The Grifters: Trump & the Gipper ~AFL-CIO America's Unions (HRC GP)

[Her Sister]

---------------
This is a snippet from the middle:

Anyway, with Trump it’s déjà vu all over again, to quote the late Yankee great Yogi Berra. Trump is running a scam on working stiffs that reminds me of Ronald Reagan’s almost identical con job.

The Gipper, the most anti-union president since Herbert Hoover, claimed to champion blue-collar America. The Donald does, too.

Sad to say, Reagan’s sucker play worked on more than a few union members. They helped elect the guy.

"Where free unions and collective bargaining are forbidden, freedom is lost!" pre-President Reagan said. Only months after he took office, he smashed the Professional Air Traffic Controllers (PATCO), one of the few unions that endorsed him.

When PATCO members went on strike for better pay and working conditions, Reagan fired them. Their union was decertified and strikers were prohibited from ever working for Uncle Sam again. (President Bill Clinton lifted the ban.)

By crushing PATCO, Reagan flashed "an unambiguous signal that employers need to feel little or no obligation to their workers, and employers got that message loud and clear—illegally firing workers who sought to unionize, replacing permanent employees who could collect benefits with temps who could not, shipping factories and jobs abroad," the Washington Post’s Harold Meyerson wrote.

(Before he decided to run for president, Trump was on board with outsourcing.)

Reagan’s bare-knuckle union-busting shouldn’t have surprised PATCO. The AFL-CIO repeatedly warned that his sometimes pro-union rhetoric was a far cry from his anti-union positions. Reagan touted "right to work" laws when he ran for president.

The AFL-CIO endorsed President Jimmy Carter’s re-election. So did nearly every union. "A union member voting for Ronald Reagan is like a chicken voting for Col. Sanders," said a sign in a Paducah, Kentucky, union hall 26 years ago. I don’t know if anybody saved the sign. But if somebody did, it ought to go back up with “Ronald Reagan” painted out and “Donald Trump” painted on.

Like Reagan’s in 1980, Trump’s record is out there, plain for all to see.

Trump says he prefers right to work states to non-right to work states.

Trump is fine with U.S. companies pulling up stakes in one state and relocating in another. Translation: Trump is cool with companies busting unions in non-right to work states and moving to right to work states.

Trump is fighting tooth-and-nail to keep his Las Vegas hotel workers from organizing a union.

"Donald Trump regularly incites political violence and is a serial liar, rampant xenophobe, racist, misogynist and birther who has repeatedly pledged to ban all Muslims—1.6 billion members of an entire religion—from entering the U.S.," is the tagline the Huffington Post puts on its stories about the presumptive GOP presidential nominee.

I’ve packed a union card for more than 20 years. Trump mocks the fundamental principle of trade unionism: In a union, everybody is a brother or sister, regardless of race, creed, religion, ethnicity, sexuality or anything else.

http://www.aflcio.org/Blog/Political-Action-Legislation/The-Grifters

[Her Sister]

1. No Surprise: Trump Is a Union Buster at His Own Hotel

Amid the buffoonery of Donald Trump’s campaign, workers at his Vegas hotel are demanding justice.

While the Donald seeks election to a new post, roughly 500 workers at the hotel are focusing on a very different vote: They’ve been pushing to form a union for months, and are trying to snatch a bit of Trump’s campaign spotlight this summer to call on him “Make America Great Again” right on his home turf. As a recent ad for the unionization campaign proclaims: “We think that working for Mr. Trump in Las Vegas is a chance to make our lives better…but only if he pays us the same wages and benefits as everyone else working on the Strip.”

https://www.thenation.com/article/no-surprise-trump-is-a-union-buster-at-his-own-hotel/

[Her Sister]

2. TRUMP'S LABOR PAINS: THE UPS AND DOWNS OF HIS UNION RELATIONS

Carmen Llarull is not a tall woman. She looked even tinier than usual standing on the back of a flatbed truck last August, with the gold and mirrored edifice of the 64-story Trump International Hotel looming behind her along the Las Vegas Strip. Speaking softly in Spanish, the 60-something Llarull addressed the boisterous group of red-clad protesters, telling them “we need to stop all intimidations if we want respect and justice.” The Trump Hotel housekeeper claimed she’d been fired from her job for wearing a Culinary Workers Union pin. “But I’m back here again, to fight for all of you.”

Nearly a year later, Llarull and more than 500 maids, bartenders and bellhops at the Trump International are still fighting the presidential candidate and his company. In early April, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) certified the Local Joint Executive Board of Las Vegas, a partnership of the powerful local Culinary Workers Union and the Bartenders Union, as the legal collective-bargaining representatives for hotel employees. Hotel management, however, has been dragging its feet on new contract negotiations.

The theme of the Culinary Workers Union’s campaign against Trump has been “Start here” (as in, to “Make America Great Again,” in the familiar words of his campaign): start with your own Las Vegas employees. According to organizers, management at Trump’s Vegas hotel has been aggressively anti-union, which they’ve documented in a flurry of NLRB complaints filed since 2014 that allege the hotel has threatened, fired or otherwise retaliated against workers trying to organize. It’s alleged that Trump management has even tried to block them from communicating.



The Trump Organization did not respond to requests for comment, but in legal correspondence and hearing transcripts obtained by Newsweek under the Freedom of Information Act, lawyers for Trump vigorously contested those claims. But Trump International Hotel’s decision to fight the Culinary Workers Union’s organizing effort at every turn certainly doesn’t suggest a company that’s union-friendly.

continues in link: http://www.newsweek.com/trump-labor-pains-466220

[BlueMTexpat]

3. One BIG difference perhaps: Raygun

had a much smoother delivery and was used to staying on script, even when it was pure make-believe

Another perhaps was that Raygun adored Nancy and actually listened to what she had to say.

Trump is a more obvious, more overtly racist and misogynistic snake-oil salesman.

But yes, grifters both.

[Kath1]

5. I remember Reagan well.

He was a narrow-minded bigot and a warmonger. He usually had an amiable delivery but he was a con man and a grifter, just like Trump.

[BlueMTexpat]

6. You'll get no argument

from me about that!

[Kath1]

4. Right on!

I was in college during the Reagan years. Trump is similar but more overtly nasty. Reagan was bad for working people and so is Trump. No one in their right mind wants anything like another Reagan administration. But I think right-wingers are crazy, anyway.

[Thinkingabout]

7. Trump says he is going to bring jobs back and everything will be great then he says wages are too

High, he can always come back he said both things, just can't tell where he goes next, probably continue his anti union and lying.