On Unions And Strikes, The Parties Are Not The Same
The day after President Biden stood with striking United Auto Workers, Donald Trump rallied supporters at a nonunion plant, and the contrast says everything about how they treat workers.
On Tuesday, President Joe Biden made history as the first sitting President to ever visit striking workers on a picket line.
And not only did the President join the United Auto Workers on that Detroit picket line, he stood with them in every sense of the word: in unambiguous solidarity.
A day later, Donald Trump held an invite-only rally at a nonunion auto parts shop on the outskirts of Detroit that has nothing to do with the Big Three automakers.
To hear Trump tell it, he was visiting Michigan to support the autoworkers. But as Alex Press of Jacobin makes clear:
Holding such a rally during a strike is the opposite of showing solidarity with union workers.
Yet the trend over the past few election cycles has seen Trump and the Republican Party broadly making gains among working-class voters, with Trump even gaining in support among working-class voters of color since 2020.
And while many in the media ate up Trump’s announcement that he would be visiting autoworkers for a rally this week, playing into his performative faux populism, Trump’s play may be backfiring.
By pitting Trump’s alleged pro-worker bona fides against Biden’s, Trump has essentially provided Biden with the perfect opportunity: to expose the stark contrast that exists between Biden’s longstanding support for workers’ rights and Trump’s actual hostility toward them.
The vastly different ways Biden and Trump have approached the UAW strike is a perfect representation of that gap.
And Biden is taking the opportunity to show workers who he is.
As The Guardian’s Steven Greenhouse told Chris Hayes on MSNBC Tuesday night after Biden’s appearance with autoworkers in Detroit:
"I think he very much made a statement to workers generally. He said…corporations had record profits, Wall St is going through the roof but so many workers think, I'm falling behind, this is terrible, something is really broken. So I think when Biden said companies are doing incredibly well you should be doing incredibly well too, that's a statement not just to union members but to every American worker."
The question remains: will voters get the message in time for 2024?
A Tale Of Two Rallies
While President Biden’s appearance on the picket line on Tuesday was historic, his presence there really should have come as no surprise to anyone who knows Biden’s history.
Joe Biden hails from a working-class, Irish-American family and has long supported labor, even earning him the moniker “Union Joe.” As Biden said in his Labor Day speech a few weeks ago, which he gave in his hometown of Scranton, Pennsylvania:
“You know, there are a lot of politicians in this country who don’t know how to say the word ‘union.’ They talk about labor, but they don’t say ‘union.’...I’m proud to say ‘union.’ I’m proud to be the most pro-union president in American history.”
On Tuesday, as Biden joined arms with dozens of United Auto Workers outside a GM parts distribution center, he echoed this sentiment, unequivocally expressing solidarity with the workers, saying:
“Wall Street didn’t build this country, the middle class built this country. The 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’re getting paid now.”
According to Reuters, when asked if workers should get the same 40% increase automaker CEOs have gotten, Biden responded:
"Yes. I think they should be able to bargain for that."
Union Joe, indeed.
Contrast this with Donald Trump’s rally, which was held at Drake Enterprises, a nonunion truck parts shop, and was reportedly an invite-only event coordinated by the notoriously anti-union National Right to Work Committee.
Far from supporting workers, by headlining that rally Trump was doing the bidding of the bosses, even as he urged rally attendees to get the UAW to support his 2024 run.
The fact is, of course, that any workers at that nonunion shop would not be union members, the well-placed signs in the crowd notwithstanding. The whole thing was staged, as Detroit News’ Craig Maugher confirmed in a post on X:
A person in the crowd with a "union members for Trump" sign acknowledged she wasn't a union member.
A person with an "auto workers for Trump" sign said he wasn't an auto worker.
Which tracks if you look at his history.
Shawn Fain, President of the United Auto Workers, went on CNN Wednesday to dismantle the entire notion that Trump is some sort of working-class hero.
