The Daily - The Presidential Politics of the Autoworkers’ Strike

Episode Date: September 28, 2023

Although one major strike, against Hollywood studios, was finally resolved this past week, another, against U.S. vehicle makers, is expanding. The plight of the autoworkers has now become a major point of contention in the presidential race.Jonathan Weisman, a political correspondent for The Times, explains why the strike could be an essential test along the road to the White House.Guest: Jonathan Weisman, a political correspondent for The New York Times.Background reading: A day after President Biden appeared on a picket line with United Automobile Workers, former President Donald J. Trump spoke at an auto parts factory.The U.A.W. strike could either accelerate a wave of worker actions or stifle labor’s recent momentum.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.

From New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Yesterday on the show, we explained how a major strike against Hollywood Studios has finally been resolved. But another major strike against U.S. automakers is expanding and is now becoming a flashpoint in the presidential race. Former President Donald Trump will skip the second Republican primary debate. According to the New York Times, the former president plans to travel to Detroit, where he will give a speech to over 500 current and former members of the United Auto Workers Union. President Biden today inserted himself in a labor dispute in a way no other modern president has, joining striking auto workers on the picket line outside a GM plant near Detroit.

Today, my colleague Jonathan Weissman on why President Biden and former President Trump see the workers involved in this strike as so essential to winning the White House and the profoundly different strategies that they're relying on to win them over. Serve what you've earned, and you've earned a hell of a lot more than you're getting paid now. Thank you very much. Yesterday, Joe Biden came to Michigan to pose for photos at the picket line. But it's his policies that send Michigan autoworkers

to the unemployment line. It's Thursday, September 28th. Jonathan, it is very rare for a labor strike to attract both a sitting president, Joe Biden, and his leading rival for the presidency, in this case, former President Donald Trump, to the place where they are holding the strike. Yet, here we are. So how do you think about that? We're at such an unprecedented moment. First of all, the United Auto Workers are on strike against all three of the big three. That is Ford, General Motors, and Stellantis, which we used to call Chrysler. This is the broadest strike we've seen

in decades. Right now, there are picket lines at around 40 different plants and distribution centers, and the United Auto Workers are seeking really remarkable gains. They want raises of about 40 percent. They want more time off. And they want the gains that they feel they lost after the Great Recession. through the state of Michigan, the historic center of the auto industry, which Donald Trump won in 2016 very narrowly, and Joe Biden won in 2020 a little less narrowly. And they are going to Michigan to appeal to workers who, if not actually on strike, are certainly supporting the strikers. And one of the most interesting things about this is that both of these candidates are saying to the workers, I'm your guy, but they have very, very different messages. Well, Jonathan, let's talk through those very different messages

and what this strike means to both Biden and Trump in this campaign season. And I want to start with President Biden. Yeah, Joe Biden, this is a guy who has made his brand unions. Hello, organized labor. He emerged as Scranton Joe from Northeast Pennsylvania. My dad used to have an expression, I swear to God. He'd say, Joey, a job's about a lot more than a paycheck, for real. The son of the working class.

It's about your dignity. It's about respect. And he has made union organizing and being pro-labor really his brand. I am a union man. Period. He ran for president saying he was going to help unions organize and expand. I intend to be the most pro-union president, leading the most pro-union administration in American history. That unions made the middle class and he is going to help unions reemerge as the center of American middle income power. Right. And despite the fact that for many years, and we learned this lesson when Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016, that Democrats have lost a lot of support in that world of unionized working class voters, Biden did pretty darn well with them. real gains, especially in the upper Midwest. We're talking about what we used to call the blue wall, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. The gains that he made among the working class,

especially the white working class, really were decisive in the election of 2020. Right. So heading into this UAW strike, that is the reservoir of goodwill that Biden has to call upon. That's right. But there was a conflicting piece of his message because as he was appealing to the working class with his messages about labor and unions, he was also appealing to more liberal voters who wanted to see the government take action against climate change. I will do everything in my power to clean our air and water, protect our people's health, to win the clean energy future. He was also going to be the president that finally started moving the United States away from fossil fuels. A future of the automobile industry that is electric.

