The Detroit News reported that one individual in the crowd, who held a sign that said “Union members for Trump,” acknowledged that she wasn’t a union member when approached by a reporter after the event. Another person, with a sign that read “Auto workers for Trump,” said he wasn’t an autoworker when asked for an interview. They declined to provide their names to the reporter.
The area does not lack for people who would show up just because they have a tribal identification with Trump. Clinton Township was about evenly split in the 2020 presidential election, with 27,851 votes for Joe Biden and 27,358 votes for Trump. Trump won the surrounding Macomb County, 53 percent to 45 percent.
Much of Trump’s spiel was well-trod territory — your union ought to endorse me; if they endorse me, everything will be terrific; if they don’t endorse me and Biden gets reelected, you’re all doomed, etc. While denouncing “the Wall Street predators, the Chinese cheaters and the corrupt politicians,” Trump also hinted that he might well seize the means of production. “We’re going to take their money. We’re going to take their factories. We’re going to rebuild the industrial bedrock of this country.”
Look, the only way Trump can really fight the threat of socialism in America is by having the federal government seize the factories of the private sector and take over the management of them. That’ll show those commies!
But, as is his habit, Trump buried a kernel of truth in his rant. The transition to electric cars is not going to be smooth or easy for Detroit’s Big Three automakers, and for a long time, the Biden administration and Democrats in general have insisted they could please unions and environmentalists simultaneously. That’s almost impossible; in some circumstances, the interests of the unions and the greens are diametrically opposed. The Biden team has kicked this can down the road for a long time, but they’re quickly running out of road.
What it takes to build an electric car, in terms of raw materials, supplies and labor, is different from what it takes to build a gasoline-powered car. In 2022, Ford chief executive Jim Farley said producing electric vehicles might require about 40 percent less labor than producing the same number of fossil-fuel-powered cars.
Farley likely was not just offering spin; in 2019, Volkswagen Group chief executive Herbert Diess said, “The reality is that building an electric car involves some 30 percent less effort than one powered by an [internal combustion engine]. That means we will need to make job cuts, and achieving this purely through fluctuation and partial retirement will be difficult.”
If the world is shifting to electric cars, automakers simply won’t need all those workers specializing in assembling gasoline engines, transmissions, exhaust systems and so on. Some of those workers can be retrained, but you’re still left with 30 to 40 percent of those workers who aren’t needed anymore.
Are you starting to see why the UAW might not be such a big fan of electric cars? When President Biden — who joined a UAW picket line the day before Trump’s appearance — pledges to make the entire federal government’s fleet of cars electric, and his Environmental Protection Agency aims for electric vehicles to make up as much as two-thirds of all U.S. car sales by 2031, they are pledging to force the auto industry to reorganize itself to make a product that doesn’t need as many workers.
Some optimistic Democrat might argue that automakers could employ those now-excess workers by expanding their production capacity: If you have 30 to 40 percent extra workers, just build 30 to 40 percent more assembly lines. But there’s another catch: The unionized workers of the Big Three are more expensive than the nonunionized employees working for their competitors.
When you add up workers’ pay, benefits and profit-sharing, the Big Three calculate that their workers make vehicles for about $64 to $67 per hour. The same figure for nonunion Tesla is $45 to $50 per hour. And besides any brand advantages, Tesla has a huge head start in this market. It’s the single biggest seller of all-electric vehicles in the United States, and the next-nearest competitor, Chevrolet, isn’t all that close. In this year’s second quarter, Tesla outsold Chevy EVs 10 to 1.
And remember, the UAW is demanding a 36 percent wage increase over four years, that workers be paid for 40 hours a week but work for only 32 hours, and better benefits across the board.
So apparently the plan is to have the Big Three make electric vehicles with a significantly more expensive labor force, working fewer hours, while dramatically expanding production capacity and taking away a large chunk of the market share from Tesla and other nonunionized competitors.
Trump might be crazy, but that approach isn’t exactly sane, either.
