WASHINGTON - President Joe Biden will travel to Michigan on Tuesday to join United Auto Workers on the picket line in one of the most extraordinary displays of support a president has ever taken in the middle of a labor dispute.
Biden’s trip comes after United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain invited Biden to the picket line in remarks Friday as the UAW ratchets up its strike against the nation’s three largest automakers.
“Tuesday, I’ll go to Michigan to join the picket line and stand in solidarity with the men and women of UAW as they fight for a fair share of the value they helped create,” Biden said in a statement. “It’s time for a win-win agreement that keeps American auto manufacturing thriving with well-paid UAW jobs.”
Further details about Biden’s trip, including which striking site he will visit, remain unclear.
Former President Donald Trump, the frontrunner to capture the 2024 Republican nomination, has said he plans to meet with striking auto workers in the Detroit area Wednesday in a push to court rank-and-file union members and other blue-collar workers for his 2024 run.
Biden faced pressure from progressives to join UAW workers on the picket line after Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries, Sen. Bernie Sanders and others each traveled to striking sites this week.
For the first time Friday, Fain publicly invited Biden to the picket line.
“We invite and encourage everyone who supports our cause to join us on the picket line − from our friends and families, all the way up to the president of the United States,” Fain said.
Biden faces a political tightrope with the UAW strike. He has decades of close ties with organized labor and said he wants to be known as the “most pro-union president” in U.S history. But Biden also wants to avoid national economic repercussions that could result from a prolonged strike.
Biden has endorsed UAW’s demands for higher pay, saying last week that “record corporate profits, which they have, should be shared by record contracts for the UAW.” But at the request of the UAW, Biden has stayed out of negotiations with Ford Motor Co., General Motors and Stellantis.
Fain extended the invitation after announcing plans to expand UAW’s strike to 38 new sites across 20 states. He said the union has made good progress with Ford Motor Co. this week, but General Motors and Stellantis “will need some pushing.”
White House press secretary Jean-Pierre said the White House “will do everything that we possibly can to help in any way that the parties would like us to.”
A White House team led by Acting Labor Secretary Julie Su and White House adviser Gene Sperling was originally scheduled to visit Detroit this week. But the trip was scrapped after UAW’s leadership made it clear they did not want help at the negotiating table.
That’s still not great. The point of strikes is to be disruptive. This undermines the power of unions. Sure the union got what they wanted, but next time they might not. This whole thing is just the usual Dems playing both sides
The point of strikes is to get employers to meet the demands of the workers
But nothing.
There are bunch of people here who think revolution is an inherently beneficial goal in and of itself, which is crazy. Here I am at work unionizing, explaining to my colleagues that the goal is NOT to strike. That strike is a last resort only if the corporation refuses to give us our critical demands (in our case, safe nurse-to-patient ratios). That we only strike when we reach the point where we all know we’d quit these jobs anyway because we feel like we can’t keep our patients safe.
No, the GOAL of a union is COLLECTIVE BARGAINING POWER, kids. The right to strike is a last, desperate resort
Teenager logic.
It really is though
A whole lot of people don’t realize that a revolution would be terrible for the working class. If people are struggling to make ends meet, a massive disruption is going to result in people going hungry and cold. Someone who needs medication to survive will die. It’s an incredibly privileged position to think you’ll be fine in a revolution.
It seems these same people stopped reading about the French revolution after the part with beheading the rich. What followed was anarchy and betrayal. You could be in full support of the revolution one day and under the guillotine the next. And the person who ordered your death would be the next one under it. Plus, in the end, it culminated in Napoleon, which wasn’t exactly the goal.
I always have to remind people of Robespierres ultimate fate
The struggle for workers’ rights is not one battle, and enforcing a precedent that the government can and will back corps during a strike diminishes the power of the strike, arguably the most powerful tools for workers’ rights, at is core. Biden essentially declared strikes aren’t acceptable, but they’ll deign to help groups when they see fit, and when this happens under a republican government, we all know there’ll be no work done afterwards to satisfy the workers, who now have a diminished position to work with.
