It’s fitting that Donald Trump and Mike Pence are making a half-hearted, last-minute visit to Ohio to “commemorate” Labor Day, because their ticket’s anti-working families agenda and joint records of facilitating outsourcing are characterized by a similar half-hearted ambivalence and thinly-veiled disdain.
Trump and Pence’s trip to Ohio particularly highlights the pair’s joint opposition to the 2009 auto rescue that saved over 200,000 jobs in Ohio. And their continued opposition to the successful initiative will be especially in focus with the two campaigning in Youngstown, near GM’s Lordstown Chevrolet Cruze plant, which had to lay off 1,000 workers before the rescue but now employs 4,500.
American Bridge President Jessica Mackler issued the following statement on Trump and Pence’s sham Labor Day observance:
“The breadth of Donald Trump and Mike Pence’s policy agenda would do nothing to help America’s working families, and in actuality undermine workers’ well-being and right to fair wages.
“From the Trump-Pence ticket’s joint record of opposing the auto rescue to their promotion of outsourcing — in Pence’s case, by approving $24 million in taxpayer dollars for outsourcing companies — the two have no grounds to claim any respect for American workers’ nor any intention to look out for working families’ best interests.
“Donald Trump and Mike Pence’s Labor Day charade does nothing but underscore their ticket’s disdain for America’s working families and their joint complicity in the offshoring of American jobs.”
Watch American Bridge’s new web ad highlighting the Trump-Pence ticket’s history of promoting outsourcing here:
When you get past the empty rhetoric, Trump and Pence’s anti-working families record speaks for itself:
Outsourcing and Boosting Outsourcing Companies
- Trump: Trump has styled himself as an opponent of outsourcing, but he’s hypocritically not only profited off the outsourcing companies he criticizes, but also outsourced the production of his Trump-branded products and imported foreign workers at prolific levels.
- Pence: Pence has done his part to facilitate outsourcing, too — and used taxpayer funds to do it, approving $24 million in incentives for companies that offshored jobs.
- Trump: Here’s Trump on the auto rescue in August 2015: “You could have let it go bankrupt, frankly, and rebuilt itself — and a lot of people think that the way it should have happened.”
- Pence: Mike Pence frequently brags about his vote against the auto rescue and at the time of the 2009 debate argued, “The American people know we can’t borrow and spend and bail our way back to a growing economy or a healthy domestic automotive industry.”
- Trump: Trump has said “our wages are too high” and, even worse, he’s called for an end to the federal minimum wage.
- Pence: When he was in Congress, then-Rep. Pence in 2007 fought to keep the federal minimum wage at $5.15, arguing, “[a]n excessive increase in the minimum wage will hurt the working poor.” In line with his view that working families didn’t deserve a pay raise, as governor of Indiana, Pence in 2013 signed a law “prohibit[ing] local governments from requiring businesses [to] pay a higher minimum wage…if it’s not mandated by state or federal law.”
Support Right to Work for Less Laws
- Trump: Trump has said, “I fight the unions very hard.” And he’s touted “Right to work for less” statutes, saying in February, “I love the right to work” and “I like [right to work] better.”
- Pence: Pence fought to defend Indiana’s anti-working
families “Right to work for less” law, and succeeded when it was upheld by the Indiana Supreme Court. At the time celebrated the decision “a victory for the freedom of every Hoosier in the workplace.”
- Trump: “Once you get it where everybody gets the same, I mean, you’re into a socialistic society.”
- Pence: During his time in Congress, Pence opposed equal pay legislation and on three occasions — in 2007 and twice in 2009 — voted against the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act.
- And then there’s Trump-Pence tax plan — which would add $10 trillion in debt — would disproportionately boost top income-earners. Trump’s tax proposal would also, among other things, deliver “extremely large and unprecedented tax-cut windfalls for people with incomes exceeding $1 million a year, almost certainly at the expense of low- and middle-income households.”
Published: Sep 5, 2016