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.
Was coming here to complain about this compared to the rail strike - found out that Biden actually got the rail strikers what they wanted in this thread.
Now I’ve got to complain something else. Hmmm, how about how Biden isn’t proud of his union support. Make noise! Show that unions actually work! Stop acting like unions winning is something is something that you should be ashamed of and hide. Good, still got to complain about something.
I feel like I voted for Bernie instead of Biden. Wtf is going on. This is amazing.
Perhaps the man’s turned a new leaf in his old age. He ain’t perfect, sure, but I’d be lying if I said he wasn’t far better than I (or most others) had expected.
This is great to see!
Biden may not be a progressive as an individual but his administration’s agenda is easily the most progressive of my lifetime–and I was old enough to vote for Obama twice. It would be even more so if Congress gave him progressive bills to sign, too!
So far the biggest positive story of 2023 is the massive increase in labor action across multiple industries.
I’m about the same age as you. It’s not saying much to be the most progressive administration of our lifetime. We haven’t had any progressive administration. Obama wasn’t bad, but it’d be a stretch to call it progressive. It did boost Healthcare some, and it helped LGBTQ+ rights, but not much else. Pretty much every republican has been regressive though.
The auto strike has a 75% approval rating. That’s way bigger than most things in US politics. Not supporting the auto strike is a losing issue.
President Joe Biden has genuinely been one of the more pro-labor presidents in American history. While I strongly disagree with how he handled the rail strikes, the policy coming from his NLRB and the way he’s been handling the auto strikes I think are a strong indicator of the policy that he stands for. The United States presidency has an extremely poor track record when it comes to working with labor, and I’ll take whatever progress I can get.
Biden was a bad influence on West Coast longshore negotiations. As our negotions started, he had both the ILWU president and the employer’s representative onto the battleship Iowa to pledge to not prepare for a strike. The union did not prepare for a strike, but the shippers diverted a huge amount of cargo away from the West Coast thru the Panama Canal. Granted, a West coast longshore strike stops 40% of US imports. But removing the threat means the employers have zero incentive to budge.
“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.
“Guys, I was being rhetorical, now what are we supposed to do?”
Remember rail strike?
You mean when he in the three months afterwards helped the workers and the union to make sure they got their demands, while also not causing an actual rail shutdown that would cause massive harm to multiple areas?
Wow he ended Precision Scheduled Railroading? Didn’t hear that /s
He got them some sick days, but definitely not the whole of their demands.
Plus the original demand was 15 days of sick leave, and then a tepid 7-day sick leave proposal was sent to die in congress. It’s not a miracle that Biden was able to get 5 days. Breaking the strike with state power and then casting crumbs in our direction was a flex on the working class saying “nah you’ll only get what we allow you to have. You don’t deserve to demand shit.”
I’m not holding out any hope that this is anything more than a PR campaign like kneeling cops and kente scarves.
It’s a complete failure of his administration that he said absolutely nothing about this and just allowed everyone to believe that he was against those workers for months.
I found this out a week or so ago and it baffled me that he just said nothing.
It’s been a general thing that his administration has just done the positive things without hyping them up or crowing about them on the news.
Maybe I’m uninformed, but how are rail strikes, which are common in my country, massive harm that a government of half a continent feels the need to step in?
It was going to be a massive rail strike in a situation where logistics were already strained. The US is run by rail, despite how little we invest into it. It’s an absolutely massive amount of land area, and the only reasonable way to transport things across it is rail. It would have crippled almost every business.
That said, if the workers are that important they should get everything they demand. The Biden administration did get them some of their demands, which is better than I expected, they should get more.
They aren’t as common here and this was a rail strike that could prevent the transportation of any number of important things, enough to impact multiple states and millions of people.
Are you talking about passenger rail strikes or freight? Because in the States, we have no meaningful passenger rail, but our geographical area is SO enormous that freight rail is critical. It makes up like 40% of all freight transport. So shutting the entire thing down would have been more than an inconvenience. It could have cost a lot of other people in other industries their jobs. Also, it could have caused shortages of food, gasoline, chemicals for purifying water, etc.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/looming-rail-strike-would-take-a-major-toll-on-u-s-economy
https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/3644798-how-bad-would-a-rail-strike-have-been/
Yeah wouldn’t trust him on this. He definitely not on the side of workers.