The foundation of workers’ rights that’s been built up over the last hundred+ years was very much damaged by Biden, and he shouldn’t get a pass for that. At best it was a stupid blunder he worked to fix, at worst it was a manipulative effort to weaken the effectiveness of these groups while also establishing a reliance on “sympathetic” governmental powers as necessary to get anything done. Neither is particularly great.
Alternatively, you could look at it as the Biden administration declared that strikes above a certain level of disruption to critical infrastructure warrant the government stepping in, even if the demands are valid.
Something about the administration unambiguously endorsing a large but not critical infrastructure strike, like they are with the UAW, implies that maybe the point isn’t to signal that strikes are unacceptable.
It’s almost like the executive branch has to balance a myriad of competing interests, all of which are important.
The government could’ve stepped in in support of the striking workers, but they didn’t. Now that the strike isn’t causing “problems”, they’re all for it!
Yes, that’s almost precisely it. The administration wants to avoid problems with critical infrastructure, but supports strikes that aren’t threatening critical infrastructure.
It’s why you see the administration negotiate to prevent a strike, block the strike, and then help negotiate for what the strike was aiming to get, and then go on to support workers who are on strike.
That’s not hypocrisy, that’s nuance.
I never claimed it was hypocritical. I’m saying it’s duplicitous. When the chips were down, Biden chose corporate interests over workers when he just as well could have pressured the corpos instead. Now he’s acting chummy-chummy with workers when it suites him better.
The point of strike is to get what is demanded. Much better outcome for everyone involved (including the very people who are striking) is to get demands satisfied without having to strike. Do you think people strike, because they love doing that? No one does.
He forced them back to work before their demands could be met. That is a fail. He may have gotten something after the fact, but that doesn’t change that he forced workers back to work instead of striking. What if he wasn’t able to get that done?
FWIW, rail workers were asking for 7 sick days a year. 7. And Biden got them 5 with the ability to convert 2 personal days to sick days. As a note, even 7 is a ridiculously low number.
He should have sided with unions then, too. The only reason he’s doing this is because Republicans are saying that the UAW is being damaged by Biden’s policies.
This all-or-nothing approach is what gives you nothing more often then not
My point is, it shouldn’t be Biden inserting himself into what should have been a conversation between the union and the railroad. He forced the union’s hand and then said “trust me”. I want you to imagine a world where a politician forced a company to accept a union’s offer and then told the company to “trust them”.
As if an American politician would ever force a company to accept a union’s (very reasonable, FWIW) offer.
Between “Biden doesn’t do anything” and “Biden shouldn’t be involved in anything” there is very little rhyme or reason to what y’all actually think he should be doing. So the only thing that’s left is to look at the overall outcome, and so far it was in the realm of “things are going to the right direction, although not quickly and not far enough”, which is frankly way better than anyone could hope for in this environment
He also robbed the right wing of a “unions bad” moment when a rail strike disrupted the whole economy.
If our infrastructure is so brittle that one strike can disrupt the economy as severely as pro-strikebreaking centrist Democrats say, the current rail companies cannot be trusted to continue operating it.
Dude, they were disruptive enough that the fucking president got personally involved on their side. What more do you want?
For the patriarchy to burn.
I’m sorry what fucking planet do you live on. Biden didn’t get involved on the side of unions. He told them they could not legally strike because of national security. But luckily our of the kindness of his heart, Biden still had the railroad give workers paid sick days. That’s not wholesome, that’s not cool, that’s fucked. Any President can now just shut down rail strikes and they don’t have to give jack fucking shit. The unions won this time, but next time the won’t.
Have you read the history of organized labor? The legal framework for forcibly terminating a strike has been around since the 1920s.
This isn’t a new thing.
Like, a hundred years ago people came up with a system for having a board review rail strikes, the severity of the dispute and the impact of the strike, and issue recommendations for if the strike should be allowed, or if Congress should prevent it.
This isn’t Biden treading new anti labor ground.
Please look up the definition of president. Legality doesn’t equal morality