“His track record speaks for itself. In 2008 during the Great Recession, he blamed UAW members. He blamed our contracts for everything that was wrong with these companies. That’s a complete lie.
“In 2015 when he was running for president, he talked about doing a rotation, taking all these good-paying jobs in the Midwest and moving them somewhere in the South where people work for less money, and then to make people beg for their jobs back at lower wages.
“And the ultimate show of his– how much he cares about our workers was in 2019 when he was the president of the United States. Where was he then? GM– our workers at GM were on strike for 60 days. For two months, they were out there on the picket lines. I didn’t see him hold a rally. I didn’t see him stand up at the picket line. And I sure as hell didn’t hear him comment about it. He’s missing in action.”
And when asked if he would meet with Trump when he was in Detroit, Fain made it clear:
“I see no point in meeting with him because I don’t think the man has– has any bit of care about what our workers stand for, what the working class stands for. He serves the billionaire class and that’s what’s wrong with this country.”
Put another way, Steven Greenhouse compiled a list of all of the anti-worker policy positions Trump championed in his four short years as president.
And yeah, it’s a lot.
But if anything sums up the difference between Joe Biden’s rally on the picket line with union members and Donald Trump’s anti-union rally, it’s this split screen posted by New York Democratic Congressman Jamaal Bowman:
Any questions?
Not Just Trump: This Is Who Republicans Are
One of the reasons Joe Biden felt empowered to take such a historic step and stand with the striking workers in Detroit this week is that public sentiment is very much on the side of workers.
Not only is support for labor unions at its highest point in decades—with 71% approval according to Gallup, the highest level since 1965—but per a recent Reuters poll, the UAW strike enjoys 58% approval (including 48% of Republicans) and the SAG/AFTRA and WGA strikes have 60% approval (including 46% of Republicans.)
With numbers like this, it’s no wonder that so far in 2023, 362,000 workers have gone on strike, as compared to just 36,000 in all of 2021.
Labor is very much having a moment.
Despite this, some Republican politicians still think it’s politically advantageous to bash unions and their members, particularly those who strike.
Take Senator Tim Scott, one of the top candidates running for the GOP nomination for president, who suggested any worker who goes on strike should be fired.
“Ronald Reagan gave us a great example when federal employees decided they were going to strike,” the Republican presidential contender said. “He said, ‘You strike, you’re fired.’ Simple concept to me. To the extent that we can use that once again, absolutely.”
This led the United Auto Workers to file a complaint against Scott with the National Labor Relations Board for threatening “employees with adverse consequences if they engage in protected, concerted activity.”
After initially doubling down on his remarks, Scott ended up backing away from them during Wednesday night’s second GOP debate, saying instead that the question was irrelevant since a president didn’t have the power to fire workers anyway.
Point: unions.
For Governor Nikki Haley, it’s telling that she felt calling Joe Biden the “most pro-union president” during a recent interview was a dig.
This from the person who proudly identified as a “union buster” when she was Governor of South Carolina, and now firmly sides with corporations over workers, telling Fox News:
"It tells you when you have the most pro-union president and he touts that he is emboldening the unions, this is what you get. And I'll tell you who pays for it is the taxpayers. ... The union is asking for a 40% raise, the companies have come back with a 20% raise - I think any of the taxpayers would love to have a 20% raise and think that's great. But the problem is we're all going to suffer from this.”
Scott and Haley, of course, both come from South Carolina, which is one of the 27 states identified as a “Right To Work” state, where conservative groups such as the Chamber of Commerce and American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) have pushed right-wing legislators to pass anti-union measures to starve unions of funding and thus make them less effective at bargaining for workers.
As Robert Reich makes clear, the point of “right to work” laws is to destroy unions, full stop. As a result, workers in “right to work” states make 15% less than in other states, are less likely to have health care, have higher workplace fatality rates, as well as higher rates of poverty and infant mortality.
Not shockingly, according to The National Right To Work Committee, a map of these so-called “right to work” states comes close to tracking with a presidential electoral college map, with most traditional “red states” having successfully passed these anti-union laws.
