- cross-posted to:
- politics@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- politics@lemmy.world
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.
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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.
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.
Part of the issue is that not enough people vote, period. But the other half of the issue is that some places are highly gerrymandered, which makes voting weighted much more towards a certain party (typically republican, using rural areas to break the power of bigger, well educated cities). They do even more damage by downplaying the power of voting and calling into question the voting system itself. And occasionally making it more difficult to vote (eg, making it so you have to vote in person and stand in long, sunbaked lines when you need to be at work, reducing the time you can mail in your ballot, trying to pass laws that require IDs to be shown, or other things that make it more difficult for low income or young people to vote.)
It’s a difficult problem to solve once it starts, especially since several smaller issues add up to much larger, more difficult to see issues (on voting, it looks like many areas are much more republican than they otherwise should be, even if they had history of being blue or flipping often until voting lines were redrawn. These groups that redraw voting districts are not done by independent government bodies, which makes them susceptible to corruption.)
Many people want change, but aren’t well educated on how to change things, or have the leadership needed to unite areas or otherwise form coalitions.
The same way there’s a vast difference between Germany, Italy, and Hungary, there’s also a massive difference between Rhode Island, Kansas, and Oregon. Though we all vote in federal elections just the same.
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.
