A union-run activist group slammed corporate America Thursday for its reaction to the recent racial unrest sparked by the violence in Charlottesville, Va., and President Trump’s response to the incident, saying that business leaders tolerated Trump’s racial attitudes before those incidents and backed away from him only when public pressure forced them to.
“Corporate America has a long history of supporting white supremacy. CEOs’ rebuke of Trump doesn’t change that,” Jobs With Justice tweeted Thursday. It followed that with another tweet, “White supremacy and low wages go hand-in-hand. #fightfor15.” Jobs with Justice is a pro-labor activist group whose board of directors includes AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, among other top union leaders.
The first tweet linked to an article for Medium.com written by Sarita Gupta, the group’s executive director. The article noted that numerous top business leaders quit the president’s manufacturing advisory council following his remarks on Charlottesville. “We should not applaud or hand out medals to CEOs who finally bowed out of these councils. Public pressure and concern for their bottom line and reputations drove their decisions to leave these ceremonial posts, nothing more,” Gupta wrote.
She argued that corporations have “a long history of perpetuating white supremacy through their hazardous workplaces, destructive patterns of development, and exploitative financial products that harm communities of color.”
“To all these executives, we are watching. You may have turned your backs to Trump this week, but you will not fool us. We know that you will continue to seek influence in the White House and Congress to boost your bottom lines and ignore the needs of working Americans.”
Trumka was a member of the manufacturing council the CEOs left, and he has openly acknowledged he took the position to influence the White House. “The AFL-CIO joined to bring the voices of working people to the table and advocate the manufacturing initiatives our country desperately needs,” Trumka said in a New York Times op-ed last week, adding that he met with Trump personally in January when “we identified a few important areas where compromise seemed possible. On manufacturing, infrastructure, and especially trade, we were generally in agreement.”
Trumka initially resisted calls to step down from the council and only did so after Trump’s Aug. 15 press conference in which he said “both sides” were to blame for the Charlottesville violence. By that time, Kenneth Frazier, CEO of the pharmaceutical company Merck & Co., Kevin Plank, CEO of the athletic wear company Under Armour, Brian Krzanich, CEO of Intel, and Scott Paul, the president of the Alliance for American Manufacturing, had already bowed out.
Trumka has subsequently attempted to downplay the importance of the council, writing in the NYT op-ed, “In fact, we were never called to a single official meeting, even though it comprised some of the world’s top business and labor leaders.”
Thea Lee, a former top official at the AFL-CIO and a member of the council with Trumka, has said that union officials were frozen out by the White House, in apparent contradiction of Trumka’s claims.
