Former President Donald Trump is trying to seize on the tense political moment as the United Auto Workers prepare for a historic strike.
He is aiming to court union voters, including those who have soured on the Biden administration’s ambitious push for electric vehicles.
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Trump has said the Biden administration's electric vehicle goals, including its proposed fuel economy standards and tailpipe emissions rule, will “destroy” the U.S. auto industry in an effort to appease environmental extremists.
In a new campaign statement Thursday, Trump urged the UAW to push for a repeal of Biden's pro-electric-vehicle rules in their contract negotiations with automakers, adding that in his view, “there’s no such thing as a ‘fair transition’ to all electric cars.”
“For the American Autoworker, that’s a transition to Hell,” Trump said. “Nothing is more important than terminating this job-crushing mandate."
Strike threats
The effects of a strike are expected to cause significant economic pain, even in the short term. The Anderson Group estimated in a new report that even a 10-day strike at the Big Three plants would cause an estimated $5.6 billion in U.S. economic losses, including $9 million in lost wages for union workers and $1 billion in automaker profits.
It would also be politically damaging to President Joe Biden. A strike would inflict major pain on both union workers and automakers and drive up inflation due to shortages, pushing prices higher at a key time for the administration.
And it would inflict pain on automakers and union workers, threatening to alienate labor groups who have long been key to his support, especially in Michigan.
But the electric vehicle push has complicated things, adding a new dynamic to Biden's longtime relationship with UAW.
That's because electric vehicle vehicle plants require fewer workers than internal combustion engine manufacturing facilities and are largely non-unionized.
Shawn Fain, the UAW's new president, has also gained a reputation for his aggressive negotiating tactics, adding uncertainty to UAW’s relationship with Biden.
“We are preparing to strike these companies in a way they have never seen before,” Fain said Wednesday night.
Fain blasted the Biden administration’s plan to lend $9.2 billion to two U.S. battery projects in Kentucky and Tennessee, both right-to-work states, earlier this summer. He described that loan as a massive “giveaway” with "no consideration for wages, working conditions, union rights or retirement security" that would help create low-paying jobs.
Notably, neither the UAW nor the Teamsters, another major union, have endorsed Biden in the 2024 presidential election.
And as Fain has refused to concede even the smallest of demands in the union's monthslong negotiations with automakers in Detroit, some say the fight playing out there is bigger than the wage negotiations, a sort of proxy fight foretelling larger tensions mounting in the electric vehicle space, and one that clears room for Republicans to vie for their support.
Where things stand
Republican presidential candidates see the growing tension between Biden and the unions as an area ripe for exploitation ahead of 2024.
This is "a very interesting wedge issue for Republicans to try and exploit,” Gary Clyde Hufbauer, a nonresident senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, told the Washington Examiner.
For Republicans, there’s an "opportunity to play it very cleverly,” Hufbauer said. “They can, in a general way, and without promising to compel unionization, can talk about how much more sympathetic they are to working people, and so on.”
“That’s very much a card that Trump has played in the past, and there's no reason why he can't play it this time around," Hufbauer, who noted other Republican candidates could easily follow suit, said.
Trump, in particular, could seek to tap into his populist bona fides as he seeks to win over union voters, bringing them under his umbrella of pushing “America-first” manufacturing and invoking many of the same frustrations espoused by Fain himself, including prioritizing U.S. jobs.
In 2016, Trump became the first Republican to win the state of Michigan since 1988. He only narrowly lost to Biden in 2020 by a margin of just 2.78%. Exit polls found that Biden had an edge with voters from union households, carrying them 56%-42%.
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But those long-held political alliances are at risk of changing quickly, depending on how things play out in Detroit.
“The E.V. transition is at serious risk of becoming a race to the bottom,” Fain said in a memo to union members in May. “We want to see national leadership have our back on this before we make any commitments.”