With lower than a month to go earlier than the 2024 presidential election, trade teams from nationwide development associations to giant commerce unions have made their endorsements for the nation’s subsequent president.
The 2 candidates are former President Donald Trump, who seeks reelection after shedding his bid in 2020, and Vice President Kamala Harris, who took the torch from present President Joe Biden after he introduced he wouldn’t search reelection on July 21. The development trade faces many points, and the 2 major-party candidates have made their coverage positions recognized on a number of of them.
Right here is the place trade teams stand on the upcoming election, damaged down by candidate:
Kamala Harris
Harris has collected endorsements from a few of the nation’s largest unions that characterize development laborers. These embody the AFL-CIO, the Worldwide Brotherhood of Electrical Staff, the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America and North America’s Constructing Trades Unions.
Kamala Harris
The teams praised the Biden-Harris administration’s monitor report on serving to unions, together with efforts to create blue-collar jobs by way of the Infrastructure Funding and Jobs Act, the Inflation Discount Act and the Chips & Science Act, which have pumped billions of {dollars} into development initiatives throughout the nation.
“The insurance policies she has helped enact over the past 4 years, shoulder to shoulder with President Biden, are rebuilding our nation’s infrastructure and manufacturing sector, strengthening alternative pipelines for traditionally underrepresented communities and reinvesting within the American center class,” mentioned Sean McGarvey, NABTU president, in its July 25 information launch saying the union’s endorsement of Harris.
As well as, unions pointed to the administration’s efforts to guard the pension plans of tens of millions of staff in industries throughout the nation.
“From day one, Vice President Kamala Harris has been a real accomplice in main probably the most pro-labor administration in historical past,” mentioned Liz Shuler, AFL-CIO’s president, within the group’s launch saying its endorsement of Harris.
Donald Trump
Related Builders and Contractors, a nationwide development trade commerce affiliation representing greater than 23,000 members, has endorsed Trump primarily based partly on selections made by present President Joe Biden that it known as unhealthy for enterprise.
In a letter to Trump’s marketing campaign, ABC President and CEO Mike Bellaman and Buddy Henley, chair of the group’s board and proprietor of Gaithersburg, Maryland-based Henley Building Co., decried the Biden administration’s 2023 choice to mandate challenge labor agreements on federal and federally assisted initiatives that price $35 million or extra.
The group claims that the PLA coverage prevents non-union staff and companies from engaged on federally funded initiatives. Attorneys say all companies can win work on federal jobs, however the insurance policies do tip the size in favor of union builders.
Bellaman and Henley additionally mentioned ABC would work with a Trump administration to offer development trade small companies with “tax certainty and equity,” and bolster apprenticeship applications.
Donald Trump
“Your assist for truthful and open competitors, job creation, small companies and expanded workforce improvement initiatives throughout your first time period in workplace helped ABC members develop their companies, upskill their workforce and create career-enhancing jobs,” wrote Bellaman and Henley within the letter.
ABC additionally praised Trump’s signing of the Tax Cuts & Jobs Act of 2017, which lowered the pass-through revenue tax and doubled the property tax exemption, alongside together with his promise to veto the PRO Act, ought to it ever attain his desk.
Staying impartial
Alternatively, Related Common Contractors of America won’t be endorsing a candidate. The commerce affiliation, together with its political motion committee referred to as AGC PAC, doesn’t endorse presidential candidates or contribute to presidential campaigns, mentioned Brian Turmail, vp of public affairs and workforce for the affiliation.
“We’re keen to work with anybody who wins the White Home and it hasn’t been in our members’ curiosity to take sides in presidential races,” Turmail instructed Building Dive by way of e-mail.
Nevertheless, Turmail famous that AGC PAC has made contributions to presidential campaigns up to now, most just lately to Utah Sen. Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential marketing campaign, which didn’t include an endorsement. Romney misplaced the race to then-President Barack Obama.
