By james art 
If the speech Vice President Kamala Harris gave a week before Election Day at the Ellipse in Washington, D.C., was her presidential campaign closing argumenther speech Friday to a packed Wisconsin union hall was a follow-up — a closing argument aimed at the working class.
Harris delivered an unapologetically pro-union message that was on par with what President Joe Biden has delivered during his four years in the White House. In the process, she set herself — and the Democratic ticket — apart from former Republican President Donald Trump.
“We have an opportunity in this election to turn the page on a decade of Donald Trump, who spent the entire time trying to get the American people to point fingers at each other. It is constantly trying to divide us, to make people afraid of each other. And people are exhausted by these things,” Harris said.
The shoulder-to-shoulder crowd at the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 890 headquarters in Janesville clapped and cheered.
“It’s him — it’s not us,” Harris continued. “No one understands better than a union member that as Americans we all rise or fall together.”
By the time Harris took the stage, shortly before 3:00 p.m., the standing-room-only crowd was thoroughly warmed up.
Peter Barka, the Democratic candidate facing U.S. Rep. Brian Steele, the Republican 1St The district congressman urged the crowd not to be complacent.
He reminded union members about Act 10, former Republican Gov. Scott Walker’s surprise attack on workers that stripped public employees of most union rights. And he warned that Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s proposal for the next Republican administration, threatens to end public worker unions across the country and cripple private sector unions.
Democratic Gov. Tony Evers also spoke, saluting the union workers who built the Milwaukee baseball stadium 25 years ago and are renovating it with state funds. He pointed to the new legislative maps — drafted by Evers’ team and passed by Republican lawmakers — that overturned 13 years of GOP rigging in Wisconsin and will get their first test at the polls Tuesday.
“We can flip the state assembly,” Evers said, adding that a Democratic resurgence would set the stage for repealing Act 10 and other union-busting legislation passed when Republicans controlled all branches of state government. Evers urged the public to call, text or otherwise contact friends and family “and tell them your ‘why'” to make their choice in the election.
After Evers at a union hall in Janesville, Sen. Tammy Baldwin, in a close re-election race, recalled Wisconsin’s “long and rich history as a pro-union stronghold in the Midwest,” where unions and workers are now fighting to restore labor rights lost in the last decade. Baldwin pointed to his push for “buy American” requirements in legislation like the bipartisan Infrastructure Act of 2021.
“Now when we’re building roads across the country, we’re using American steel and American concrete to do it,” Baldwin said. “That means union jobs in our state — but all of that progress is absolutely on the line right now with this election.”
A rough reunion message
When Harris addressed the crowd in Janesville, she singled out union members as leaders for fair pay, benefits, workplace safety, a five-day work week, paid vacation and family leave, “because union members work and put in blood, sweat and tears in improving the conditions of the American worker wherever he works.
In contrast to the “power imbalance” between nonunion workers and their employers, collective bargaining allows workers to “come together as a collective and then negotiate to better ensure one simple thing—that the outcome is fair.” Harris said.
Harris has outlined an industrial policy agenda building on themes central to the Biden administration’s economic policy: continued federal investment in local manufacturing, with local hiring and union participation, especially for technology and clean energy building. She promised to pursue “good-paying jobs that don’t require a college degree,” to eliminate by executive order “unnecessary degree requirements for federal jobs” and to challenge private employers to do the same.
Harris reiterated his promise to sign the PRO Act, legislation that unions seek to remove barriers to union organizing and counter threats to pension benefits.
She cited economic analysis that said Trump’s economic plans “will bankrupt Social Security in the next six years.” And she countered Trump’s claim when he ran in 2016 that he would restore American manufacturing jobs with his record in office.
“America lost nearly 200,000 manufacturing jobs when he was president, including thousands of jobs right here in Wisconsin,” Harris said. “And let’s be clear – these losses started before the pandemic, making Donald Trump one of the biggest manufacturing job losers in America.” The crowd booed and booed.
Those losses, Harris notes, include six U.S. auto plants after Trump promised the industry “will not, quote, lose a single plant during his presidency.”
She paused. “Janesville” – where General Motors close plant in 2008, which had been the city’s industrial mainstay for 90 years — “you know what these closings mean,” she said, describing the loss of good-paying union jobs and the ripple effects that have brought down small businesses in the community.
“Union Buster Throughout His Career”
Harris mocked the Foxconn project in Mount Pleasant, which failed to live up to Trump’s promotion, and charged that the 2017 tax cuts Trump signed “cut taxes for corporations that sent 200,000 American jobs abroad during his presidency’.
Trump “has been a union buster his whole career,” she said, citing Trump’s description of union leaders as “dues-sucking people,” his support for right-to-work laws that weaken unions, and talk that Trump had a spat with Elon Musk in which Trump confirmed Musk’s suggestion that striking workers should be fired.
“While he was president, he lowered labor standards and made it easier for companies to violate labor laws and then get federal contracts,” she added.
GET THE MORNING HEADLINES.
Harris tacitly acknowledged that Trump’s supporters appear to include a group of working-class voters, some of them union members.
“So part of the reason I’m here is to ask all the leaders here – let’s remind all our Labor brothers and sisters who Donald Trump really is. Because he has a lot of talk, but if you pay attention to what he really did, if you pay attention to who he really stood with when people needed a protector and a friend, you will see who he really is. And we need to get the word out about that,” Harris said.
“Donald Trump’s record has been a disaster for working people, and he is an existential threat to America’s labor movement.”
After the rally, Rock County Clerk Stacey Farrington said the recognition of how public sector union rights have been lost resonated with her. “We don’t have a voice,” she said, adding that the rally sparked “hope that we have to get back to this.”
Tom Bryan, who worked for 43 years at the Janesville GM plant until it closed in 2008, said it’s important to heed the warnings about Trump’s likely jobs program.
“Kamala is pro-union and we’re going to be much better off with her than her opponent,” Brian said. However, he is cautious about the outcome.
“It’s definitely going to be close,” Brian said. “I don’t think it’s going to be a run. But we will hope for the best.”
