The UAW Strike Gives President Biden a Huge Opening

President Biden has announced that he will join striking United Auto Workers members on the picket line on Tuesday in Detroit. News of the move—which would be an unprecedented show of support for organized labor by a sitting president—came hours after UAW president Shawn Fain formally invited Biden, and days after Donald Trump announced he would be appearing in Michigan, not to walk the picket line but to evangelize to autoworkers about his own presidency.

If this strike feels unusually political, it is. Seemingly everyone in the national political world has felt called upon to weigh in on the labor action, lending it in an air of importance beyond just its numbers. At the end of last week, a total of 12,700 autoworkers were striking, roughly the same number of screenwriters in the striking Writers Guild of America, though the numbers increased over the weekend as new manufacturing plants shut down and joined the strikers’ ranks.

Already, the political press was referring to Biden’s relationship to the strike as “historic” after the president called for “record contracts” for the UAW, pointing to the automakers’ record profits. And now Biden has gone a step further, becoming the first president in memory to commit to joining striking workers on the line. In a phone call, Nelson Lichtenstein, director of the Center for the Study of Work, Labor, and Democracy at the University of California, Santa Barbara, agreed that the move was “historic, certainly,” he said. “The old centrist Democratic thing would be to encourage both sides back to the negotiating table and come to an agreement quickly.”

The strike is a huge moment for organized labor in the United States, which is enjoying the greatest public support it’s seen in decades, but makes up a still-dwindling percentage of the labor force. It’s also a huge moment for the Democratic Party. Joe Biden, the self-proclaimed most pro-union president in history, heads to Michigan with a chance to atone for 30 years of intermittent policy sins by Democratic presidents against organized labor and the auto industry—not to mention the state of Michigan.

Nothing quite exemplifies the shift in the Democratic approach to union politics better than the involvement of Gene Sperling.

Sperling is currently a senior adviser to Biden, and before Biden committed to joining the picket line, Sperling was one of two White House officials tapped to travel to Detroit as an emissary of support for the UAW. Under President Clinton, Sperling served a very different role: He was sent to China to hammer out the deal that led to China’s inclusion in the World Trade Organization, a move that contributed directly to the destruction of millions of American manufacturing jobs, many in the industrial Midwest. “Sperling was a classic centrist, an opponent of industrial policy in the White House in the ’90s,” said Lichtenstein. (Industrial policy refers to government efforts to shape the economy through the development of certain industries.) Now, Sperling is an advocate both for striking workers and for Biden’s own policies supporting them.

If American manufacturing suffered broadly under Clinton’s policies, autoworkers in particular suffered under President Obama. The president’s implementation of a bailout process for GM and Chrysler that began in the final weeks of the Bush administration visited severe pain on the union autoworkers at those firms, including harsh real-dollar wage cuts and the implementation of wage tiers that not only locked in lower lifetime earnings for new employees, but sowed resentment within the union, as younger workers were stuck with wages commensurate with fast-food jobs and members saw their dues going to a leadership class that was willing to accept broad concessions and cuts to worker compensation.

The UAW’s negotiations had already won substantial wage increases prior to the strike’s start on Sept. 15; the ongoing work stoppage exists to secure the end of the tiered system and the reinstatement of benefits, like cost-of-living adjustments, that disappeared as part of the Obama administration’s program. While the auto companies rebounded to record profits after 2009, and their executives scored grotesque increases in compensation, union workers have been the last to be made whole—something Biden has criticized the auto companies over specifically and publicly. (Tiers have also been a hugely effective way to suppress unionization, depress morale, and hurt recruitment, an issue that also arose in the 2021 John Deere strike.)

Squint, and you can see a Hillary Clinton angle to Biden showing up at the picket line as well. In what has become mythical, infamous campaign lore, Clinton never showed up to press the flesh in Michigan, the all-important swing state, in the 2016 race’s final days; she ended up losing to Donald Trump there by 10,000 votes, which secured his Electoral College victory. There’s no doubt that Trump, petty as he is, might be thinking of this fondly and particularly as he threatens to appear in Michigan and appeal to striking workers himself. Democrats have been eager to show that they’ve learned from Hillary’s disastrous 2016 performance, and showing up has been a big part of that reckoning, which no doubt puts even more pressure on Biden to appear.

The other Republican presidential hopefuls for 2024 do not feel the same as Trump. While he wants to court union workers, the rest of the party is bashing the strikers vociferously. Tim Scott wants them fired; Nikki Haley, self-proclaimed union buster, says one of her proudest résumé points is courting auto companies (even those with unionized plants) to set up nonunion shops in South Carolina.

All of this means that there is a lot riding on this for Democrats, and Biden in particular has a lot to gain, especially on a union record that lacks a signature accomplishment. In 2021, the president made waves for his endorsement of the union drive at Amazon in Bessemer, Alabama, which failed by more than a little. But he was foiled by West Virginia’s Sen. Joe Manchin in a signature pro-union rider in the Inflation Reduction Act, when the senator used his swing-vote influence to strip out a $4,500 consumer rebate for electric vehicles produced in unionized factories. Meanwhile, the Biden team took plenty of heat for a perceived botching of the incipient rail workers’ strike. The workers did win the sick days they were pushing for eventually, though the White House was unable to communicate that as a victory. (Union officials later credited Bidenworld for helping pressure the companies into that result, after criticizing him for voting to preempt a strike.)

There’s basically no path back to the White House that doesn’t run through Michigan. Democrats in the state have had a ton of momentum of late, winning narrow majorities and passing impressive and meaningful legislation.

How they have accomplished that is notable: One of the first things Democrats did with their new majority was pledge to get rid of anti-union, right-to-work legislation, which was formally repealed in March. State Dems have shown national Dems the way to succeed in the swing state: Don’t be cautious about supporting organized labor.

Already, the UAW’s actions have succeeded in several ways. Ford has agreed to end tiers and add cost-of-living raises; major wage increases look like a certainty (GM and Stellantis are the holdouts). The victory of that new contract, when it’s finally signed, will be powerful proof of the value of paying union dues, and make it much, much more difficult for nonunion plants at Toyota and Tesla to repel unionization efforts to come. These represent huge victories for Biden’s vision of industrial policy, what we’re now being urged to call Bidenomics.

“The implications for the election are huge,” Lichtenstein told me. “Biden can say, ‘I backed the UAW, which won higher wages for working people in the industrial Midwest.’ ” There’s arguably no clearer way for Biden to prove that his Democratic Party is different, and ensure that he gets some credit, than showing up. Getting from D.C. (or Delaware) to Detroit is a short trip, but it shows just how far the Biden Democratic Party has come.