The relationship between unions and people’s populist beliefs

This study asks, “Do unions affect people’s draw to populism and the politicians that they vote for?”. To answer this question, I interviewed custodians from Union 32BJ Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and teachers from the Boston teachers’ Union (BTU) and Brookline Educators Union (BEU). Alongside these interviews I also analyzed the websites and social media pages for Harvard Union of Clerical and Technical Workers (HUCTW, another union at Harvard that had more information than 32 BJ SEIU), BTU, and BEU to compare what was said in my interviews versus the messaging from each of these unions. The websites and social media pages of these unions had a strong Democratic leaning and, in some cases, particularly with HUCTW and BEU, displayed populist attitudes. When analyzing these websites alongside the interviews I found that there were populist displays from the teachers and the custodians. Specifically, there were teachers and custodians who echoed the populist sentiment of politicians not being trustworthy. There were also teachers who supported populist politicians like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. There was also one custodian who leaned slightly populist right in his discussion of Trump and seeing himself has a hard worker in comparison to his colleagues. There did seem to be a connection in the messaging of the unions and their members when analyzing the interviews alongside the websites and social media of the unions represented in the interviews. The websites and the social had populist leanings of an “us versus them” framework of these occupation versus everyone else. There were also strong Democratic leanings that generally matched the beliefs of the participants