The Automotive Plant Where Trump Is Speaking Sure Has Some Bad Reviews

In lieu of Wednesday’s Republican debate, and in an attempted answer to President Joe Biden’s Tuesday appearance at the picket line in support of striking United Auto Workers members, Donald Trump is heading to Michigan himself to speak directly to blue-collar Michiganders in the auto industry.

The event will not, despite original reports to the contrary, have Trump speaking to striking union members. Instead, he will speak to nonunion workers at a nonunion parts manufacturer called Drake Enterprises, at the invitation of the company’s management.

“It was complete luck,” said Drake president Nathan Stemple in a Fox News segment misleadingly titled “Biden, Trump to rally auto workers in Michigan as UAW strike expands,” explaining that “some of our colleagues that we do business with reached out to us said that the president was looking for a location to host this event and we were more than willing to do so.”

That’s a far cry from Biden’s personal invitation from UAW president Shawn Fain; Trump will not be speaking to any UAW workers from Drake at all, because, of course, there are none.

He might, however, be speaking to some unhappy workers, at least according to a bunch of reviews of Drake on Indeed, a recruiting site that allow employees and ex-employees to review their workplaces.

“Crabs in a bucket mentality,” wrote someone who identified themselves as a former production worker, in May, in a three-star review (out of five). “Nothing about this job is good longevity wise and McDonald’s pays more.”

“Worse [sic] place to work,” wrote a respondent identifying as a current technician in March, in a two-star sendup. Across 35 total reviews, Drake got its lowest marks for “management”: 2.8 stars out of five.

It’s not much better on Glassdoor, another popular site for workplace reviews. There, the company sports three out of five possible stars, across 12 evaluations, with only 50 percent of employees saying they’d recommend the plant to a friend.

“Beware,” wrote one person identifying as a current employee in a one-star January 2023 review. “Management is clueless. Shop is completely dirty. The truly good people leave after a short time as there is no culture.”

“DON’T WORK HERE,” warned one self-identifying former employee in December 2022. “Dead end,” wrote another.

(One very positive review for Drake on Glassdoor, a five-star endorsement from a self-identified machine operator in January 2023, states: “Drake is one of the best places I have ever worked. It’s a family owned business and the owners actually care about us.” That’s the only positive review dating back two years.)

It’s not that the Indeed and Glassdoor reviews on, say, Stellantis, one of the auto manufacturers with unionized workers that are currently on strike, fare so much better. (We’re talking about jobs after all.) But “fair pay for job” is one of the top comments in the Indeed reviews of Stellantis, across 1,223 survey responses. And that kind of says it all, doesn’t it? The unionized work places can at least boast that the jobs pay mostly fairly—in large part because of the efforts of organized labor.

When asked about the autoworkers strike on Fox, Drake president Stemple lamented the action and offered no support for striking workers. “We’re still producing parts to create inventories and things like that and to keep our people working,” he said.

Trump’s appearance, then, looks a lot less like a rally with labor than it does a captive audience meeting. It certainly won’t succeed in driving a wedge between the Democratic Party and organized labor. Workers at Drake seem to have a very dim opinion of their management, who invited Trump to evangelize, not on behalf of organized labor but on behalf of himself (and presumably, against electric vehicles).

If anything, Trump’s appearance in Michigan puts the UAW strike in even starker relief. As UAW president Fain told CNN, “I find a pathetic irony that Trump is going to hold a rally at a non-union business. … He serves a billionaire class and that’s what’s wrong with this country.”