UAW Strike Day Four: Which Side Are You On, Man?

Hopefully the right one!

The United Auto Workers strike is on its fourth day, and it is picking up a whole lot of steam and a whole lot of pushback from CEOs and capitalists who clearly haven’t been paying too much attention to the room in the last decade or so. They still think they’re living in the heady, anti-union, anti-worker afterglow of the Reagan administration.

The Worst Take

There are like 12 articles out from yesterday and today about how “Elon Musk Is Winning The Strike!” — more or less suggesting that because production is on hold at the Big Three, that his electric vehicles will emerge triumphant and destroy Biden’s dreams of an electric vehicle market dominated by unionized labor.

But here’s where they’re wrong. The people who worship Elon Musk are, ironically, deeply, desperately opposed to electric vehicles. Sure, they might spend a day on Midjourney making memes of Musk’s face transposed on male models …

But they’re not going to go out and buy any Teslas because they are devoted to fossil fuels and literally consider anything that might be not terrible for the environment to be an existential threat.

It’s the people who hate Elon Musk and who are probably also pretty fond of unionized labor that are going to buy electric cars. So if things go well for the UAW, things will go well for The Big Three’s future in terms of selling electric cars.

On top of that, the strike may very well convince Tesla workers that they should join the UAW themselves.

This Is Just A Great Video And You Should Watch It

This video was posted to the UAW Twitter this morning, and as dorky as it is to say, it actually made me tear up a little. But more importantly than that, it features UAW president Shawn Fain explaining exactly why everything the Big Three CEOs are saying about how devastating this would be for their companies and the American economy at large is absolute bullshit.

---

---

What Are Democrats Doing?

On Friday night, Bernie Sanders joined UAW workers at a major rally, calling out corporate greed and supporting their call for a 32-hour workweek, which the senator has been pushing for on his own end.

“The fight that you are waging here is not only about decent wages, decent benefits and decent working conditions in the automobile industry,” Sanders said. “No. The fight you are waging is a fight against the outrageous level of corporate greed and arrogance that we are seeing on the part of CEOs who think they have a right to have it all and could [not] care less about the needs of their workers. […] The fight you are waging is to rebuild the struggling middle class of our country that was once the envy of the world.”

“We refuse to live in an oligarchy,” he added. “We refuse to accept a society in which so few have so much and so many have so little.”

Well, some of us do, anyway! Admittedly there are a lot of people in the US who are still pretty jazzed about that set up, including many of those who have so little.

Sanders’ speech is pretty great, but so are the speeches from the UAW workers themselves, which is why I included the video of the whole damn rally. Check them out!

On Sunday, John Fetterman went out to Michigan himself to join the picket line.

“It’s time to decide what side you’re on. Are you on the side of the Big Three CEOs who made a combined $74 million last year, and are now claiming they cannot afford to pay their workers?” Fetterman said. “Or are you on the side of the UAW workers who bust their ass every day, the people who build the American cars and trucks we Pennsylvanians drive?”

And Democratic Senator Gary Peters from Michigan was happy to welcome him, tweeting “Great to have you join us on the picket line standing in solidarity with the @UAW workers fighting for their fair share and the future of the middle class.”

“These are folks who have sacrificed over the years to make sure that these companies were successful and now that they’re very profitable, it’s time to share those profits to make sure that we can strengthen the American middle class,” Peters said in another video posted to Twitter.

In an interview with MSNBC on Sunday, Nancy Pelosi pointed out that the CEOs of these companies are making, in a month, what their workers maybe make in a lifetime.

“When our workers succeed, our state succeeds. We are all on Team Michigan. I’m proud to stand with the hardworking men and women of the UAW and remain hopeful that this strike can be resolved quickly,” Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer said on Twitter.

As previously mentioned, President Biden has said that he is behind the union and is sending aides down to Michigan to assist in the negotiations.

“Over the past decade auto companies have seen record profits, including over the last few years because of the extraordinary skill and sacrifice of the UAW workers,” Biden said in a statement on Friday. “Those record profits have not been shared fairly, in my view, with those workers.”

---

---

And What Is It That Republicans Are Doing?

Republicans are in a fairly weird position with this, given their recent attempts to feign care for the working class. They can’t explicitly come out against the striking workers, but they don’t want to attack corporate greed, either — because where would any of them be without it?

So it seems they’ve largely settled on claiming that the strikes are actually about electric vehicles and how electric vehicles are bad. Does this make any sense? No, it does not!

“Rooting for the auto workers across our country demanding higher wages and an end to political leadership’s green war on their industry,” tweeted JD Vance, despite the fact that “stop making electric vehicles” is definitely not on the list of the demands the union is making.

“Auto workers deserve a raise,” tweeted Josh Hawley, “and they deserve to have their jobs protected from Joe Biden’s stupid climate mandates that are destroying the US auto industry and making China rich.” Again, not a thing they are asking for!

Over on Breitbart, they are trying to push the line that UAW workers are actually protesting “Bidenomics,” which they are also not doing.

Hey! Let’s All Be Clear On What The Workers Are Actually Getting Paid Right Now!

I’m guilty here as well. Media outlets have been largely reporting that workers at these companies are making $33 an hour and up. That’s true, but only for workers at the top tier, workers who have been there since before 2007. Those who were hired after that point are on a lower tier where they are making about half of that, at $17 an hour.

This is because, in order to help save the auto industry, workers agreed to major cuts to their pay and benefits. Now that the industry is posting record profits and CEOs are raking it in … they feel it is only right that their pay and benefits are restored. While many on the sidelines are balking at 36 percent wage hike for workers over four years (despite the fact that this is what the CEOs have gotten), this is what they would have been making had they not made those sacrifices. Probably less than that, really.

Now Here’s The Truly Radical Thing The UAW Is Asking For …

One of the main causes of our current economic inequality situation has been the legalization of stock buybacks in 1982. Corporations are legally allowed to spend millions and billions of their own money on buying their own stocks back, which benefits investors, but hurts workers. And not just because they’re not using that money to pay their workers. Workers are often laid off so that corporations can buy back more stock with which to reward their investors. Since executive pay often comes in the form of stocks, this means they are enriching themselves as well.

So, you know, when you hear CEOs talking about “Oh! I’m not earning tens of millions of dollars because of my salary, but because I’m paid in stocks, so I only do well if the company does well!” … well, that’s actually why they do well.

One of the things the UAW is demanding is $2 in profit sharing for every million dollars that goes to stock buybacks. While that doesn’t sound like it would be a lot, it would come out to about $28,000 per worker, this year alone. Because the companies have spent $14 billion on these buybacks so far.

By tying some worker pay to these buybacks, they are not only helping workers but also discouraging the buybacks, which are extraordinarily destructive to our economy. At least, you know, for people who aren’t stock holders.