What are you talking about? Yes, they ended the strike without getting paid go leave, but the WH continued to work on it after and they did get what they were asking for. Just media didn’t bother reporting on that little detail as it wasn’t “newsworthy”.
Edit: https://www.ibew.org/media-center/Articles/23Daily/2306/230620_IBEWandPaid
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 be disruptive.
The point of strikes is to get employers to meet the demands of the workers
Sure the union got what they wanted, but
But nothing.
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!
Dude, they were disruptive enough that the fucking president got personally involved on their side. What more do you want?
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.
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.
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.
No, which is the problem.
Beat me to it! Fuck these fucking fucks.
They worked to get what the Union asked for and the Union thanked them for it.
Wasn’t Trump supposed to visit striking workers next week? He’s about to be upstaged.
No trump is doing a rally event with hand picked union members that are anti union. He is not going there to support the union.
I thought it would have been funny if Biden planned to go at the exact time and place and preempted trumps visit because the president is first.
Labor costs, at roughly 5%, remain a small percentage of annual costs for the Detroit automakers
Source - CNBC and Kristin Dziczek, vice president of industry, labor and economics at The Center for Automotive Research
As a Democrat who voted for Biden because he didn’t want to see fascism, but was very sore about doing so because Biden is a milquetoast moderate at best…
This is sick. Props.
He sold out the rail unions not even a year ago
He ended up getting them what they wanted just a couple months later. Check out the top comment threads here
He got them some sick days. A far cry from having their demands met. Particularly in the aspects concerning safety
No he didn’t, one of their largest complaints was safety. Democrats downplayed their strike as ‘sick days’ so it sounded like their demands were trivial.
He’s been a lot more progressive in his policies than I think people thought he’d be. He’s not flashy about it though, so people tend to only hear the complaining that comes from much louder people
Just remember, this isn’t Biden having a change of mind necessarily, this is more about Biden answering to pressure. The reason why Biden behaves like this is mostly because the UAW has witheld their endorsment for him, saying that “Biden has to pick a side, either the working class, or the billionaires”, that “he has to earn his endorsment” and that “they expect actions, not just words”.
I might actually vote for him if he does this
Otherwise what, you’re voting for Trump?
Nah not voting for Biden. It doesn’t matter anyway. Blue state and all that
What about the down ballot races? And honestly, your choice is trump or no trump. Not voting for Biden is pretty close to accepting fascism because you didn’t get your perfect candidate.
I ain’t a Joe Biden fanboy, but I would like to say if Bernie got elected president and he did this then the streets would go wild. This is insanely (good) that a president is showing so much solidarity and support to striking workers. This gets eyes and ears about the UAW strike, people see this support, they become emboldened, and now start thinking, “Hey, maybe we should strike or unionize…”
This is such a huge win for America and leftism in general. Let’s Go Dark Brandon
Yeah. He sure showed solidarity when he broke up the train strike…
Bernie would have stood with the rail workers as well. This is makes his current stand seem less sincere and more like a photo op.
Take a look at some of the top voted comments, Biden ended up getting the rail works what they were asking for 2 weeks later
But they could have gotten a hell of a lot more if they did strike
Perfect is the enemy of good
Choose the lesser of two evils every time and you’ll end up with the most evil imaginable.
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He broke the rail strike, then made a big song and dance about sick days as if that was the only thing rail workers needed to strike over.
Fucked over workers and pissed all over their broad set of grievances and demands.
I don’t think he should be welcomed.
The rail strike affected the supply chain, it wasn’t just a straight up workers vs. the company kind of thing. A lot of collateral damage to consider downstream. And he hardly fucked them over. He forced a deal that was likely how it would’ve worked out anyway.
Biden has done more for unions than any President in history. That just doesn’t fit with the doomer narrative though.
The damage is the fucking point.
Yes, that’s the doomer philosophy. But you understand there are people that aren’t doomers that like having groceries on the shelves at the store?
What should have happened here is that Biden should have pressured the companies to resolve the strike as quickly as possible.
Workers generally don’t like striking. Not getting paid sucks. It’s really the only lever of power they have in a lot of cases though.
Banning their ability to strike means that the only options they have left are to suck up whatever awful conditions they have or quit. Quitting en mass would do the same damage you’re talking about, but far more permanently.
He did. The companies were forced to accept Biden’s deal just as much as the union was forced to accept the deal. It’s just being characterized as Biden forcing the union to accept in the narratives you’re consuming.
