By Timothy Aeppel
RACINE, Wisconsin (Reuters) - For workers at CNH Industrial's sprawling tractor plant just outside Racine, Wisconsin, debate over whether President Joe Biden or former President Donald Trump would do more to save their jobs from getting packed off to Mexico has turned into "friendly warfare."
CNH, a multinational heavy-vehicle maker based in the UK, has cut nearly one-third of the plant's hourly jobs and told the union it wants to move many of the remaining jobs south of the border by 2027.
The United Auto Workers union endorsed Biden in January and its leaders point to his willingness to join workers on the picket line during a 2023 auto strike - a first for a sitting president - as evidence that Biden is more likely to favor union workers in fights like this. The UAW's national leaders met last week to discuss their concerns about Biden's ability to beat Trump, in the aftermath of the president's poor debate performance last month.
Meanwhile, rank-and-file UAW members at CNH and elsewhere remain split over who to support, and CNH workers interviewed by Reuters in Racine said the rift is causing friction as the election approaches. The city of 76,500 people is 30 miles (48 km) south of Milwaukee, where Republicans gather this week to formally anoint Trump as their nominee, days after the former president survived an assassination attempt.
"I believe Trump wants to keep manufacturing in the U.S. - and he’ll bring a lot of it back, like he did the last time," said Cynthia Schlapkohl, a cheerful 69-year-old who builds mufflers and has worked for the company for 14 years.
Schlapkohl describes the back-and-forth over politics inside the plant as "friendly warfare," though for some workers it clearly has an edge. For a while, she would place, in playful mockery, "I did that" stickers featuring Biden’s face on lunch boxes of Democratic colleagues who she calls the "diehard union guys." Republicans across the U.S. had placed the stickers on gas pumps when inflation was at its highest.
'EVEN SPLIT'
Local union leaders don’t track members' party affiliations or voting preferences, but they closely follow chatter on the factory floor. "In our facility, I’d say it’s an even split" between Biden and Trump, said Richard Glowacki, who heads UAW Local 180’s bargaining committee.
Glowacki said he doesn’t urge colleagues to vote for a candidate based on who might save their jobs, since no president has such power. "Presidents don’t dictate what companies do - except in wartime," he said.
Both Biden now and Trump during his four years as president focused on reviving a dwindling U.S. industrial base. In Wisconsin, where manufacturing's 16% share of overall employment is roughly twice the national average, that matters.
During Trump's first three years in office, factory employment in Wisconsin grew by around 3.7%, but was already falling off when the pandemic struck in early 2020 and wiped out roughly 40,000 manufacturing jobs. Four years later, the total number of Wisconsin factory jobs has recovered to about 482,000, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, roughly where it was before the pandemic.
Union workers, who hold 10% of all payroll jobs nationally and 7.4% in Wisconsin, have long held diverse political views but were mostly considered dependable Democrats.
Not anymore. The fight for blue-collar America has jumbled the political calculus in swing states such as Wisconsin where old-line industrial unions remain a powerful, albeit diminished, force.
Trump and his populist strain of protectionist policies such as tariffs on Chinese goods accelerated a drift toward Republicans by unionized workers. A question in this year’s race is whether unions such as the UAW can reverse this migration.
“Joe Biden is the most pro-union president in American history, the first president to walk a picket line, the defender of more than 1 million pensions, and a champion for working people over greedy corporations," a Biden campaign spokesperson said.
A campaign spokesperson meanwhile said Trump has made "historic gains with longtime Democrat constituencies including African Americans, young people and union workers."
NO MORE 'LITTLE MOSCOW'
A visit to Racine - one of the birthplaces of the American farm machinery industry - underscores how tough it will be for Democrats to regain their dominance with industrial union workers.
The city was once dotted with factories and solidly Democratic. In the 1930s, it elected a socialist mayor.
"They called us Little Moscow," said Gerald Karwowski, a retired CNH worker who developed a second career as a local historian.
Jerome I. Case started building threshing machines here 182 years ago and his portrait still hangs in the city council chamber. In the 1970s, the company employed over 3,500 people in five factories around Racine.
But as it went through a succession of new owners - Case is the “C” in CNH - and downsizing, Racine’s devotion to unions and Democrats waned.
Racine County voters favored Trump in 2020, 51% to 47%, continuing their drift to Republicans. In 2016, Trump received 48.1% to Hillary Clinton's 43.9%, while in 2012, Democrat Barack Obama beat Republican Mitt Romney, 50.8% to 47.3%.
It was once easier for unions to influence how their members voted, because unions played a bigger role in their social lives, said Katherine Cramer, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin.
"But that's a thing of the past in Wisconsin, as elsewhere," she said.
'WE'RE SCREWED'
Gathered around a table inside their union hall last month prior to the attempt on Trump's life, a group of workers agreed politics had become a more visible, and sometimes toxic, topic at work.
Josef Eisenbraun, a 44-year-old with tattoos covering both biceps who builds axles, said the most ardent Trump supporters irritate him.
"I call them the hoot-and-hollerers, because they’re always hooting and hollering about this or that," he said.
Eisenbraun voted for Biden in 2020 and will probably do so again in November, but he’s far from enthusiastic.
"Biden is a bumbling fool - Trump is just a fool," he said. "That’s why this election is really hard - vote for the guy falling over literally on stage or the one who divides the country."
Thomas Kloften, a 53-year-old press operator, is firmly for Biden, but said he doesn’t try to sway coworkers to his view.
"It comes up in weird, indirect ways - like when someone you never talk to suddenly blurts, 'Whoever wins will have to spend four years cleaning up Biden’s mess,'" he said.
Abel Rodriguez, a 46-year-old computer-controlled machine operator, said he thinks the CNH job losses in Racine have dampened enthusiasm for either candidate as workers obsess about the fate of their own jobs.
CNH recently shed about 200 of the plant’s 660 union workers, according to the union, and has told the UAW that plans for outsourcing and moving jobs to Mexico will bring the number of Racine union positions down to 175 by 2027, saving $58 million a year. The actions followed a nine-month strike that ended in January 2023.
The turmoil has attracted support from Democratic politicians, including U.S. Senator Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin, who sent an open letter to CNH criticizing the moves.
The chair of the Racine County Republican Party, Andrew Docksey, told Reuters he was unaware of layoffs at the plant.
In a statement, CNH acknowledged it cut an unspecified number of jobs at the factory due to weak sales and that it plans to "redistribute certain manufacturing activities" to other CNH plants as well as third parties. This will allow Racine to focus on tractor production, the company said.
"After the strike, I think everyone realized it doesn’t matter how we vote (in the upcoming election) - we’re screwed," said Rodriguez, the machine operator. As for his own vote, he’s libertarian and said he usually picks a third-party candidate.
(Reporting by Timothy Aeppel; Additional reporting by Nandita Bose and Gram Slattery in Washington; Editing by Dan Burns and Rod Nickel)