President Joe Biden will travel to Michigan on Tuesday and walk the picket line with members of the United Auto Workers union, he announced Friday, a trip that comes after the president faced political pressure to ramp up his public support for the union members.
“Tuesday, I’ll go to Michigan to join the picket line and stand in solidarity with the men and women of UAW as they fight for a fair share of the value they helped create. It’s time for a win-win agreement that keeps American auto manufacturing thriving with well-paid UAW jobs,” Biden said in a post to X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.
Biden’s trip, and the historic presidential appearance on a picket line, underscores the political opportunity as the strike against the nation’s three largest automakers – General Motors, Ford, and Stellantis – enters its second week. It will come one day before former President Donald Trump, currently the front-runner in the GOP presidential race, is scheduled to deliver a primetime speech to an audience of current and former union members, including from UAW, in Detroit. Earlier in the week, Trump’s team confirmed he would be skipping the second Republican primary debate for the Michigan speech.
I remember when biden told the striking rail workers they could get fucked and go to prison. What was that, last year?
I remember a state of the union address where he said, “It’s time for Americans to get back to work and fill our great downtowns again,” like people didn’t bust their asses working from home during the pandemic. Small moment but it always really stuck in my mind for showing how he thinks of the commercial property owning class before he thinks about workers.
I busted my ass working not from home during the pandemic.
Not everyone had the flexibility to work from home. Which makes his condescension that much worse.
Uh… He then helped negotiate with their employers and gave them their demands.
Source? Cause no, their demands were not all met.
Source is one of the unions themselves:
https://www.ibew.org/media-center/Articles/23Daily/2306/230620_IBEWandPaid
"Since then, several other railroad-related unions have also seen success in negotiating for similar sick-day benefits. These 12 unions represent more than 105,000 railroad workers.
“Biden deserves a lot of the credit for achieving this goal for us,” Russo said. “He and his team continued to work behind the scenes to get all of rail labor a fair agreement for paid sick leave.”
This is a union that voted for the original contract without sick days. They didn’t want to strike in the first place.
And there were more demands that what they ended up getting.
…this September, Biden reversed course, helping negotiate a deal between railroad bosses and unions that would only grant workers a single paid sick day per year, despite the unions pushing for as many as 15 sick days — a number they were ultimately willing to reduce to as few as four. Now, to avoid a shutdown of the nation’s rail network, he is asking Congress to force that deal on workers who voted to reject it.
That’s an article from November. The commenter above you was referring to further efforts made after that.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/may/01/railroad-workers-union-win-sick-leave
Not saying it’s perfect, but you should include the full story.
So basically he sequestered all the power within his office, and when (not if) that office changes, they lose all they fought for.
Taking power from workers so you can pander to the masses is not a good thing. It erodes the entire fabric of labor rights. It means they have no power to negotiate on their own behalf, and have to wait on the convenience of politicians.
Careful, you might summon the vote blue crowd. Can’t have people criticizing their god king
Don’t get me wrong, I’ll still be voting for biden since the Republicans can’t find a better person than trump in the entire country.
I mean, I’m voting for Biden because the Democrats don’t seem to want to find better than him.
Unless there’s some very radical changes (and not towards more right-wing extremism) in the Republican party, they won’t field anyone who will make the country more prosperous. Trump is symptomatic, not an outlier.
I’ve spent most of my life supporting 3rd parties, but with someone like trump trying to destroy democracy and our freedom, I have no choice but to vote for the person best equipped to stop him. If there was a more tolerable republican, I’d consider going back to supporting the end of the 2 party system
Supporting third party candidates at the federal level doesn’t mean ending the two-party system… it means you value pride over pragmatism. This has been a problem since long before Trump ever came within a stones throw of the white house.
I value what having more than two parties would bring us… but its delusional to think they can be anything but a spoiler for presidential races, until we do something much further down the chain.
Plurality voting only really works well in two candidate elections. In three candidate elections, you start to frequently run into problems with spoilers.
Because of that, the best performing third parties in countries that use plurality are regional ones. You’ll have local elections where one of the national major parties is functionally a third party.