Battery electric, plug-in hybrid electric, fuel cell electric. It's electric and there's no turning back. The question is whether we'll lead or fall behind in the race for the future. But the challenge is doing both things at once, creating union jobs and green jobs. A lot of my friends in organized labor know

when I think climate, I think jobs. I think union jobs, not a joke. Because when it comes to the auto industry, electric vehicles fundamentally take fewer workers to build than the old internal combustion engine cars did. Well, say a little bit more about that, this tension for Biden between supporting auto workers in the union and his climate agenda at the same time. Yeah, I mean, the fact is that electric cars are simpler than traditional cars. Things like drivetrains and catalytic converters

disappear when the engine is really being operated by a battery. And at the moment, they're generally not built by union workers. You know, people love their Teslas, but those Teslas are not being built by organized labor. Those are non-union shops. Other companies are coming in from abroad, like Hyundai, and they are setting up their big auto plants in the South where there aren't unions and where the state governments are very hostile to unions. And that's where also the battery companies are coming in. Those battery makers are the ones that are replacing the workers that now are building transmissions and catalytic converters.

And if they're not unionized, the movement is away from the unions, not toward unions. And so Joe Biden has this problem. He needs to be able to say that the electric vehicle future is bright for American workers. And at the same time, he understands that for now, electric vehicle labor is not unionized. So, Jonathan, how does President Biden reconcile these two sides of his political identity

in this moment amid this strike, the Green Revolution Joe and the Union Joe? So he's throwing his weight entirely behind the UAW. And when the UAW president, Sean Fain, invited him to come to Michigan, he overrode the opposition of some of his aides and said, I'm going, I'm getting on that plane. And he showed up at a UAW picket, which is unprecedented for a president. So then we see President Biden wearing a UAW hat. On the picket line, he makes a few quick remarks on a makeshift stage. I've marched on the UAW picket lines when I was a senator since 1973, but I tell you what, it's the first time I've ever done it as a president.

And broadcast his support for the union's position against Detroit management. You guys, the UAW, you saved the automobile industry back in 2008 and before. Made a lot of sacrifices. Gave up a lot. And the companies were in trouble. But now they're doing incredibly well.

And guess what? You should be doing incredibly well, too. So what he's doing here, going to the UAW picket lines, is trying to throw presidential weight behind the UAW to get as good a contract as he can for the union so that the union can then take that contract from the big three automakers to these new battery plants or to these foreign electric vehicle makers and extend union organizing where it isn't now. It's a little bit complicated, but what Biden's hoping for is that a winning UAW contract translates into an ability by the UAW to unionize the rest of the electric vehicle market in places where they're not yet unionized, thereby solving that problem you mentioned earlier of this vast EV market that relies on non-unionized labor. Correct. His pitch is green energy jobs are good union jobs.

He just has to make that a reality. And if Biden can't actually deliver that, he'll have to own that. People will blame him for ushering in a green revolution that happens in non-union plants. And how does the UAW see this vision, this pretty complicated vision that Biden is outlining? They understand rhetorically that Biden is with them,

but they want to see real concrete legislation and regulations that benefit them, which is why the union, with its very aggressive new leadership under their president, Sean Fain, has withheld the endorsement for Biden's reelection because they feel like he could and should have done more for them as their industry moves toward electric vehicles. And Biden has tried in the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, which included all sorts of incentives to move the country toward electric vehicles, he got a bonus tax credit for the hiring of unionized workers, that was stripped out at the last minute by Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia.