One footnote to this graphic is that in March of 2023, Michigan Democrats, having just taken the majorities of both houses of the state legislature last November, repealed Michigan’s 11-year-old “right to work” law. Once that repeal takes effect next March, the number of “right to work” states will go from 27 to 26.
And yes, the vote was along party lines, with Democrats siding with unions and workers.
Then Why Are Democrats Losing Ground Among Working Class Voters?
In spite of this clear divide on policy, it’s evident that Biden specifically and Democrats more broadly have lost their lock on working-class voters.
As far back as 2012, this trend of working-class voters defecting from the Democratic Party was already well underway.
As the Brookings Institute framed it at the time:
Perhaps the most dominant narrative over the last several election cycles is the idea that Democrats “lost” the white working class, who focus on cultural issues (e.g. “God, guns, and gays”) at the expense of their economic self-interest.
Robert Reich, who served as Labor Secretary under President Clinton, went further in a 2016 post-election piece in The Guardian, pinning the blame for this trend squarely on Clinton and Obama policies that sent a very clear message that Democrats were the party of the elites.
And so the foundation for Trump had been inadvertently laid by Democrats themselves.
The Democratic party once represented the working class. But over the last three decades the party has been taken over by Washington-based fundraisers, bundlers, analysts, and pollsters who have focused instead on raising campaign money from corporate and Wall Street executives and getting votes from upper middle-class households in “swing” suburbs.
If the story of 2016 was the inevitable electoral consequence of this shift of white working-class voters away from the Democratic Party, then 2020 saw the next step in that trend.
An analysis by Jacobin of the results of the 2020 presidential election found that “Working-class voters shifted to the right across all racial groups.” And now an August 2023 analysis by Axios of a New York Times/Siena poll confirmed this trend with the headline “Biden loses ground with working-class Black, Latino voters.”
Whereas Joe Biden beat Trump by 48% among non-white working-class voters in 2020, the August 2023 NYT/Siena poll found Biden leading by just 16%, 49%-33%.
A HarrisX poll from earlier this year states the problem plainly:
40% of self-identified working class voters said that they feel like the Republican Party best represents their interests and views, while 36% of these voters preferred the Democratic Party.
A result that was confirmed by a recent Morning Consult poll, which found that “Democrats’ edge over GOP on ‘caring about people like me’ has vanished.”
This of course baffles those on the left who see Trump as an inveterate conman who is the personification of the billionaire class and big corporate interests. That’s who he took care of during his presidency, even as he put on his faux populist act.
The good news is that Joe Biden, contrary to most expectations, has represented a genuine shift away from the neoliberalism of the past two Democratic presidents with his populist economic and labor policies.
Biden’s visit to the Detroit picket line is an extension of that shift, and according to Steven Greenhouse, during his appearance on All In With Chris Hayes Tuesday night, was an important high-profile step in reframing the Democratic Party for working-class voters.
"Usually, Presidents either side with management or don't want to get involved. And I think Joe Biden wanted to make a very big statement…He wanted to show that this is a new Democratic Party. We're not the wine-and-cheese Democratic Party that Republicans mock, we're the party that fights for workers... "
Now we just have to help ensure that voters get the message.
In 2017 the Republican majority passed legislation, signed by the governor, declaring MO to be a right to work state. In 2018, using a ballot initiative, the voters of MO rejected the 2017 law. This is why MO, a red state, is not a right to work state. After using ballot initiatives to successfully expand Medicaid and legalize medical and recreational marijuana, Republicans tried to increase the threshold for ballot initiatives but were never able to pass anything. There is a fight going on right now to change the extreme state abortion ban using ballot initiatives and our Attorney General just lost a court fight due to the biased language he was trying to force the initiatives to use. There's another ballot initiative to raise the minimum wage in MO to $15/hour. There are ways around Republican legislators.
Trump is a Fraud!