The president and his team made a big bet on the union. Here's how they managed it.
President Joe Biden joins striking United Auto Workers on the picket line, Sept. 26, 2023, in Van Buren Township, Mich. | Evan Vucci/APLess than an hour before Joe Biden announced he’d join striking auto-workers on the picket line, one of his top aides broke the news to the car company executives being targeted.
“This is the first time in American history a president has taken a side, walking a picket line,” said Chris Spear, head of the American Trucking Associations. “It’s not only anti-business, it kicks 90 years of impartial mediation by a president to the curb.” “The president sees the agreement as a boost for his middle-class jobs agenda and a strong refutation of those suggesting policies for an auto future made in America will backfire,” Sperling said in an interview. “Just go down the list. Instead of lower wages for auto workers, less jobs and less factory investment, you have 148,000 UAW auto workers getting a bigger raise in the next four-and-a-half years than they’ve gotten in the 22 years before this combined.
In June, Matt Frantzen, president of the Illinois-based UAW Local 1268, was invited to meet with the president behind closed doors when he traveled to Chicago for fundraisers and a speech on the economy. Frantzen, who represents workers at a Stellantis-owned factory that was indefinitely idled in February, urged Biden to help bring the Belvidere assembly plant back online.
But Biden told his staff that he wanted to talk to Fain himself. The two men ended up speaking one-on-one for about 30 minutes. That pronouncement surprised car company executives, people familiar with the matter said, as they expected more impartiality. “The president told all of us in no uncertain terms that he was there in 2009 when auto workers sacrificed so much to save the Big Three and that he planned to be clear as a bell that he was standing with the UAW workers,” said Sperling.
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