Given that one of Donald Trump’s longest-running jobs involved sitting in front of a camera and telling strangers to their face that they are fired, it makes sense that he would be a huge fan of layoffs. This fact became apparent yesterday, during Trump’s interminable conversation with Elon Musk on Musk’s platform X. Amidst the hours-long rhetorical marathon, Trump, at one point, went off about how great it is to fire people, referring to Elon as one of the best fire-ers (or, in his words, “cutters”) of them all: “You’re the greatest cutter,” Trump said, of Musk. “I mean, I look at what you do. You walk in, you just say: ‘You want to quit?’ They go on strike—I won’t mention the name of the company—but they go on strike. And you say: ‘That’s okay, you’re all gone.'”
Now, as with other times when Trump has blabbed indiscriminately, there may be consequences. In response to Trump’s dumb remarks, the United Auto Workers union, which protects manufacturing workers at major car companies, has filed a federal complaint against both Musk and Trump. Though it seems unlikely that Trump is up to date on federal labor laws, he really should know that it is illegal to fire workers (or threaten to fire them) for striking. As such, Trump’s comments could quite easily be construed as worker intimidation.
“When we say Donald Trump is a scab, this is what we mean,” said UAW President Shawn Fain, in a statement. “When we say Trump stands against everything our union stands for, this is what we mean. Donald Trump will always side against workers standing up for themselves, and he will always side with billionaires like Elon Musk, who is contributing $45 million a month to a Super PAC to get him elected. Both Trump and Musk want working-class people to sit down and shut up, and they laugh about it openly. It’s disgusting, illegal, and totally predictable from these two clowns.”
Unlike Musk and Trump, Fain actually has a demonstrable track record of doing stuff for workers. Last year, Fain led the UAW’s strike, which resulted in renewed contracts with the “big three” car manufacturers, the likes of which saw the average worker’s wages and benefits drastically improve. Fain has also made plans for further strikes and an aggressive organizing effort designed to further mobilize workers and take on corporate America.
Conversely, Trump has never been pro-worker, except when it comes to his campaign rhetoric. During his years as a business and real estate mogul, Trump was widely known for treating workers like shit. Meanwhile, Trump’s political strategists’ greatest achievement was to somehow transform him into a “populist” hero, despite the fact that, while in office, the billionaire/former reality TV star gave huge tax breaks to his plutocratic buddies and took every opportunity to screw over working and middle-class families. The Trump team’s propaganda has worked so well that, in some cases, rank-and-file union members have largely gone MAGA, even though such allegiances are the surest path to destruction for said workers.
Of course, Musk is even more virulently anti-union than Trump. Musk has flatly refused to recognize unionization efforts at his companies—and has publicly stated that he would like to gut the National Labor Relations Board, which protects workers from predatory corporate practices. After the Biden White House snubbed Musk at an EV conference years back, he whined that he felt the administration was “controlled by unions.” Late last year, Musk entangled himself in a low-frequency war with the labor unions of Sweden, a country where organized labor is heavily entrenched. Musk, the richest man in the world, has stated that he disagrees “with the idea of unions,” claiming, apparently unironically, that they create a “lords-and-peasants sort of thing.”
Given all this, it isn’t surprising that Fain and the UAW recently endorsed Kamala Harris for President. Even if Trump and his funder, Musk, weren’t right-wing billionaires pushing a plutocratic agenda that threatens to send America back to the 19th century, it wouldn’t be surprising. For decades now, organized labor has almost always sided with the Democrats. They don’t have much of a choice. The modern-day GOP is actively hostile to the very existence of unions and has frequently pushed for union-busting policies, like right-to-work. “Donald Trump is all talk and no action when it comes to delivering for autoworkers,” Fain recently remarked. “But you know who did walk the picket line in 2019 with striking [General Motors] workers? Kamala Harris.”
