The Patriot Post® · A View From Inside the Looming UAW Strike
Scranton Joe Biden fancies himself a union guy, a union president, but that just doesn’t pass the giggle test, does it?
After all, how many union guys do you know who live in a mansion once owned by the du Pont family? With a six-bedroom beach house to boot? How many union guys do you know who dispatch their coke-addled, sex-addicted son to peddle their influence among corrupt countries around the globe? How many union guys do you know who’ve set up 20 or so shell companies to launder their ill-gotten millions? How many union guys do you know who go around saying that “white supremacy is the single most dangerous terrorist threat in our homeland”?
We didn’t think so. Maybe this leftist-elitism is why we’ve seen a major shift in our two political parties — a shift we wrote about just before the 2020 election. The Democrats used to be the party of blue-collar America, the party of Main Street, while the Republicans were the party of Wall Street. Not anymore. In recent years, the two parties have done a switcheroo.
All this brings us to a looming deadline of midnight tonight, at which time, if an agreement hasn’t been reached between labor and management, the United Auto Workers will go on strike, an action that will no doubt shake an already fragile American economy. As the AP reports:
The auto industry accounts for about 3% of the nation’s gross domestic product and though union leaders say they are mulling strikes at a small number of factories run by those automakers, as many as 146,000 workers could eventually walk off their jobs. The effects would be most immediate in Michigan and other auto job-heavy states such as Ohio and Indiana. But a prolonged strike could trigger car shortages and layoffs in auto-supply industries and other sectors.
This spells trouble for Joe Biden and his party. As former UAW President Bob King said in a recent interview: “UAW members feel abandoned by the Democratic Party. I think there’s a segment of the Democratic Party that sees itself as serving corporations rather than the common good. … We’ve had a lot of disappointments.” King cited Bill Clinton’s NAFTA agreement and “the failure of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act to ensure that clean energy funds flow to union workers.”
What King failed to say in so many words is that no one is buying the Left’s electric vehicles.
Not surprisingly, the UAW has yet to endorse Biden’s reelection. As current UAW President Shawn Fain says: “Actions are going to dictate endorsements, so we’ll see how things continue to play out, and we have a lot of issues to resolve. There’s a lot with the EV transition that has to happen, and there’s hundreds of billions of our taxpayer dollars that are helping fund this, and workers cannot continue to be left behind in that equation.”
Fain, by the way, says the offers he’s received from the Big Three automakers “have been completely unacceptable.”
To be clear, though, some of the UAW’s demands are outrageous: a 46% pay raise over four years, and a 32-hour work week while getting paid for 40 come immediately to mind. And folks wonder why car companies go overseas or south of the border for cheap labor.
Says Fain: “We will strike all three companies, a historic first, initially at a limited number of targeted locations that we will be announcing. Then, based on what’s happening in bargaining, we’re going to be announcing more locals that are going to be called to stand up and strike.” The action will be targeted, then, rather than including some 150,000 UAW workers all at once.
“If there is a strike,” counters Ford CEO Jim Farley, “it’s not because Ford didn’t make a great offer. … We should be working creatively to solve hard problems rather than planning strikes and PR events.”
What might a rank-and-file union member think of all this? We’re glad you asked. An anonymous source, a Big Three union worker, tells us the following:
Yeah, the 32-for-40 is a pipe dream, and I think [Fain] knows that. We don’t hear him mention it much anymore. Pensions are also not coming back. Anybody hired after 2009 didn’t get a pension, but got 401(k) contributions instead. … As far as wages, he’s got a point. Inflation has been sky-high, thanks to Brandon. Just in the last four years, car prices are up 34%, profits are up over 40%, and CEO salaries are up over 40%, while we’ve received 6% in raises since 2019 in one of the tightest labor markets ever. Also, labor costs are currently only about 5% of the price of a car. Look at the cars and trucks made in Mexico with practically slave labor. They’re no cheaper than what is made here, just higher profit margins. So despite some of [Fain’s] more outrageous demands, he’s correct on a lot of points about “corporate greed.”
As to the political side, there has certainly been a bit of a shift [from Democrat to Republican], especially among the skilled trades. Over a third of UAW voted for Trump, with an even larger percentage among the skilled trades.
Maybe Biden thinks they can all just learn to write code. You know, like the coal miners. Easy, right?
Perhaps the most shocking thing our source mentioned was the high level of absenteeism among the rank and file. “This,” he said, “forces the company to keep more workers than they need on the payroll to make up for people that don’t show up.”
As for the cause of the runaway absenteeism, he added: “It’s largely a result of [Bill Clinton’s] Family Medical Leave Act, which blocks companies from punishing workers with an FMLA exemption and is abused horribly. Just need a doctor to sign off, and you can be absent any day, any reason, with no repercussions. … Somewhere around 40% of workers here have an FMLA exemption they can use whenever they want.”
Our source is just one guy, but he’s a patriotic American, he’s right there in the thick of it every day, and he sees the rot on both sides of the fight.
Meanwhile, the clock keeps ticking. The deadline is midnight tonight, and the two parties seem impossibly far apart.
POSTSCRIPT: The push for EVs by Joe Biden brings another consideration for autoworkers: If the Green New Dealers get their way, not as many UAW employees will be needed. It’s long been known that EVs require fewer parts and thus fewer assembly workers and parts manufacturers. And when we consider the environmental impact of EVs — whether to the lands in Africa that are being despoiled by mining, or to the health of the workers doing that mining, or to American roadways that undergo additional wear and tear due to the added weight of non-gas-tax-paying EVs compared to internal-combustion vehicles — the EV revolution doesn’t seem nearly as promising as it’s been cracked up to be.
UPDATE: Upon the expiration of its labor contracts just before midnight Thursday, the UAW engaged in a limited strike on each of the Big Three automakers: Ford, General Motors, and Chrysler parent company Stellantis. As the Detroit Free Press reports: “UAW members at three assembly plants in Michigan, Ohio and Missouri went on strike after their labor contracts expired at 11:59 p.m. The UAW confirmed that about 13,000 members across the three plants are walking the picket lines.”