The Biden administration recently found itself between a rock and a hard place. This time, though, it’s not because of the Biden family’s illicit business dealings or the president’s rapidly deteriorating mental capacities. Rather, the problem is the competing goals of the president’s allies: the globalist climate mob and the reliably left-leaning workers unions.
Early on Friday morning, United Auto Workers Union (UAW) members walked out of unionized plants in Ohio, Michigan, and Missouri. The strike, which may turn out to be one of the most significant in decades, has been brewing for a while. It’s aimed at the three largest auto manufacturers in the United States: Ford, General Motors, and Stellantis. By Monday morning, 12,700 UAW workers were still on strike, according to Reuters. (READ MORE: The Fight for the Bouquinistes: Killing a Medieval Profession)
Their demands are relatively simple: The union wants more pay and fewer hours on the clock. It also wants employers to do away with tiered wage systems, which pay workers more if they’ve worked for the company longer, even if a new employee is doing just as much or more than his older counterpart. But the issue at the heart of the strike has less to do with the dollars being handed out to workers as compensation and more to do with job security.
The Climate Agenda: EVs v. Unions
According to Ronald Brownstein in the Atlantic, union workers are afraid that the shift to electric vehicles (EVs) being pushed — and largely funded — by the U.S. government could put them out of work as auto manufacturers seek to build new factories in Southern states, where workers aren’t unionized. “In both public and private, union officials have made clear their belief that the auto industry is using the technological transition to mask a second, economic, transition,” Brownstein writes.
Their concerns are justified — auto manufacturers like Ford, General Motors, and Stellantis are indeed building EV plants in red areas in the South — but the problem isn’t the manufacturers themselves; it’s global climate extremists on the international stage dictating U.S. government policies. (RELATED: Union Opposition to Electric Vehicle Kickbacks Could Upend 2024)
In 2016, 196 countries, including the United States under President Barack Obama, signed the Paris Agreement — a statement of the global climate agenda, whose goal is to “limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.” Although the U.S. withdrew under President Donald Trump, Joe Biden rejoined the agreement on his very first day in office.
Under Biden, the United States went to work passing legislation to achieve these climate goals, with the president signing a trifecta of laws designed to kickstart investment into EVs: the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, which authorized up to $108 billion in funding for federal public transportation programs; the CHIPS and Science Act, which provided funding for semiconductor research and development; and the Inflation Reduction Act, which dispensed even more funds for green energy.
According to Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm, the tax subsidies, federal grants, and loans contained in Biden’s trifecta have “unleashed a wave of investment” in green energy and zero-emission “solutions.” In late April, the White House reiterated its goal to reduce emissions by 50–52 percent by 2030 and noted that transforming U.S. transportation is important to reaching that goal:
The transportation sector is a large and fast-growing source of greenhouse gases globally…. Thanks to technology innovations, the historic investments in the Inflation Reduction Act, and additional investments made by automakers and throughout the battery supply chain, the U.S. transportation sector is rapidly shifting towards zero emission vehicles.
The Biden administration sees the Inflation Reduction Act as a huge success, but the unions have just one problem: To pass the act, Democrats in the Senate had to bargain with Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.V.), whose series of demands included the seemingly innocuous push to not grant tax credits to consumers for EVs produced largely by union labor.
Unions Distrust Biden’s ‘Pro-Union’ Stance
At the beginning of the summer, unions began to grow skeptical. Granholm assured labor leaders in Silicon Valley that the administration was “agnostic” as to where exactly auto companies built their new EV plants, but, just a few weeks later, the Loans Programs Office announced that it was granting up to $9.2 billion in loans to Ford for the manufacturing of three EV plants to be located in Tennessee and Kentucky — red communities without unions.
Union members were hardly pleased with the so-called agnosticism, and the Biden administration tried to appease them by announcing a plan to provide $12 billion in grants to manufacturers who wanted to transform existing plants into EV plants. (READ MORE: It’s Time We Update Labor Union Laws)
Despite this concession — and Biden’s assurances that he is the most “pro-union President leading the most pro-union administration in American history” — the UAW chose to withhold its traditional endorsement of Biden’s 2024 presidential campaign.
UAW President Shawn Fain told CNBC after Biden’s Labor Day speech in Pennsylvania: “It’s time for politicians in this country to pick a side. Either you stand for a billionaire class where everybody else gets left behind, or you stand for the working class.”
The UAW’s disagreements with Biden aren’t exactly trivial, and Trump has already indicated that he doesn’t care for EVs either.
“Joe Biden’s Electric Vehicle mandate will murder the U.S. auto industry and kill countless union autoworker jobs forever, especially in Michigan and the Midwest,” the Trump campaign said in a statement. “The only acceptable policy for UAW members should be the complete and total repeal of Biden’s catastrophic EV mandate.”
Given Trump’s pro-worker policies, it’s possible that traditionally left-leaning unionists would turn red in 2024.