Chuck Jones, who is President of United Steelworkers 1999, has done a terrible job representing workers. No wonder companies flee country!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 8, 2016
Chuck Jones didn’t start his work life with a seven-figure loan from his daddy. He doesn’t have tens of millions of Twitter followers. He can’t offer Carrier hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in tax breaks. He can’t threaten its parent company’s federal contracts, or promise to rewrite the laws governing corporations in ways it likes. He is not the president-elect.
So, no. Chuck Jones could not singlehandedly save jobs at Carrier that, by the way, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence had not been able to keep in the state when he was a mere governor without a notorious bully backing him. Jones could only negotiate the best deal he could backed by the power his workers and his union had been able to build, person by person—and he was doing that in the face of an economy shaped by union-busters and greedy billionaires like Donald Trump.
Now, thanks to the president-elect deciding it’s a reasonable use of his power to attack a private citizen, Jones has a little bit of a platform. Let’s hear what he has to say:
Jones then responded to the tweet on CNN, saying of Trump: “If he wants to blame me, so be it, but I look at him and how many millions of dollars he spent on his hotels and casinos, trying to keep labor unions out, you know, so, I like my side, trying to work to make people’s lives the best they can be,” Jones said.
Jones, who said the union wasn’t involved in the negotiations, said he’s working to lift his members’ spirits. He said he didn’t have time to worry about Trump.
“He needs to worry about getting his Cabinet filled,” he said, “and leave me the hell alone.”
Don’t forget—Jones is working to lift his members’ spirits because more than a thousand of them will be out of work while the president-elect runs around claiming to have saved their jobs.
And by the way, CNN and Politico, Jones is not a “union boss,” unless you want to start calling Trump “U.S. boss” (not that he’d mind). Jones is the elected president of his union local, not an autocrat.
This article originally appeared at DailyKOS.com on December 7, 2016. Reprinted with permission.
Laura Clawson is a Daily Kos contributing editor since December 2006. Labor editor since 2011.