So there are limits to what Biden can do for the unions. So the UAW's message to Biden is basically do better, work harder, and show us that you understand just how existential a threat the electric vehicle is to our workers. And that's why Joe Biden was on the picket lines on Tuesday with the UAW. To basically say, not only do I hear you, but I am pausing my busy schedule as president of the United States to literally be here with you as you strike. The first president that we know to ever walk the picket lines of a strike. It's a remarkable moment. Now, just because the UAW has withheld its endorsement of Joe Biden doesn't mean they're even flirting with the idea of endorsing Donald Trump. They know Trump is anti-organized labor. And you know, Sean Fain, the president of the UAW, really hates Trump, is very outspoken,

and he's very popular. But Trump thinks that he can appeal to the rank and file of UAW members with a much simpler message. We'll be right back. So Jonathan, walk us through Donald Trump's strategy for winning over the rank and file of the United Auto Workers, given the reality that the union's leadership, as you just told us, is pretty wary of Trump. Donald Trump has shown a remarkable ability to tear union voters away from their leaders and the marching orders that union organizers have given their voters. He can go around the union leadership and go straight to the union voters and say, I'm your guy. You know, in 2016, he had vanishingly few union leaders actually behind him. And yet, banishingly few union leaders actually behind him. And yet his appeal to union workers helped him break the blue wall in the upper Midwest

and win the presidency by winning Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. And he's done this not just with auto workers. We will lift the restrictions on American energy, including shale, oil, natural gas, and clean, beautiful coal. Put our miners back to work. He's done this with coal miners. He can reopen the coal mines. We're going to bring steel back to Pennsylvania like it used to be. He can bring steel back to the United States.

We are not going to allow our jobs to be taken from our states anymore. He has this way of telling voters he can turn back time. America Great Again has always contained a promise to reverse a lot of the changes that have been made to the working-class American economy. It's an appeal to nostalgia, and it has really worked. And we're seeing that playbook all over again with electric vehicles. Electric cars will kill more than half of U.S. auto jobs, and it's going to decimate more than electric vehicles. Trump's fundamental pitch is, we don't need to move to electric vehicles. Climate change is a hoax. We can stick with the internal combustion engine.

Electric vehicles are all made in China. And electric vehicles are the threat, not the future. So Trump's basic message to the UAW in this labor conflict is that their problems could be solved if they would just take the electric vehicle out of the equation. That's right. Biden is a catastrophe for Michigan and his environmental extremism is heartless and disloyal and horrible for the American worker. And you're starting to see it. If you want to have an auto industry, you need to defeat Joe Biden. He's a corrupt president and reelect President Donald Trump. And he wants electric vehicles to be Joe Biden's problem. And he wants to be the guy who can

liberate them from economic change and bring them back to some halcyon days when internal combustion engines were flowing out of Detroit like water. But I'm thrilled to be back with the workers, UAW members, and proud patriots of the great state of Michigan. UAW members and proud patriots of the great state of Michigan. And when Trump held a rally in Michigan Wednesday night, instead of going to the Republican debate, he hit that message really hard. You can be loyal to American labor or you can be loyal to the environmental lunatics, but you can't really be loyal to both. It's one or the other. but you can't really be loyal to both.

It's one or the other. But it does make sense to remember that Trump's previous stabs at economic nostalgia, to use your word, back in 2016, didn't play out the way he promised they would. He, like you said, claimed he could turn back time on coal and coal mining, and he was wrong. And now he's saying that you can turn back time on EVs, which seems pretty complicated. They have become such an essential part of the big three automakers' future.

So why would a unionized autoworker believe Trump's claim here? Well, you're right, Michael. I mean, when Donald Trump was pitching the coal miners that he was going to keep those mines open, that didn't pan out. But if you think about the mindset of the miners, they had nothing to lose. Their minds were going away.

