[ad_1]
An old Washington principle holds that, at any given moment, only two people in American politics really matter: the President, and whomever the President is arguing with. But last week President Joe Biden and his eternal partner in argument, Donald Trump, found themselves sharing the spotlight with a third party. Enter a fifty-four-year-old former electrician from Kokomo, Indiana, named Shawn Fain, who won the presidency of the United Auto Workers in March, on a reform ticket—“The machine will churn no more,” an account of Fain’s victory in the left-wing magazine Jacobin began—and by September had launched a strike against all three major U.S. automakers. Fain, who quotes Malcolm X and whose membership is now one-fifth graduate-student workers, made clear that he would go big.
In negotiations, the U.A.W. is demanding across-the-board raises of forty per cent—to match the steep trajectory of C.E.O. compensation—and the institution of a four-day work week. The reporting from Detroit has suggested that, with this strike, Fain hopes to show workers around the country what unions can do for them. Both Biden and Trump pride themselves on having managed the populist politics that emerged from the decline of manufacturing in the Upper Midwest, and last week the two men were in Michigan, each trying, in his own way, to take advantage of something rare in U.S. Presidential politics—a genuinely radical point of view.
Behind the familiar positioning and chaos of the 2024 Presidential race, the economy is beginning a slow but profound transition, from being based on oil and gas to relying on renewable energy. The Biden Administration’s work to make this change happen, in the face of the climate crisis, is its most forward-thinking undertaking, and the Inflation Reduction Act, which worked to enroll automakers in the transition, has been its chief legislative accomplishment. The U.A.W. strike is about tangible labor issues—pay and benefits. But it is also about the emerging electric-vehicle industry, which insiders have publicly suggested may need many fewer workers—Ford’s C.E.O. estimated perhaps forty per cent fewer—though some studies have found that the new plants won’t be less labor intensive. E.V. production does depend on battery plants, and, according to CNN, there are currently six operating in the country, only one of which is unionized. (Workers at Tesla, suddenly an important competitor, are not unionized, either.) In May, Fain said that the U.A.W. was withholding an endorsement of President Biden over the issue. In a memo, the union declared, “The EV transition is at serious risk of becoming a race to the bottom.”
From Mar-a-Lago, Trump, despite the preoccupations of facing ninety-one criminal charges, recognized that two things Biden wants—to achieve the green transition and to be the most “pro-worker” President in U.S. history—were in tension, and ripe for some political entrepreneurship. So his campaign confirmed that he would skip the second Republican debate and, instead, address autoworkers in Michigan. Certain Republicans, sensing a shift—one poll suggested that forty-one per cent of Republican voters now view unions as a “positive force”—had already begun to speak more sympathetically about the plight of union labor. This has not translated into policy, though, and the U.A.W. is skeptical of some of its new admirers. Senator Josh Hawley, of Missouri, who visited a U.A.W. picket line in his home state, previously enjoyed a rating of zero per cent from the union. And, ahead of Trump’s visit, Fain said, “Every fibre 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.”
That was enough to draw Biden to join the striking workers in Michigan last Tuesday. No sitting President had ever before stood on a picket line—not Obama, not Clinton, not F.D.R.—which itself suggests just how rapidly the Washington consensus on labor is changing. (Steve Rattner, Obama’s auto czar, denounced Biden’s trip as “outrageous.”) Biden, wearing a union ball cap and carrying a bullhorn, stood with Fain at the picket line. He told the crowd that they had earned “a hell of a lot more” than their current pay, and backed the call for a forty-per-cent raise, which surely troubled even the pro-E.V. executives at Ford and G.M., who have already committed to spending heavily on the electric transition, with no guarantee that the new cars will sell.
Biden’s appearance also served as a bit of general-election positioning; he looks vulnerable to attacks on the economy, where a generally strong rebound from the pandemic has been complicated by high consumer prices. A mid-September USA Today poll found that, by a margin of eleven points, voters trust Trump over Biden to improve the economy, and an ABC poll, conducted a few days later, gave Biden his lowest ever scores on the economy. Biden means to run on the economy (“Bidenomics”), but he tends to frame it in confusing metaphors—he often talks about remaking the economy not just from the bottom up but from the “middle out”—that can obscure how much is changing.
Trump’s pro-labor appearance, a day later, turned out to be an invitation-only event at a non-union truck-parts manufacturing plant in Macomb County, hosted by the company’s president, which had the effect of bypassing its supposed audience—union workers. A U.A.W. vice-president sent an e-mail to a reporter at the Detroit Free Press, which delicately redacted it for publication: “Let me be blunt. Donald Trump is coming off as a pompous [expletive].” Nevertheless, Trump found a way to make his point. “You can be loyal to American labor, or you can be loyal to the environmental lunatics,” he said. “But you can’t really be loyal to both. It’s one or the other.”
Of course, it really has to be both, even if Trump’s party doesn’t yet admit that. At the second Republican debate, on Wednesday night, candidates rushed to champion fossil-fuel extraction, with Mike Pence calling for the U.S. to “unleash” its oil and gas resources. This is already happening, to some extent, since Biden, even as he calls climate change an “existential threat,” has helped foster a gas boom. Still, drive across the Midwest, and you can see the first landmarks of the new economy: huge battery plants going up in small-town Michigan, wind-turbine blades spinning along ridgelines in Iowa, solar arrays wedged into highway cloverleafs. And yet, as a political cause, this transformation remains curiously under-heralded, hidden beneath the banner of the Inflation Reduction Act and enacted through a dense set of tax credits. In Michigan, Biden sought to demonstrate that he is on the side of the workers, but the U.A.W. has yet to endorse him. In the general election, he might need to convince its members, and the rest of the country, that the new economy can still come with a forty-per-cent raise. ♦
[ad_2]
Source link
