If that means disrupting the Big Three′s transition to electric vehicles, Fain seems to think, so be it. The union has always been skeptical of that transition anyway, since many fewer workers are needed to build a zero-carbon EV than a gas-powered car.
Biden, by contrast, has a variety of objectives, which he says are compatible but are actually in tension with one another.
He wants to fight the “existential threat” of climate change while enhancing wages and benefits of all workers, but especially union workers, who make clean technology. The second goal obviously clashes with the first. As another former treasury secretary, Lawrence H. Summers, explained in remarks to a Washington think tank on Sept. 18: “If climate change is a central problem, we should want climate change technologies produced as inexpensively as possible.”
Biden’s overriding objective is reelection in 2024, which likely requires carrying Michigan. And carrying Michigan is easier with the all-out support of the UAW. Fain has audaciously withheld his union’s endorsement, even as other big unions have given Biden theirs, and as GOP front-runner Donald Trump has appealed directly to the rank-and-file, blaming their woes on Biden’s EV push.
Put it all together, and Fain was able to maneuver Biden, the head of an executive branch whose responsibilities sometimes include mediating labor disputes, into a pro-striker presidential tilt.
Big Three executives must be seething, given their decision to work with the Biden administration on its EV push. If they’re feeling passive-aggressive, the companies could just agree to the UAW’s entire wish list, such as the 40 percent pay raise over four years Biden endorsed on Tuesday, and let Washington deal with the consequences. Those might include a much less competitive domestic auto industry.
Meanwhile, the president has fortified his declared intent to be the most pro-union occupant of the White House ever. Franklin D. Roosevelt is the other top contender, based on his support for the 1935 National Labor Relations Act, which established a legal right to organize, bargain and strike.
Yet Roosevelt had limited patience with strikers who threatened what he saw as vital national priorities. In June 1941, he sent the Army to crush a walkout at the North American Aviation plant in Los Angeles, deeming it a threat to the defense buildup he had ordered prior to Pearl Harbor. During World War II, he held unions to tight wage controls and no-strike pledges.
In April 1943, the 500,000-member United Mine Workers, under their famously militant leader, John L. Lewis, struck the coal mines in defiance of the president. Roosevelt put the mines under the Interior Department’s control, threatening to send troops to keep them open. His administration eventually negotiated a wage increase with the miners, but not before Congress enacted a law empowering the president to take over any war-production industries whose workers struck, or threatened to. It passed over Roosevelt’s veto — but he later used it to put down strikes anyway.
Any analogy between the threat posed by World War II and what many today consider a “climate emergency” is far from exact, even a bit strained. Yet that’s the point: to contrast Roosevelt’s tougher response to strikers amid a real war against fascism with Biden’s more indulgent posture in the midst of today’s metaphorical war against carbon emissions.
Like a latter-day John L. Lewis, Fain is probing, and exposing, a president’s true priorities, working along a seam in the Democratic coalition. That fault line, today, runs between what’s left of the party’s former core constituency — the industrial working class — and college-educated professionals, concentrated in coastal cities and suburbs, who exercise increasing influence over the party’s agenda. For the latter, climate change is a top concern.
“Which side are you on?” asks an old labor anthem. Tuesday, Biden came closer than any other president ever has to answering that question as a striking union would like.
He then boarded a plane for the West Coast, where he was scheduled to attend a fundraiser in Atherton, Calif., the ultrawealthy Bay Area enclave populated by tech executives and venture capitalists. About one-seventh of the 6,261 cars registered in Atherton are electric, the highest percentage of any town in California.
Many are Teslas, made by workers who do not belong to the UAW.
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