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Next week, Teamsters union President Sean O’Brien will speak at the Republican National Convention in Wisconsin — a key battleground state where Republicans led a prominent attack on labor unions more than a decade ago. 

“There’s always a threat to organized labor, so we want to be proactive and make certain every candidate — not just President Biden — understands how important our issues are,” O’Brien said after a meeting with Biden in March.

It will be the first time a Teamsters president has spoken at the Republican convention. O’Brien’s presence at the convention in Madison highlights the dissonance in the party’s approach to union members, many of whom are the working-class voters they now depend on.

Unions have historically supported Democratic candidates and gotten out the vote for them while threats to organized labor are typically mounted by Republicans. The state that is hosting the convention is a poster child for the right’s attacks on organized labor.

Earlier this month in Wisconsin, the Teamsters and other unions scored a legal victory against Act 10, the Republican-backed 2011 state law that stripped public sector workers of their collective bargaining rights, when Dane County Circuit Court Judge Jacob Frost struck down part of it.

“Thousands of public sector workers in Wisconsin are under attack by their own state government,” O’Brien said in a statement when the lawsuit was filed in November. 

Some labor leaders believe that years of Republican assaults on organized labor may have energized working-class voters in Wisconsin to support Democrats, even those who aren’t union members but share similar values. To build on this sentiment, unions are making substantial investments to mobilize working-class voters in Wisconsin and elsewhere.

The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) committed $200 million to engage voters in battleground states in the upcoming presidential election, a record political investment for the union, it said. The union intends to turn out working-class, multiracial voters to elect local and national leaders who support labor. In April, the union endorsed President Joe Biden for reelection. The union is explicitly targeting voters who have never voted or are less likely to vote, and its members started knocking doors in September last year. According to the union, similar organizing in 2022 increased turnout among voters the union contacted by 27%. 

The union will mobilize volunteers such as Mary Jorgensen, a nurse leader with SEIU Wisconsin at the University of Wisconsin hospital system in the state capital of Madison, whose union lost recognition in 2014 because of Act 10, which former Republican Gov. Scott Walker championed. Jorgensen said that nurses at UW Health face short staffing and high turnover in part because of the law’s effects. She will knock on doors to rally support for Democrats, even as she campaigns to win back her union. 

Walker is one of 41 delegates to the Republican Convention in Madison. As governor, he made it his mission to drastically curtail the power of public sector unions. Act 10 allows workers to bargain only for wage increases tied to inflation and prohibits public sector employers from collecting union dues.

“The world changed for us after Act 10,” said Rick Korducki, a retired school psychologist in Milwaukee who was a member of the American Federation of Teachers. As pay declined, benefits became more expensive, and teacher turnover climbed, Korducki said. “There was a change in morale” among the school workforce, he added. “Educators just felt less valued.”

A few years after Act 10’s passage, state Republicans shifted their target to private sector unions, passing a so-called “right-to-work” law in 2015. It was the second part of what Walker described as a “divide and conquer” strategy to weaken unions in the state. 

Following the enactment of the laws, unionization rates in Wisconsin plummeted by nearly half, dropping to 7.9% of the workforce in 2021 — below the national average of 10.3 % and part of the largest unionization decline of any state in the past two decades, according to the Wisconsin Policy Forum, which describes itself as a nonpartisan independent statewide policy research organization. Last year, union membership marginally rebounded in Wisconsin after a few years of labor protests and new unionization campaigns. 

Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential win and Biden’s razor-thin 2020 victory margin in Wisconsin have both been linked to the decline in labor unions, as states like Wisconsin were once considered part of the Democratic Blue Wall — a coalition of traditionally Democratic-voting states crucial for the party’s national electoral strategy. Walker understood the political threat posed by unions, which typically provide funds and boots on the ground in support of Democrats, said Steve Rosenthal, president of  The Organizing Group, a private political consulting firm, and a former political director of the AFL-CIO.

“Republicans like Walker have a much better appreciation for unions politically than the Democrats do,” said Rosenthal. While Republicans attack labor unions because of the party’s traditional allegiance to business interests, Rosenthal said, “it’s also because they understand the collateral damage it does to Democrats.”

For instance, right-to-work laws — which allow workers to benefit from union representation without paying membership dues, straining union coffers — reduced Democratic vote shares at the county level in presidential elections by 3.5%, compared with neighboring counties without such laws, according to a 2018 working paper by researchers at the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Jorgensen, a Biden supporter, views the upcoming November election as “tied very closely” to the fight for workers’ rights. She is optimistic that the effort will be bolstered by new district maps that resulted from a recent state supreme court ruling mandating fairer representation. 

Wisconsin’s previous district maps were widely criticized as being heavily gerrymandered to favor Republicans, and the new, more competitive maps give Democrats a better chance to flip the state Legislature. This change could be instrumental in helping nurses fight for union recognition since the state governs public sector union organizing.

Jorgensen thinks that “Biden loves the working class.” Since taking office, Biden has pursued policies aimed at strengthening unions, increasing funding for the long-beleaguered National Labor Relations Board, which conducts private sector union elections and enforces labor law, according to the Center for American Progress Action Fund. Trump, on the other hand, allowed vacancies at the board to go unfilled — except when he appointed corporate lawyers. And Biden became the first sitting president to ever join a picket line when he rallied with striking United Auto Workers last year.

But there are headwinds for Jorgensen and other union members who support Democrats, including the concerns swirling around the viability of Biden’s candidacy following a disastrous debate performance last month. 

In addition, weaker unions have fewer members — and fewer resources — to devote to electoral battles. The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, a union of public workers that was founded in Wisconsin, has significantly fewer members than it once did — a March 2024 filing by the union’s Wisconsin state council reported 4,285 members, down from nearly 63,000 members in 2010. 

Meanwhile, Trump has had some success in drawing support from union members. Trump received 40% of the votes from Wisconsin households with union members in the 2020 election, according to exit polling. One facet of his attempt to appeal to union members, and working class voters more broadly, has been his attack on immigrants. At a June rally in Racine, Wisconsin, Trump stated there was “mass entry into our country and the unions are getting absolutely killed by it.” 

The narrative around Trump suggests that he stands apart from other Republican presidential candidates in drawing support from union voters. But Mitt Romney won 40% of the union household vote nationally in 2012. Even in 2016, Trump only performed 3 percentage points better among union households nationwide than did Romney in the previous election.  

Now there is heightened union support across the country and an increase in new union organizing and labor activity throughout Wisconsin. Could Democrats seize on renewed enthusiasm for unions?

Building more Democratic power in the state could lead to statewide labor wins, such as repealing the right-to-work law and Act 10. After winning back the state Legislature in 2022, Democrats in Michigan quickly repealed a right-to-work law that was passed by state Republicans in 2012. 

In Wisconsin, flipping the state Supreme Court from a Republican to a Democratic majority encouraged unions to file their lawsuit against Act 10.

In November, “We have a shot at rebuilding what [made] Wisconsin a great state — minus the weather,” said Mike Tate, former chair of the Wisconsin Democratic Party who currently works as a consultant. When unions were strong, he said, Wisconsin “had this huge middle class.”

Kalena Thomhave is a writing fellow at The American Prospect.

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