The following day, the twice-impeached, four-times indicted GOP presidential frontrunner Donald Trump skipped a scheduled Republican presidential debate to visit Detroit, ostensibly to show his support for the striking autoworkers. But Trump ended up addressing workers at a nonunion auto parts plant.
Trump took the opportunity to attack Biden for introducing incentives to spur more electric vehicle manufacturing to address climate change. “You’re all on picket lines and everything, but it doesn’t make a damn bit of difference what you get because in two years—you’re all going to be out of business. You’re not getting anything. What they’re doing to the auto industry in Michigan and throughout the country is absolutely horrible and ridiculous,” Trump said. Trump even made the audacious suggestion that the UAW should endorse him for president because only his economic nationalist policies could save their jobs.
And now, just over three weeks later, the UAW has reached tentative deals with Ford, General Motors, and Stellantis (formerly Chrysler) in a big win for labor. The agreements, which still must be ratified by UAW members, would constitute the largest gains in decades for autoworkers. They include a 25% raise in base wages over the next four and half years, the elimination of divisive wage tiers, and a path to unionize the companies’ electric vehicle plants.
And in retrospect, Biden has also emerged as a winner with Trump once again a loser. In a Washington Post opinion piece published Wednesday, titled “The autoworkers’ big win exposes the absurdity of Trump’s populism,” columnist Greg Sargent wrote: “On multiple levels, this whole affair captures the vacuity of the right-wing populism espoused by Trump and other Republicans eager to give the GOP a ‘working class’ makeover.”
During the 1930s, UAW President Walter Reuther emerged as a hero of the American labor movement union, leading the sit-in strikes in Flint, Michigan, that led to General Motors recognizing the UAW and substantial pay raises for autoworkers. And now another UAW president is following in the footsteps of Reuther. Hamilton Nolan, in an opinion piece for MSNBC, wrote:
Shawn Fain, the reform-minded UAW president elected earlier this year, has grown during the course of this strike into a full-fledged hero to the labor movement’s most fervent believers. Fain is the rare union president who speaks in a direct, unvarnished way about the fact that unions are engaged in a class war. Recognizing the natural antagonism between workers and capital, not acting like “we’re all on the same team here,” is the proper orientation for a labor leader. At the UAW’s convention in April, Fain told members that “we’re here to come together to ready ourselves for the war against our only one and only true enemy, multibillion-dollar corporations.” And this week, he called the contracts that the union just secured “a turning point in the class war that’s been raging in this country for the past 40 years. …
The gains won in this strike will secure a place in the middle class for hundreds of thousands of American families.
In his column, Sargent referenced a video speech that Fain delivered to UAW members on Sept. 13, two days before the start of the strike:
“The billionaire class,” Fain said recently, has “spent decades” convincing workers that “we are weak,” that “it’s futile to fight” and that workers “should be grateful for the scraps that they decide to give us.” Fain relentlessly argues that this strike is about defeating an idea, that what’s good for the wealthy is synonymous with what’s good for our country because it showers benefits on everyone else.
Nolan noted that “throughout the six-week strike, much of the mainstream commentary argued that the UAW might be demanding too much” from the Big Three automakers. But he added: “In the end, the union’s decision to boldly ask for what its members actually needed was vindicated.”
Fain adopted a successful strategy during the strike: It was the first time that the UAW struck all of the “Big Three” automakers at once. The union also struck only selected plants, enabling it to ease the burden on workers and keep the option open of expanding the strike to more plants in response to delays in negotiations.
Sargent quoted from an interview he did with Damon Silvers, the former political director for the AFL-CIO:
“The labor movement has been most successful when it embodies the larger aspirations and values of working people throughout society,” Silvers said. He said Fain made the strike about “inequality, wage stagnation, the rich getting everything — the fundamental problem that has been growing in the U.S. economy for 50 years.”
While Biden delivered a similar message, Trump and other self-proclaimed right-wing populists did not. Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance said in a pre-strike statement that he supported higher wages for autoworkers and considered himself “among the most pro-labor Republicans in the U.S. Senate,” but claimed that “Biden’s forced transition to electric vehicles is crushing UAW workers.” He criticized UAW’s leadership for encouraging their members “to vote for the most anti-car president in U.S. history.”
Sargent noted that assembling electric vehicles requires fewer workers than making gas-powered cars, and that the factories manufacturing electric vehicles in the U.S. in partnership with foreign companies did not have UAW contracts.
But Fain says the UAW does not oppose the transition to electric vehicles but merely wants a “just transition” for workers, according to Sargent. The New York Times reported in the recently negotiated agreements, Ford and GM workers at battery plants will be covered by the new UAW contracts.
Gene Sperling, a senior economics adviser to Biden and the White House’s point person on the negotiations, told Sargent in an interview that the new agreement “refutes virtually every conservative critique of a new auto future made in America. The UAW even made serious gains on ensuring that future EV battery jobs are strong, middle class union jobs.”
