Vice President Kamala Harris and Tim Walz are spending Labor Day in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania between them, Midwestern states central to Democrats’ hopes in November.
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“I tell people, you may not be a union member, but you better thank a union member,” Vice President Kamala Harris said on Monday.
Vice President Kamala Harris, seeking to press her advantage with union voters, stormed into Detroit for a Labor Day union rally on Monday, telling organized-labor supporters that the country celebrates unions “because unions helped build America.”
Ms. Harris and her running mate, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, were barnstorming through the so-called blue wall states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin on Labor Day, appealing to union voters as the ground troops of a campaign that has barely two months left. Ms. Harris was to appear in Pittsburgh on Monday evening with the man she seeks to succeed, President Biden. There, she planned to back Mr. Biden’s opposition to the proposed takeover of U.S. Steel by Nippon Steel of Japan.
At Northwestern High School in Detroit, the vice president was greeted onstage by the presidents of unions representing autoworkers, laborers, utility workers and teachers.
“I tell people, you may not be a union member, but you better thank a union member,” she said, attributing union action for paid leave, vacation time, higher wages and safer work conditions.
The question hanging over the day, however, was just how important unions remain in an American labor force where they represent just 1 in 10 workers, half the percentage they once represented in the 1980s. It is also not clear whether union members, especially in the old-line industrial and laborer unions, will side with the Democratic ticket as overwhelmingly as they once did, as Donald J. Trump continues his courtship of the working class.
In Detroit, Michigan’s Democratic luminaries — Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and Senator Debbie Stabenow, and hopefuls like Representative Elissa Slotkin, who is running for Ms. Stabenow’s Senate seat — shared the stage with Shawn Fain, president of the United Automobile Workers; Brent Booker, general president of the Laborers’ International Union of North America; and Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, among others.
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Source: nytimes.com
