Who Would Be the Better President for the Working Class? | Opinion

For working people, the choice in the November election could not be clearer. On the one hand, you have Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, who chose careers that serve working people and our communities—Harris as district attorney, state attorney general, and U.S. senator, and Walz as teacher and coach, a member of our nation’s military, U.S. representative, and governor. They have walked picket lines with us, created breakfast programs for our kids, and stood up for us in court. Donald Trump and JD Vance, on the other hand, have alternated between serving themselves and serving the richest and most privileged among us. And they have attacked the pillars of our families’ economic security—Social Security, Medicare, the Affordable Care Act, and our public schools.
Let’s break it down in detail.
Harris and Waltz stand for the things that matter most to the people I represent, who work in education, health care, and government service, and to all working people.
—They support our rights at work—our freedom to form unions and to collectively bargain with our employers, our right to a safe workplace, and our right to be free from discrimination and harassment.
—They support good jobs and prosperity for all. As vice president, Harris helped pass the most ambitious program for creating good jobs in America since Franklin D. Roosevelt, shifted our nation’s trade policy to be centered on the interests of America’s workers rather than giant corporations, and helped save pensions for hundreds of thousands of retired union workers.
—They have made clear they will defend Medicare, Social Security, and the Affordable Care Act, just as Harris did with President Joe Biden. And they believe that the wealthiest among us should pay their fair share for our common good, not pay a smaller percentage of their incomes than working people do.
—Perhaps most important—No working person is free or safe without democracy. Harris and Waltz have spent their careers promoting and defending our democratic freedoms—to vote, speak our minds, read what we want, and make our own decisions about our health and our bodies.
Trump says he is a champion of working people, but he is a world-class scam artist. He has stiffed hundreds of workers—painters, plumbers, dishwashers, lawyers and others—going back decades. He was fined millions for ripping off charities and duping students through his sham Trump University. Trump isn’t looking out for America’s workers.
—Trump and Vance oppose our rights at work. They have close ties to Project 2025, which would destroy private sector workers’ freedom to collectively bargain. In the Senate, Vance wouldn’t support the PRO Act or any other legislation that strengthened workers’ rights. Trump has crossed multiple picket lines, and he joked with Elon Musk about illegally firing workers for exercising our right to strike.
—Trump talked big about infrastructure, then did nothing to pass an infrastructure bill. He would condemn our children to a nightmarish future of runaway climate change in exchange for favor and funding from his billionaire buddies in the oil and gas business. And he cut taxes on billionaires and giant corporations, and lowered taxes for companies that offshored their businesses, after he promised to do the opposite.
—Trump and Vance supported repealing the Affordable Care Act, cutting off health insurance for millions of working people and letting insurance companies play the pre-existing-condition game at our expense again. Every year of his presidency, Trump proposed federal budgets that would have cut Social Security and Medicare—prevented only by Democrats in Congress. Project 2025 proposes gutting these programs that working Americans have paid into and need to keep us secure in retirement.
—Trump led an insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021, and has made clear he has no intention of respecting the results of the 2024 election should he lose again. He sought to use the U.S. military against American citizens and has indicated that, if elected, he would try again. He tried to coerce election officials in Georgia and Arizona into committing election fraud, and he supported the submission of fraudulent slates of electors in multiple states where he lost.
Finally, Harris and Walz will support public education. They understand the harm of defunding and destabilizing public schools through private school vouchers, and they realize what we would lose if extremists and privatizers get their way. Trump supports universal school vouchers and slashing funding for public schools, and Vance says weird things that suggest he thinks teachers should be forced to have children.
Donald Trump and JD Vance look out for themselves and for their billionaire friends. Their entire lives have been spent selfishly. Kamala Harris and Tim Walz work for the American Republic and for the good of working people. It’s a no-brainer what to do in November.
Randi Weingarten is president of the 1.8-million member AFT, which represents workers in education, health care, and public services.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.