Trying to oppose the two party system by just voting third party is about as effective as trying to end car dependency by just biking down major stroads. Without changing the underlying environment (e.g. switching to a better voting system or building a protected bike lane), most people won’t follow you.
“Vote for us! You have no choice!” Is a shitty message.
I have always felt that way, but we’re so close to the tipping point of our democracy coming irreversibly unraveled that pragmatism is the only rational course for someone that believes in democracy. We should all be single-issue voters if the issue is democracy vs fascism.
If the party would quit taking advantage of us having no choice, the argument that we have no choice would sound a lot less like gloating.
Same. By vote blue crowd, I mean the people that believe you can’t criticize the Democrats because otherwise you’re a MAGA supporter. I call them that due their always vote blue attitude
I think some of us are traumatized by Reddit and Trump. Because for every person offering legit, good faith, well thought out criticism of Biden or the Democratic party (and there are plenty of things to criticize), I could show you about 1000 shills, bots, The Donald magats, and so on, following the alt right playbook like a fucking bible.
You call 'em what you will. Call me one if it feels right. But I don’t see viable options in the short term at this dark point in the nation’s history.
I think long term it is going to have to be a bottom up involvement in politics to maybe try to put the corporate bootlickers in the Democratic party. It’s going to have to be a long fight to fix the judiciary, undo citizens united, fix the corrupt, partisan SCOTUS, reform campaign finance, implement something other than first past the post voting, fix gerrymandering, break up oligopolies, and a million other things. I’m too tired to list it all.
Of course one could argue that centrists aren’t the right folks to fight fascism. And might enable it. Anyway…
Not joking, I honestly think some Democratic party members were (understandably) traumatized by Trump being elected and being president, and that (unfortunately) causes them to be hyper-aggressive douchebags when it comes to supporting Biden, which is sort of understandable but also thoroughly exhausting and really does harm to this country by making it difficult for people to discuss why things have continued to get worse under Biden and where improvements need to be made
They were hyperaggressive douchebags before Clinton lost.
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Sheesh, those downvotes…some larger instances are feeling more and more like Reddit.
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The idea that people in USA have to strike for pension and healthcare seems so absurd to me as someone from the EU.
If a president really stands in solidarity, they would be pushing for this on a federal level, ensuring this for all.
I get the resistance to social policy, using tax dollars and all, but then could you not simply mandate a minimal package that the employer has to guarantee?
It should be that easy. The US is such a bizarre place. They call themselves a developed country and have a GDP that outpaces most others, yet they can’t even offer the things that many developing countries can.
But sadly, I don’t think it’s as simple as you hope. About half of the elected US politicians want nothing to improve. The president can’t do that much on their own. If Americans gave a shit, they could fix this in a single election cycle by electing some actual progressives, but Americans are pretty fucked up and most either don’t give a shit, or give negative shits (as in, they want to see things get worse for certain people).
Yea, I obviously don’t expect the president to single handedly change things, the main point was mostly that going for a photo-op is hardly showing support if you are the president, especially in a country where that title is more than symbolic.
Hell fucking yeah!
He’s still too moderate in the face of Republican extremism and the rail strike breaking was still very bad, but this is living up to the “most pro-union president” in a very good way and deserves vocal praise. It sucks that this isn’t already the norm, but this is an important step toward making it so and hopefully will convince other moderates to get off the sidelines.
the rail strike breaking was still very bad,
Just gonna mention that he then gave the rail unions their demands in negotiations with their employers so in that regard he was pretty pro-union.
“You can’t bargain to your fullest ability, but I’ll put in a good word with your boss” isn’t pro-union. The union needs to have the power to demand and secure those benefits or it serves little benefit and workers are just at the whims of what outside parties think is acceptable.
Joe Biden can go straight to hell with his disgusting foreign policy, cozying up with dictators is a terrible thing for a leader of this country to do
Whenever I see people like you bitch about foreign policy, it’s always racism and getting upset that brown people aren’t being stepped on by white people.
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