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.
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?
See if that’s true that’s sad because that is the best possible outcome and I haven’t heard a damn thing about it.
Here’s about rail: https://www.ibew.org/media-center/Articles/23Daily/2306/230620_IBEWandPaid
Biden seems to do a lot of things that don’t get much attention or unfairly get bad attention. For example he drastically reduced number of drone strikes (trump actually increased them after Obama, but blocked reporting).
When he lifted sanctions on NS2 he got a lot of bad flak, some even from democrats. Only months later we learned that Russia was planning attack on Ukraine and he was doing it to repair our relationship with Germany. He managed to persuade them to drop it themselves which is how we supposed to deal with allies.
“Without making a big show of it, Joe Biden and members of his administration in the Transportation and Labor departments have been working continuously to get guaranteed paid sick days for all railroad workers."
I’m glad yo hear that not everything has to be a show, but this would be a great message to get out to the progressive democrats
I’m a bit torn on it. Yes it would be good to publicize, but I really like that he prioritized getting shit done over publicizing it. That’s what good leaders should do.
Arguably, this is something that progressive Democrats should be aware of if they truly care about the issue, and aren’t just looking for talking points.
Why not do both? The executive branch can walk and chew gum.
I guess it’s naive idealism on my part.
Here’s an article on it: https://www.axios.com/2023/02/09/white-house-biden-administration-railroad-companies-paid-sick-leave
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.
He learned nothing from Trump when that’s the one lesson Trump should have taught him: Brag.
I mean… Trump didn’t get re-elected. So you could argue that it didn’t help.
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/
Some people like strikebreaking for its own sake and will make up any excuse to do it.
Watch the news for whining about high car prices from people who were fine with high car prices a few weeks ago.
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 get employers to meet the demands of the workers
But nothing.
There are bunch of people here who think revolution is an inherently beneficial goal in and of itself, which is crazy. Here I am at work unionizing, explaining to my colleagues that the goal is NOT to strike. That strike is a last resort only if the corporation refuses to give us our critical demands (in our case, safe nurse-to-patient ratios). That we only strike when we reach the point where we all know we’d quit these jobs anyway because we feel like we can’t keep our patients safe.
No, the GOAL of a union is COLLECTIVE BARGAINING POWER, kids. The right to strike is a last, desperate resort
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It really is though
A whole lot of people don’t realize that a revolution would be terrible for the working class. If people are struggling to make ends meet, a massive disruption is going to result in people going hungry and cold. Someone who needs medication to survive will die. It’s an incredibly privileged position to think you’ll be fine in a revolution.
It seems these same people stopped reading about the French revolution after the part with beheading the rich. What followed was anarchy and betrayal. You could be in full support of the revolution one day and under the guillotine the next. And the person who ordered your death would be the next one under it. Plus, in the end, it culminated in Napoleon, which wasn’t exactly the goal.
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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!
Yes, that’s almost precisely it. The administration wants to avoid problems with critical infrastructure, but supports strikes that aren’t threatening critical infrastructure.
It’s why you see the administration negotiate to prevent a strike, block the strike, and then help negotiate for what the strike was aiming to get, and then go on to support workers who are on strike.
That’s not hypocrisy, that’s nuance.
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.
Between “Biden doesn’t do anything” and “Biden shouldn’t be involved in anything” there is very little rhyme or reason to what y’all actually think he should be doing. So the only thing that’s left is to look at the overall outcome, and so far it was in the realm of “things are going to the right direction, although not quickly and not far enough”, which is frankly way better than anyone could hope for in this environment
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.
Not doubting you, but got any links? Like you said, there wasn’t any real coverage to speak of, so I was completely unaware of this.
https://www.ibew.org/media-center/Articles/23Daily/2306/230620_IBEWandPaid
You think he’s just going to steal their snacks?
Like Bill Clinton at McDonald’s.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eYt0khR_ej0
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.
As if this thread will let me forget it for 30 seconds.
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