They could put their hopes in this man. And if it didn't work out, they didn't lose anything that they weren't going to lose anyway. In this case, Trump's got a much harder pitch here. He's going to electric vehicle workers and saying, stop the electric vehicle transition. These electric vehicle workers are going to look at each other and say, what's he talking about? He wants to stop the electric vehicle transition. We're working for electric vehicle makers now. Our question isn't whether our jobs are going to exist. Our question is whether our pay is going to get better or our benefits are going to get

better under a union contract. We're not disappearing. We are the industry of the future. disappearing. We are the industry of the future. So because this threat of the EV is not as existential as the previous economic threats that Trump identified and campaigned against, Trump himself faces somewhat of a tricky sales job here, you're saying? That's right. So as both Trump and Biden make these two very different pitches, two workers, Jonathan, I'm curious, based on your reporting, which of their messages is most resonating with the UAW membership? You know, I was at a UAW plant last week, and you talk to a lot of workers, they really do understand electric vehicles are the future. They see the Teslas on the road. They spend $80 filling up the gas tank on their Ford F-150s.

They understand there is a great appeal to an electric vehicle future. And they hear Trump. They know that Trump's idea that you can just stop the movement toward EVs is probably not right, but they like him. They like the way he talks. They like the sense that Trump gets them and cares about them. That's the big challenge that Joe Biden faces. Can he also come across as really caring about them? Jonathan, what you're saying suggests that even if President Biden can deliver this complicated economic trick of delivering good-paying union jobs and the EV revolution at the same time, Trump's comparatively simpler message could still win the day for many unionized workers, not just in the UAW, but across the country watching this.

for many unionized workers, not just in the UAW, but across the country watching this. And that will remind us of a lesson we've learned many times in many elections, which is that economic policy and economic interest in elections can get pretty well divorced from political loyalties, that when it comes to voting, the head and the heart can go separate ways. As we've seen time and time again, voters do not necessarily vote in their own economic interests. They vote with their heart. They vote by emotion. The fight that we're seeing now developing is a fight for the hearts and minds of white working class voters. Donald Trump has a difficult job as Biden here.

Trump has to reassemble that patchwork coalition that delivered the White House to him in 2016 and that abandoned him in 2020. But Joe Biden has the more difficult message, which is, look, I've done everything I can for you. The fact of the matter is the electric vehicle revolution is coming, whether you want it or not. Would you like to have somebody who guides it in favor of the unions? Or would you like to have that other guy who's living in his fantasy world of coal mines and steel mills and couldn't care less about electric vehicles? I'm the guy for you. It's time you come back to the party that recognizes the contributions of organized labor.

So who wins these union voters' support? That really could determine who sits in the White House in 2025. Well, Jonathan, thank you very much. Thanks for having me, Michael. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. I want to look at that camera right now and tell you, Donald, I know you're watching. You can't help yourself. I know you're watching.

OK, and you're not here tonight because you're afraid of being on this stage and defending your record. You're ducking these things. And let me tell you what's going to happen. You keep doing that. No one up here is going to call you Donald Trump anymore. We're going to call you Donald Duck. In the second Republican presidential debate, Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey and Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida mocked and taunted Donald Trump for skipping the event, saying that he owes voters an explanation for what they said was his role in rising inflation and a ballooning national debt. Donald Trump is missing in action. He should be on this stage tonight. He owes it to you to defend his record where they added $7.8 trillion to the debt. That set the stage for

the inflation that we have. Now, I can tell you this is Governor... With Trump off the stage, the candidates once again focused much of their fire on political newcomer Vivek Ramaswamy, who has surged in the polls, overshadowing longtime elected officials like former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, who pointedly dismissed Ramaswamy as a lightweight. And what you've got, I honestly, every time I hear you, I feel a little bit dumber for what you say because I can't believe they hear you. I'm going to hate this.

It's a tough situation. Today's episode was produced by Ricky Nowetzki, Olivia Natt, Eric Krupke, and Rob Zipko with help from

Luke VanderVloog. It was edited by John Ketchum and Paige Cowan, contains original music by Mary Lozano, Rowan Emisto, and Diane Wong, and was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg

and Ben Landsberg of Wonderly. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.