New York Steamfitters Union Chief Breaks With Democrats Over DSA Primary Wins, Cites Wages and Immigration

Blue-Collar Pushback After DSA Primary Wins

Steamfitters Local 638 has represented New York City pipefitters, HVAC technicians, welders, and industrial mechanics for 150 years. For most of that time, it backed Democrats. That relationship has been fraying for a while now, and the recent New York primary results appear to be accelerating the break.

Robert "Bobby" Bartels Jr., the union's business manager, told Fox News Digital that Democratic Socialists of America candidates who won primary seats last week do NOT represent the working class he knows. "I think they're communists, and I don't think they have the benefit of the working class — the real working class, the taxpayers' — support," Bartels said.

The candidates in question are Darializa Avila Chevalier, who won New York's 13th Congressional District primary, and Claire Valdez, who won New York's 7th Congressional District primary. Both are DSA members. Both defeated incumbent or establishment Democrats.

The Wage Argument

Bartels's central complaint is concrete: he argues that open-borders immigration policy drives down wages and displaces union labor. "They're bringing the illegal immigrants in here to steal the Americans' jobs and lower the rates," he said.

Construction-trade unions have long documented wage suppression in markets with high concentrations of unauthorized workers in skilled trades. The Economic Policy Institute, which leans left, has separately acknowledged that labor-market competition from unauthorized workers can depress wages in specific sectors, though it frames the solution as organizing those workers rather than restricting immigration. Bartels and EPI disagree on the remedy; they do not entirely disagree on the mechanism.

Bartels also accused Democratic leaders of doubling down on failing policies rather than recalibrating. "The more building trades people you speak to, the more they're going away from the Democratic Party," he said.

A Real Realignment, Not Just Rhetoric

Local 638 is not just talking. The union broke with its own Democratic-endorsement tradition and backed President Donald Trump in the 2024 election. Bartels spoke at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee on July 15, 2024, a visible, documented break with decades of union political alignment.

That kind of institutional shift reflects a longer erosion between the Democratic Party and trade unions whose members hold skilled, well-paid jobs that feel directly threatened by policy choices on immigration and regulation.

The DSA's Counter-Argument

Avila Chevalier and Valdez ran explicitly on expanding workers' rights, raising wages, and taxing wealth to fund housing and healthcare. Their supporters would argue that the real threat to union wages is corporate power and union-busting, not immigration policy, and that a politics of solidarity across immigrant and native-born workers is the only durable path to labor power. Plenty of labor historians would agree. The DSA's surge in New York primaries suggests this message has genuine traction with a significant slice of Democratic primary voters.

Bartels clearly rejects that framing. He describes it as workers being offered things "for free" without accountability, and says it offends him when DSA candidates claim to champion the working class while supporting policies he sees as economically harmful to his members.

Both positions are internally coherent. They reflect a genuine disagreement about which policies actually deliver for working people, not a disagreement about whether working people matter.

What This Means for Democrats

The Democratic Party is currently caught between two constituencies that want incompatible things. DSA candidates are winning primaries in safe blue districts by turning out activated progressive voters. At the same time, trade-union leaders in the building trades are telling anyone who will listen that their members are leaving.

Those two trends can coexist temporarily in a party big enough to contain both. They cannot coexist forever, and the DSA's primary wins this cycle suggest the progressive faction is gaining institutional ground inside the party's nomination process, even as working-class non-college voters continue shifting toward Republicans.

The unresolved question: whether unions like Local 638 represent a meaningful fraction of the broader labor vote that Democrats cannot afford to lose, or a niche constituency in skilled trades that the party has already effectively priced in as acceptable collateral. The 2026 general elections in New York's 13th and 7th districts, both heavily Democratic-leaning seats, will be an early test of whether DSA candidates can hold blue-collar support or whether turnout among trade workers softens in the general.