Two years after the UAW strike

Two years ago, tomorrow (September 26, 2023), then-President Joe Biden became the first president to participate in a striking worker picket line. The occasion was the United Auto Workers (UAW) strike against General Motors. Biden addressed the UAW members outside the Willow Run parts center near Detroit, Michigan.

What You Need to Know About the UAW Strike, a report from CRC’s research director, Michael Watson, was posted earlier in the month.

Here’s a sample:

What Has This Got to Do with Electric Cars?

Thanks to the general metropolitan-progressive war on cars, government subsidies for electric vehicles, the Biden administration’s anti-energy agenda, and regulations from states like California that target combustion engines for elimination, the Detroit Three have increasingly focused on electric vehicles. This changeover has led the companies to commit to a combined $120 billion infrastructure investment related to electric cars—cars on which at present, they are losing scads of money.

The automakers argue that conceding to the union’s demands amid this electric vehicle changeover expense could send them under. Job losses that the union hopes to avoid are also likely from the shift from combustion to charging. The right-of-center America First Policy Institute estimated that adopting the Biden administration’s directives to increase the proportion of electric vehicles on the roads from 6 percent to 67 percent would eliminate 117,000 jobs in the industry.

Watson’s full report is linked here.

InfluenceWatch has a profile of the UAW that begins with this overview:

The United Automobile, Aerospace and Agricultural Implement Workers of America International Union—also known as the United Automobile Workers (UAW)–is a labor union mainly comprised of American automobile manufacturing employees but that also includes unionized casino and higher education workers.

The UAW was at the forefront of the American labor movement and used militant strikes and sit-downs to force American car manufacturers to enter into their first labor agreements during the 1930s and 1940s. Over the years, the UAW has lobbied for excessive labor handouts—at one point including a “jobs bank” that paid laid off autoworkers 95 percent of their salary. The UAW also fought for an $80 billion government-funded auto industry bailout that critics claimed was merely a thinly veiled bailout for the UAW.

Since 2010, the UAW has spent over $87 million on politics and lobbying.⁴ The union uses this money to push a left-of-center agenda that includes traditional labor union prerogatives, such as replacing secret-ballot unionization elections with public “card check” and other liberal items including environmentalist manufacturing mandates, tax increases, legal status for millions of illegal immigrants, and laws to ease prison sentencing.

In 2017, a U.S. Justice Department corruption investigation revealed the corporate executives at Fiat Chrysler had illegally paid millions of dollars in kickbacks to UAW executives in exchange for union concessions.

Other CRC reports on the UAW have included the following:

UAW Fails at Volkswagen, Again

UAW Caught Using Non-Union Labor on Perk for Ex-Boss

UAW Sets its Sights on Tesla

Republicans and Big Labor: The Two Minds of Tricky Dick