The NPR Politics Podcast - Trump Will Visit Striking Auto Workers, Reception Could Be Mixed

Episode Date: September 20, 2023

The former president is evidently trying to shore up support with working class voters in Michigan. He narrowly lost the state in 2020.The autoworkers' union blasted Trump in a statement — though its relationship with the Biden White House is less than cozy.This episode: White House correspondent Asma Khalid, senior political editor and correspondent Domenico Montanaro, national political correspondent Don Gonyea.The podcast is was produced by Casey Morell and Elena Moore. Our editor is Eric McDaniel. Our executive producer is Muthoni Muturi.Unlock access to this and other bonus content by supporting The NPR Politics Podcast+. Sign up via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org. Connect:Email the show at [e-mail] the NPR Politics Podcast Facebook Group.Subscribe to the NPR Politics Newsletter.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hi, this is Sarah, Blake, Luke, and Abby, and we're hiking at the Grand Canyon of Yellowstone in Yellowstone National Park. This podcast was recorded at 1.57 p.m. Eastern Time on Wednesday, September 20th of 2023. Things may have changed by the time you hear it, but we'll still be on our 15-day road trip visiting national parks from Kentucky to... Theodore Roosevelt National Park. Glacier National Park. Yellowstone National Park. Grand Teton National Park. Wind Cave National Park.

And Gateway Arch National Park. Okay, here's the show. I love how active our listeners are. I do feel like that's a little bragging, though. I haven't been to all of those national parks, and I'm like a grown adult. But I have been to Yellowstone, and it was honestly one of the most surreal, like otherworldly places I have ever been in my life. And I can recommend the Grand Tetons. That's, yeah.

All right. What a trip. Hey there. It's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Asma Khalid. I cover the White House. I'm Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent. And I'm Don Gagne, national political correspondent.

And today on the show, the politics of an autoworker strike. It is now day six of the United Autoworker Strike, and the politics seem to be getting more and more interesting. Former President Donald Trump says he will skip the next GOP presidential debate and instead head to Michigan to meet with autoworkers. Michigan is, in fact, Don, where you are now based. So I want to begin just by asking you, how welcome will Trump be in this crowd? I think he's going to pick an audience that will be very friendly to him, right? Look, Trump has fans who are autoworkers, absolutely. And if you look at the total union vote in America, the autoworkers are in there. And Trump has done better than most

Republican candidates have of the modern era, right? Especially against Hillary Clinton. He didn't do quite so well against Joe Biden four years later. But he does not get the majority of the union vote or of the autoworker vote. So he's going to have to be very careful where he goes, right? If he just shows up at a picket line, and again, we don't know where he's going to go just yet. They haven't explained. They haven't released a schedule. Clearly, they have to deal with things like the Secret Service because he is an ex-president. But if he just shows up at a picket line, that could become a really crazy scene, right? And there's no guarantee that these are overwhelmingly or, as he would like, totally Trump supporters. In fact, the most enthusiastic picketers are often more progressive and more

liberal, and they might give him a really hard time on the picket line, and they're not looking for that. So what is more likely is they run out of space. Maybe it's an outdoor venue because the weather is beautiful in Michigan and Detroit this time of year. Maybe it's someplace that's a local union hall or something that looks like a union hall. And they have a small group of likely, you know, very, very, very strong, even adoring Trump supporters there. And he holds a rally and it looks like he's there as the champion of the autoworkers. But obviously, it's a lot more complicated than that. Yeah. And look, you know, Donald Trump is not really like the person who is really welcome by union voters.

