trump won the 2016 election with a vow to halt the offshoring of American jobs. Yet corporations closed hundreds of factories — and relocated about 200,000 jobs — over the past four years. The manufacturing sector fell into recession long before Trump’s bungled pandemic response further wrecked the economy.
This past summer, the USW and Tenaris reached out to the Trump administration for assistance saving the plant and helping workers weather the recession. But no one would even meet with us. So much for Trump’s pledge to fight for working people.
American workers simply cannot afford another four years of Trump.
And that’s why this union guy — along with millions of my brothers and sisters in labor — will help carry Biden to victory.
Mike Sabat III is a resident of Raccoon Township, Beaver County, and a member of USW Local 9305.