Biden To Visit UAW Picket Line

[Webster]

(The Guardian) At 12pm today, Joe Biden will go where no president has gone before: a union picket line. The Guardian’s Robert Tait reports on why Biden’s visit to striking autoworkers in Michigan is significant: Joe Biden will make a rare presidential appearance on a picket line in Michigan on Tuesday to show solidarity with striking members of the United Auto Workers (UAW) union locked in an escalating dispute with America’s three biggest carmakers.

In a high-stakes effort to steal a march on Donald Trump, Biden will offer his backing to strikers at a plant in the Detroit area as part of an all-out bid to retain the support of union members in Michigan, seen as a key presidential election battleground state.

The US president’s visit comes a day before Trump, his expected Republican opponent in next year’s poll, visits Detroit – the historic centre of the US car industry – to address workers in his own pitch for the strikers’ support.

Trump, who won Michigan with the help of union members’ support in his 2016 election victory over Hillary Clinton before losing it four years later in his defeat to Biden, is not expected to visit a picket line. Biden’s trip is designed to burnish his self-proclaimed credentials as the most union-friendly president in US history and possibly also to earn the explicit backing of the UAW, which has yet to endorse his bid for re-election.

In a post on X, the social media platform that was formerly Twitter, the president said the aim of his visit was “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”. He added: “It’s time for a win-win agreement that keeps American auto manufacturing thriving with well-paid UAW jobs.”

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It’s no accident the picket line Joe Biden is visiting is in Michigan – the state is crucial for him to win if he’s to return to the White House for a second term. The Guardian’s Steven Greenhouse reports on how the president is hoping today’s visit gives him a boost among a constituency vital not just to his own presidency, but to Democrats’ successes nationwide:

In the more than 150 years since workers first formed labor unions in the United States, no American president has ever stood “in solidarity” with workers on a picket line. Joe Biden has vowed to do exactly that with striking autoworkers in Michigan on Tuesday.

“This is genuinely new – I don’t think it’s ever happened before, a president on a picket line,” said Nelson Lichtenstein, a longtime labor historian at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “Candidates do it frequently and prominent senators, but not a president.”

Biden’s visit to the picket line, labor experts say, will give him a political boost in Michigan and other industrial swing states and might also help nudge the United Auto Workers (UAW) and automakers to a quicker settlement. But some experts say his visit could backfire if the walkout drags on for months or seriously hurts the nation’s economy.

Biden’s predecessors were often far more hostile toward strikers. In 1894, Grover Cleveland dispatched federal troops to help shut down a railroad strike; during the Korean war in 1952, Harry Truman seized the nation’s steel mills in response to a steelworkers’ strike; and in 1981, Ronald Reagan fired 11,345 striking air traffic controllers.

 

[Webster]

(The Guardian) The Guardian’s Tom Perkins is outside one of the plants where United Auto Workers members have walked off the job in Michigan, and has this report: On a damp and windy day in Wayne, Michigan, United Auto Workers (UAW) picketing outside the sprawling plant, one of the original to strike earlier this month, burned logs in barrels for warmth, as horns from passing traffic on the busy highway blared in support.

The strike has pushed into its third week, and Biden’s visit will be followed by a Wednesday stop by Donald Trump at an auto facility in nearby Macomb county in what feels like the unofficial kickoff to the 2024 campaign season. Workers here say the appearance by the president is a boost to morale, and Larry Hearn, a 61-year-old UAW committee member, views it as a “monumental and history-making” visit that marks the first time a sitting US president has joined a picket line. “We’re out here on the frontline, taking the brunt for everybody, losing money,” Hearn said. “The support feels good. We don’t need him to get in our business and secure us a contract, but his support is enough, it hits home with people.”

The Trump campaign called Biden’s visit to the picket line a “cheap photo-op”, but at least some workers disagree with that assessment. “As long as Biden is going to come here then do something to help working people when he returns to Washington, then he is welcome,” said Walter Robinson, a 57-year-old quality inspector. “He is going to have to do that if he wants our endorsement. I think he will.”

The UAW has withheld an endorsement so far, but union leadership has been critical of Trump, who has sought to capitalize on the strike and siphon support from the majority-Democratic unions. Trump visits a non-union shop tomorrow, which was not lost on those outside the Wayne plant. “That’s where his loyalties lie,” Robinson said “If he wants to be with working people who are struggling, then he would be here. I don’t know who he is playing for – is he playing for working people, or corporations?”

Trump gets a lot of support among union members because of “guns, gays and taxes”, Robinson said, and inflation has not helped Biden. “That resonates with a certain sector of people,” he added, estimating that there is about a 60-40 split in support at the plant for Biden and Trump. “He has to go to a non-union plant because if he came here we wouldn’t let him in,” Hearn said. “If he pulled up in his motherfuckin’ motorcade right now, we would not let him in.”

Hearn said he is a Democrat and most union members will say they are, but added: “You never what someone is going to do when they get behind the [voting] booth.”