You know, he's seen as much more on the side of big business in general, but he sees a kinship culturally with a lot of these voters. And he's really tried to work to win over some of these voters, not based on economics, but based on culture, on things like immigration, on gay rights, and, you know, trying to more kind of poke at that. But what is really kind of going against the grain of where support for unions is right now, because it's at really a decades long high. I mean, if you look at the Gallup numbers on support for labor unions, it's at 67% this

year in support for them. And that's the highest it's been since roughly 1965. I mean, this is a long time where we've seen now this trend upward in support of labor unions. And Joe Biden wants to say he's the most pro-labor president, maybe since FDR. Of course, there's some friction there as well between Biden and the union, too. Yeah. So I want to ask you about something you said there, Domenico, which is, you know, if you look at Donald Trump's economic policies, he is pro right to work. He doesn't really support the idea that folks should have the right to unionize. And yet he's going to the Midwest and it feels like he's going to Michigan

in part to reach out to these auto workers who are striking. I don't really fully understand the connection here. Right. Like there is the political need he has to win Michigan. But there's also the fact that push and saying that a lot of the electric vehicles are going to be built in China when that's not exactly the case. You know, there's some batteries that are being built in China, but the U.S. has really made a push, the auto industry, to sort of build more electric vehicles in the United States. That's really what Trump is sort of going to try to talk about and put a wedge between Biden and the autoworkers on. But, you know, there's also a wedge between Trump and the other 2024 Republican presidential campaign hopefuls, because people like Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina, who's from the right to work state, Tim Scott, also from that same state, you know, had said Scott, for example, saying that he wants to follow the model of Ronald Reagan with what to do with people who are in a union who strike.

And that's if they strike, they'd be fired, alluding to the air traffic controller strike in the 1980s. Asma, can I mention one more obstacle that Trump has as he comes to Detroit? The president of the United Auto Workers Union. Sean Fain is this very militant new UAW leader. He's been in office less than six months. He's taken them out on strike already, right? As soon as Trump said he was coming to town, Fain issued a statement that said, I'll read it,

quote, every fiber of our union is being poured into fighting the billionaire class and an economy that enriches people like Donald Trump at the expense of workers. So again, Sean Fain has made some news for not joining the rest of the AFL-CIO in endorsing Joe Biden for president next year. But at the same time, he has said Trump would be a disaster. And now comes this statement in response to Trump's pending visit. Don, I want to ask you, though, about where the union is when it comes to supporting Joe Biden,

because Biden often has said that he is the most pro-union president in history, right, that he is supporting this union. And yet it doesn't seem like even all the workers are necessarily lining up right behind him. It sounds like there's kind of complex feelings people have about it. I think it's complex, but let's be clear. Biden won the vote. He won union households. There's no reason to think he won't win them again, right? But he's got to win them by the same margin because a state like Michigan, where this is a key voting group, he can't afford to lose any voters. So that's important. But it's a UAW leadership that took office earlier this year, making it clear that they were not just going to hand out their endorsements to Democrats because, oh, Democrats are on our side and we're Democrats, so we're going to endorse them and everything's going to be OK.

Sean Fain made it clear he's going to need to see results. So it's one thing for President Biden to be supportive of this strike and to say to companies, you should give the workers what they want. That's basically what he said. But for Sean Fain, while I think he's happy to have that, that's not enough. that all jobs created will be high-paying union jobs, and things that Biden hasn't been able to get through Congress and that Biden can't deal with through a snap of the fingers or through an executive order. So they are going to continue to hold Biden's feet to the fire because they feel that is in their interest. Trump sees a play. That's why Trump is sliding in there, even though, you know, that's not necessarily the most friendly audience for him. All right, let's take a quick break and we'll be back in a moment. And we're back. You know, another strange thing about this entire dynamic is that last week, the day this strike began, President Biden gave a speech at the White House in which he said that he was going to dispatch two high-level administration officials to Detroit to support these contract negotiations.

He said he was going to send out the acting Labor Secretary Julie Hsu as well as Gene Sperling, a senior advisor within his White House has now told me that these two officials never went and that they're not planning on going imminently, that they're just going to monitor the situation from Washington. I wanted to get a sense of what you all interpreted. I mean, we've heard the UAW president publicly say on TV that there really isn't a role for this White House to broker the deal. But I guess I'm struggling to understand fully what this means for Biden, because it's like he wants to have a role in this. But it also seems like the union doesn't really think there is a role for him. That's exactly the case.

