This isn’t just a chance for the Democrats to court organized labor.
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
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.”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.
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