A day before the Malignant Loser holds a rally at a non- union shop, President Biden will be joining a UAW picket line in Michigan. The stakes and ramifications couldn't be more significant:
President Biden has announced that he will join striking United Auto Workers members on the picket line on Tuesday in Detroit. News of the move—which would be an unprecedented show of support for organized labor by a sitting president—came hours after UAW president Shawn Fain formally invited Biden, and days after Donald Trump announced he would be appearing in Michigan, not to walk the picket line but to evangelize to autoworkers about his own presidency.
Already, the political press was referring to Biden’s relationship to the strike as “historic” after the president called for “record contracts” for the UAW, pointing to the automakers’ record profits. And now Biden has gone a step further, becoming the first president in memory to commit to joining striking workers on the line. In a phone call, Nelson Lichtenstein, director of the Center for the Study of Work, Labor, and Democracy at the University of California, Santa Barbara, agreed that the move was “historic, certainly,” he said. “The old centrist Democratic thing would be to encourage both sides back to the negotiating table and come to an agreement quickly.”
The strike is a huge moment for organized labor in the United States, which is enjoying the greatest public support it’s seen in decades, but makes up a still-dwindling percentage of the labor force. It’s also a huge moment for the Democratic Party. Joe Biden, the self-proclaimed most pro-union president in history, heads to Michigan with a chance to atone for 30 years of intermittent policy sins by Democratic presidents against organized labor and the auto industry—not to mention the state of Michigan. [snip]
Already, the UAW’s actions have succeeded in several ways. Ford has agreed to end tiers and add cost-of-living raises; major wage increases look like a certainty (GM and Stellantis are the holdouts). The victory of that new contract, when it’s finally signed, will be powerful proof of the value of paying union dues, and make it much, much more difficult for nonunion plants at Toyota and Tesla to repel unionization efforts to come. These represent huge victories for Biden’s vision of industrial policy, what we’re now being urged to call Bidenomics.
“The implications for the election are huge,” Lichtenstein told me. “Biden can say, ‘I backed the UAW, which won higher wages for working people in the industrial Midwest.’ ” There’s arguably no clearer way for Biden to prove that his Democratic Party is different, and ensure that he gets some credit, than showing up. Getting from D.C. (or Delaware) to Detroit is a short trip, but it shows just how far the Biden Democratic Party has come. [our emphasis]
As Biden has been known to say, it's a BFD, and showing up is half the battle. With Ford looking like it's breaking ranks with the other manufacturers, the path to a comprehensive UAW victory may come sooner rather than later, and Biden's historic show of union support may well be seen as contributing to the ultimate settlement. Win / win scenario for union workers and the President.
BONUS: There he is --
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