"You’ve heard me say many times: Wall Street didn’t build this country. The middle class built this country. And unions built the middle class. That’s a fact. Let’s keep going. You deserve what you’ve earned, and you’ve earned a hell of a lot more than you get paid now."
It is unprecedented. It is controversial.
President Joe Biden joins a labor strike picket line
It is Joe Biden at his most articulate, using body language.
Labor unions retain a brand. They represent an idea of struggle to maintain middle class incomes against a tide of globalization and wage squeeze for American workers. Ford, GM, and Stellantis (formerly Chrysler) are archetypes of big, self-interested corporations. They cry poor to workers but Ford pays its CEO $29 million last year. They cry for help from taxpayers when they are in trouble but then they move factories to Alabama and Mexico to lower what they pay those worker-taxpayers.
The politics of this strike are complicated. Interests, values and cultural affinities move in multiple directions at cross purposes. Joe Biden cut the Gordian Knot. It is clean, simple direct: He stands with organized labor.
There are issues and controversies:
*** the pros and cons of labor unions
*** the injury to the economy of this strike or any strike
*** the wage demands and whether they are fair and reasonable
*** the competitiveness of U.S. workers vs. foreign workers
*** electric vehicles vs. hybrids vs. internal combustion engines
*** union-friendly vs. right-to-work states
*** tax credits for EVs
*** concessions made by labor following the 2008 bailout of the auto industry
*** the non-union auto factory in Joe Manchin's West Virginia
*** whether EVs are really better for the environment
*** whether Green New Deal policies favor urban environmentalists over blue collar workers
Amid all these cross currents, Joe Biden stood with the UAW.
Many American voters consider unions unreasonable, anti-competitive, and generally bad. This has a partisan skew. The traditional GOP position, with its pro-business, pro-employer, free-market, freedom-to-contract orientation, opposes unions. Even that is complicated. Richard Nixon courted pro-Vietnam war hardhat-wearing union construction workers who were culturally offended by anti-Vietnam war protesters and counterculture hippies. Like Nixon and Reagan, Trump aligns himself with blue collar workers using patriotic symbols, even when opposing labor union strikes. Trump will visit a non-union shop and talk about electric vehicles being made in China.
Biden and Democrats are pushing conversion to electric vehicles as part of their climate agenda. The UAW considers that a threat, if not an outright betrayal. U.S. automakers are not retooling existing plants, but instead are opening non-union factories in right-to-work states and offshore. Senator Manchin, a Democrat who Biden cooperated with, demanded that the Inflation Reduction Act eliminate the $4,000 tax credit for purchasers of EVs made with union labor in the U.S. Biden's trademark success as a get-things-done dealmaking President required he give in to Manchin.
Electric vehicles exacerbate the cultural divide. The prime EV customer is educated, coastal, and upscale. The children of the blue collar Americans of 1970s who shared Archie Bunker's scorn for the work habits of hippies now resent Silicon Valley techies in their Teslas for thriving so well in a workplace while they are struggling.
Still, Biden and Democrats are more pro-union than Republicans. Tim Scott said strikers should be fired. Nikki Haley complained:
When you have a president that’s constantly saying, ‘Go union! Go union,’ this is what you get. The unions get emboldened, and then they start asking for things.
Those comments are pure gold for Biden. The criticism clarifies who stands where.
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| The Hill, which is becoming increasingly Republican, evidenced by this photo choice. |
Biden is not pleasing everyone, but for a politician who wants to declare solidarity with working Americans, Biden was where he needed to be.
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5 comments:
I worked in corrections for 30 years and watched my fellow employees vote Republican even though they were against state employees. They did vote democrat holding their noses when it was blatantly obvious it was in their self interest to do so. I’m guessing Michigan union workers will now vote for Joe Biden regardless of other considerations.
Those who equate freedom and democracy with unfettered free-market capitalism have always complained about workers having any input in their working conditions. They are there to maximize company profits, not to share in it.
It’s worth noting that in the years between 1978 and 2020, CEO compensation rose by 1,322% while the typical worker’s pay rose by 18%.
https://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-pay-in-2020/
Very few workers can improve their situation by themselves. In the pure capitalist system they are forced to compete with other workers, with the business entity gaining the benefit. Unions even up this disparity.
Unions are not perfect. They are businesses themselves. Technically non-profit, they are lucrative for the people that run them. As long as workers benefit from union membership they will tolerate the cost, but it's contentious.
Note that if businesses acted fairly and humanely, which includes millions spent anti-worker lobbying, unions wouldn't be needed.
Republicans do not represent workers, "full stop". In order to get around this fundamental failing, they pander to cultural and irrelevant prejudices for the benefit of their wealthy donors. Unfortunately it works, and as a result we have wages trailing inflation and increasing wealth inequality threatening political stability.
Biden did the right thing both in itself (standing on the side of justice) and politically (reaching out to the working class whom the Clintons and Obama largely abandoned). Bill Clinton pushed NAFTA, a trade deal that speeded up outsourcing and offshoring. Candidate Obama in 2007 promised unions he would support EFCA, a legislative proposal that would have declared victory for unions as soon and more than 50% of workers in a workplace signed union cards, but never tried to help pass it and it died. The Democratic Party sold its soul to Wall Street for three decades, and working people sensed that even if they had no clarity about how even more pro-wealth Republicans, including the faux-populist Trump, were. I think Biden's move here will pay off in 2024. Mitt Romney lost the presidential election of 2012 because in his first term Obama saved the auto industry with a timely bailout, the best thing he ever did, and during the campaign Romney couldn't obscure the record of his opposition to helping the industry when it was in crisis. Romney lost the election in battleground states of the industrialized Midwest.
Joe did the right thing by standing with the working class, again.
He has my vote and financial support, as he did in 2020. Trump is too old and in poor health. And we know he surrounds himself with fools.
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