Chants of “Trumps a scab! Trumps a scab!” rang out repeatedly on the first night of the Democratic National Convention, where, perhaps more than any other moment in American history, the Democratic Party leaned into becoming the party of working-class Americans. United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain delivered a commanding speech, lambasting Donald Trump and denouncing corporate greed and declaring that “Donald Trump is a scab!” to an audience of thousands who chanted back “Trumps a scab!”
The first night of the convention saw union leaders and members get top billing. The convention even paused to play a video from Plumbers, Steamfitters, Pipefitters, and HVAC Local 469 in Phoenix, where two union leaders told the audience how good the Biden-Harris administration has been for them. The local has added 2,000 members, has apprenticeship classes over 1,000 people in size, and is so busy they have to send fabrication work to other locals. All thanks to Biden-Harris.
“Donald Trump said he’d bring back American manufacturing, but Joe Biden and Kamala Harris actually did it. Thanks to them, Plumbers and Pipefitters like us are building the data centers and factories of the future. We are hard at work in Phoenix, Mesa, and more. Our neighborhoods, schools, and local businesses are growing,” said one union leader. “Kamala Harris will keep investing in American manufacturing. With her commitment, there is nothing that us American workers can’t build.”
Union leaders that spoke on the first night included United Automobile Workers President Shawn Fain; Service Employees International Union President April Verrett; American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees President Lee Saunders; Laborers’ International Union of North America President President Brent Booker; International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers President Kenneth W. Cooper; Communications Workers of America President Claude Cummings; and American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations President Liz Shuler.
More than 2.7 million union members reside in the battleground states, with recent polls showing Harris-Walz leading Trump-Vance. In 2020, 56% of union houses voted for Biden, but union leaders across the country have expressed concern that union members are tempted to vote for anti-union politicians like Donald Trump.
“Vice President Harris and Governor Walz are no strangers to organized labor. Since announcing her candidacy, there’s been an enormous groundswell of support from labor unions for electing Kamala Harris as President. Educators, health care professionals, farmworkers, construction workers, postal workers, service, and public employees, as well as workers in communications, nursing, transportation, utility, and manufacturing, join a growing list of dozens of unions — nearly all of organized labor — standing with the Vice President. They stand with Vice President Harris and Governor Walz because of their lifelong commitment to fighting for workers’ right to collectively bargain, holding corporations accountable, and creating millions of good-paying union jobs,” said the Harris-Walz campaign in a press release about the importance of union members to the campaign. “The Trump-Vance record of attacking and undermining unions at every turn is toxic to working families. Vice President Harris and Governor Walz have spent their entire career delivering for unions and American workers, and now the nation’s leading unions are putting the full strength of their organizing prowess along with hundreds of millions of dollars to send them to the White House and defeat Trump’s anti-worker agenda.”
Nearly every speaker, including the elected officials, who went on stage mentioned or praised unions in some capacity. This is a huge change in pace from the 1990s and early 2000s when saying union was functionally a dirty word. Now, you’d be hard pressed to find a Democrat on the national stage who isn’t preaching the union message.
UAW President Shawn Fain’s speech was so popular that Google searches for “what is a scab?” skyrocketed following the speech. If you don’t know, a “scab” is a worker who declines to join a union or it’s also an individual who crosses a picket line during a strike.
If you’re wondering if you can buy the shirt he’s wearing on the front page, the answer is yes you can.
Delegations from Kansas and Missouri both cast their votes for the Harris and Walz ticket, with the Kansas delegation playing “Carry On Wayward Son” by the band Kansas and Missouri playing “Good Luck, Babe” by overnight pop super star Chappell Roan, who is from Springfield, Missouri. The Kansas delegation rode a train to Chicago with Ty Dragoo, a union leader for SMART in Kansas. The train car was renamed “Coconut Express” to honor Vice President Kamala Harris.
UAW President Shawn Fain’s speech was so popular that Google searches for “what is a scab?” skyrocketed following the speech. If you’re wondering if you can buy the shirt he’s wearing on the front page, the answer is yes.
The convention being hosted in Chicago, Illinois led to increased coverage of just how popular unions are in the Windy City. Gov. J.B. Pritzker, the rare billionaire who likes unions, has worked arm-in-arm with organized labor to get a laundry list of pro-worker policies passed.
“All eyes are on our state this week. So what do we have to show them?” said Bob Reiter, president of the Chicago Federation of Labor, at the Illinois delegation breakfast. “We’ll show them how labor and Democrats work together to improve the lives of working people. We’ll show them how we passed the constitutional amendment protecting workers’ rights. We’ll show them how we banned captive audience meetings in this state, and we’ll show we’ll show them how we raised the minimum wage, expanded paid leave, and put an end to last-minute schedule changes.”
“You know we need all of our elected leaders to really look at Illinois, where the Democrats have proven time and time again that this party is one and one party for working people,” said AFL-CIO Secretary Treasurer Fred Redmond, who is from Chicago.
One thing is clear: Unions are the driving force behind today’s Democratic Party and unions are here to stay.
“I, for one, am tired of hearing about how a two-bit union buster thinks of himself as more of a patriot than the woman who fights every single day to lift working people out from under the boots of greed trampling on our way of life,” said Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in one of most fiery speeches of the night. “There is nothing wrong with working for a living. Imagine having leaders who understand that!”
Tristin Amezcua-Hogan is the Editor of The Labor Beacon and a member of LIUNA Local 264. Tristin also serves as the Director of Communications for the Greater Kansas City AFL-CIO and the Chair of the Kansas City Regional Transit Alliance.
Tristin grew up as the son of a UA Local 669 member in Tecumseh, KS and the great-nephew of George C. Amis, longtime leader of the United Rubberworkers (now USW Local 307) in Kansas. Growing up in rural Kansas as the child of teen parents, Tristin quickly came to appreciate the life-changing benefit of a union job.
Tristin and his partner, Rebeca Amezcua-Hogan, are residents of the Westside, Kansas City, MO's historic Mexican neighborhood. They are proud members of Kansas City's New Reform Temple.