It's not clear what Acting Secretary Hsu and the special envoy to the auto industry, Mr. Sperling, would do. They don't have a role at the bargaining table. They can talk and cajole each side, but the two sides need to be ready to be talked to and cajoled. And there may come a time if there's some kind of an impasse and there's some sort of pressure that can be applied from Washington. But they are not at that stage just yet, especially since the strike is just three plants right now, you know, one from each of the companies. Not that they're not feeling it, but it's not a real stalemate yet. And I think there's just not a sense that there's anything they could do here at this point. And President Biden at the end of last week, you know, at the White House talked a lot

about this, makes a statement that looked like it was as full throated as you would think it could be. I do appreciate that the parties have been working around the clock. And when I first called them at the very first day of the negotiation, I said, please stay at the table as long as you can to try to work this out. And they've been around the clock and the companies have made some significant offers. And Sean Fain, the head of the UAW, takes it takes issue with Biden saying that they're not at the negotiating table where you get it almost. If you read between the lines, seems like Biden's also talking to the CEOs because he has to, you know, keep the economy afloat or be part

of that. And what you heard from the CEOs in the days leading up to the strike was that the union wasn't at the bargaining table. So you might have a little bit of that internal conflict where the union hears that one thing, thinks that Biden might be talking to the CEOs too, and they want more runway to be able to negotiate and they want more leverage to be able to win over all of the things that they want, including this 40 percent increase in pay, which they say, you know, is really just clawing back what they had given away in 2008 after the economic collapse. And look, once they get a deal, we're going to look back at this, right? Biden is not trying to claim the moral high ground as much as he's trying to define it. And he's giving them both the place that maybe they should get to. If they get there, Biden's going to look good. If they don't get there, if the strike drags on and on and on and on, then that becomes an issue. You know, guys, as we're taping this show, we are just getting some

incoming news that GM is temporarily laying off about 2,000 unionized workers at a plant in Kansas. What's going on there is the union is trying to minimize pain on its membership by only striking these three select plants. GM, the auto companies, are now trying to maximize pain on the unions by laying off people in addition to those who are on strike. Inna Domenica, you mentioned that it sounds like Biden, you know, is talking with some of the auto executives. And it is worth pointing out that he has a close working relationship, certainly with some of these executives, including Mary Barra, for example, of General Motors. And so, you know, he may present himself as being very pro-union, but Biden does have a track record of working, of speaking with some of these executives. The fact is the president has to

be on top of the economy. The CEOs who run these companies are people who presidents do wind up talking to, but it's a delicate balance, especially for a Democrat who wants to look like a person of the people. And that's why you have someone like former President Trump trying to sneak in and do an end around and say, this guy is really out for the corporations, not really for the people like you, pro-trade, pro-China, even though Biden talks in a way that's pretty similar to how Trump talked when it comes to trade with China. I mean, it's also really complicated, though, for the president of the United States to, say, join the picket line, because then ostensibly he's picking a side. We've certainly seen some Democrats, some Democrats in Congress do that. And there's a sense from the

more progressive side of the party that they would like Joe Biden to do that. But there's a sense from the more progressive side of the party that they would like Joe Biden to do that. But I don't know of a president in recent history who's done that. And I think it'd be it certainly be unprecedented. I can't think of a president on a picket line as I look back. I'm not going to say it's never happened, but I can't picture it. And it does feel like it's one thing to voice support, to even voice strong support. But that feels like it would be a real thumb on the scale. And it also is a kind of a perilous position because what if it doesn't go the way the workers then expect? Presidents, especially Biden, like to play the role of dealmaker.

You know, they like continuity and they're not really pugilists or fighters generally. They, you know, they're not exactly, you know, some of those other Democrats who we can think of, people like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders who ran against Biden for the nomination, who are a bit more pugilistic when it comes to, you know, these kinds of income inequality issues. Biden is somebody who does like to go to the table

and feels like he can hammer out a deal. And that's his instinct is always to get a deal as opposed to really maximizing leverage. All right. Well, let's leave it there for today. I'm Asma Khalid. I cover the White House. I'm Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent. And I'm Don Gagne, national political correspondent. And thank you all, as always, for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.