Just as Fox News has a long tradition of “celebrating” Martin Luther King day by race baiting, host Martha MacCallum “honored” Labor Day today with the poster child for union busting, Mark Janus, and helping to pile on Donald Trump’s Labor Day attacks on AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka.
The Trumka v. Trump back story
In case you missed it, Trumka was a guest on Fox News Sunday yesterday where he criticized Trump’s record on helping workers. Trumka said, “To date, the things he’s done to hurt workers outpace what he’s done to help workers.” Trumka went on to cite specifics such as a lack of an infrastructure program, overturning regulations that have the effect of denying millions overtime, overturning health and safety regulations and weakening enforcement. Trumka also noted that wages have been down this year while costs such as gas prices have risen.
Apparently, that kind of talk on Trump’s go-to source for news, policy and intelligence set his Twitter fingers a-twitching. In a tweet today that received a lot of Twitterverse blowback Trump decided to smear Trumka on Labor Day:
Richard Trumka, the head of the AFL-CIO, represented his union poorly on television this weekend. Some of the things he said were so against the working men and women of our country, and the success of the U.S. itself, that it is easy to see why unions are doing so poorly. A Dem!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 3, 2018
Fox News conundrum: How to recognize Labor Day by both sending props to Trump and putting on a show of support for labor?
Enter MacCallum, whose show was live today. She solved the dilemma by hosting an enemy of labor and pretending he champions it.
MacCallum began by playing a clip of Trumka saying Trump has hurt workers more than he has helped them. She conveniently left out the details Trumka cited to back that up. She did however, suggest that Trumka was to blame for the attack from Trump by saying, “With those comments, the head of the country’s largest federation of labor unions ignited a feud with the president – on Labor Day of all days.” In reality, Trumka made those comments yesterday. It was Trump who had the poor taste to feud on Labor Day.
Then MacCallum introduced Janus. He was the lead plaintiff behind the recent Supreme Court decision that ended unions’ ability to collect “fair share fees” from public workers who choose not to join a union but are nevertheless able to benefit from its collective bargaining. If workers can benefit from unions without having to join, why would they? As Think Progress put it, the decision stuck a knife in labor unions.
Yet MacCallum and Fox had the audacity (and dishonesty) to present Janus as a labor rights advocate. “He took his fight for labor rights all the way to the Supreme Court this year,” she said in her introduction, “winning government workers the right to choose if they want to pay union dues.”
MacCallum's lapdog interview with Janus overlooked his lawsuit's negative impact on unions
Rather than ask anything about the state of labor today, MacCallum all but openly urged Janus to slam Trumka. “Talk to me a little about your reaction to what Richard Trumka said and how the president responded.”n
Janus did not attack Trumka or defend Trump but played along with the pro-worker charade.
JANUS: I think what we’re really looking at is that worker rights are really paramount. … If the unions were doing such a great job and the unions were representing their people the way they should be and listening to the people, then probably my case would never have come to the historical end that it did. And I probably would have never filed it. But because they didn’t, you know, we now have this situation that we’re under today.
I have no reason to disbelieve Janus' sincerity in thinking himself pro-worker. But it was MacCallum's job to point out the anti-worker practical effects of his efforts. But she never let her viewers in on the other side of the story. Instead, she pushed harder to discredit Trumka: “What bothered you was to have union leadership like Richard Trumka professing to sort of have a political viewpoint that represents all workers, correct? And you believe that that’s wrong and not worth paying dues into.”
FACT CHECK: A 1977 Supreme Court case, Abood v. Detroit Board of Education prohibited public-sector fees from using union fair-share fees for political causes like lobbying. Apparently, MacCallum was too busy nudging Janus to attack Trumka to bother to tell her viewers that.
Janus kept playing his "workers rights advocate" role without challenge. “Well, I think workers have the right to choose their own path and I think that workers have the right to choose their own opinions and to have somebody, you know, like Mr. Trumka, you know, purport to say that he speaks for all workers I think is, is, is erroneous.”
MacCallum looked on admiringly and nodded. She asked, “What about what the president said about the decline of unions and the decline of membership that has been overseen by Trumka and a few others? Is that true, do you think?
Funny, I thought it was her job to do the fact checking, not an anti-union guest.
Janus didn’t answer the question directly but he did claim that his goal in the case was not “to try to put unions under.”
Sure, just pay no attention to the real-world effects. MacCallum didn’t. And even worse, she kept them from her viewers, too.
Watch MacCallum use Labor Day to undermine labor and help discredit a Trump foe below, from the September 3, 2018 The Story with Martha MacCallum.