- cross-posted to:
- politics@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- politics@lemmy.world
This weekend, Neil Cavuto of Fox News asked former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley what should have been an easy question about the ongoing UAW strike. Donald Trump had already made it clear how to respond from the right: Say something vaguely supportive about autoworkers, then pivot to claiming the Biden administration will send all their jobs to China by pushing electric vehicles. Instead, Haley portrayed workers in the largest industry in Michiganāa key battleground state that Trump won in 2016āas greedy and ungrateful.
āIt tells you that when you have the most pro-union president and he touts that he is emboldening the unions, this is what you get,ā Haley replied. āThe union is asking for a 40 percent raise; the companies have come back with a 20 percent raise. I think any of the taxpayers would love to have a 20 percent raise and think thatās great.ā
Ford, GM, and Stellantisā offer to increase pay by about 20 percent is less impressive after taking into account that it would happen over four years. The proposal comes after the Big Three made roughly $250 billion in profits over the past decade, increased CEO pay by 40 percent, and booked an additional $21 billion of profit in the first half of this year. Inflation has eroded wage gains UAW members made in their last contract, but the companies have refused to restore the cost-of-living adjustments that workers gave up to help the Big Three survive bankruptcy and the Great Recession. The taxpayers who make Fordās vehicles would likely envy the 1 percent effective federal income tax rate the company paid in 2021.
Haley, who as governor in 2014 said she didnāt want unions in South Carolina because āwe donāt want to taint the water,ā didnāt stop there. āI was a union buster,ā she told Cavuto. āI didnāt want to bring in companies that were unionized simply because I didnāt want to have that change the environment in our state. We very much watched out for workers, but the way that we watched out for workers was we didnāt encourage middlemen between companies and their workers.ā
Cavuto found himself in the unusual position of having to push back against a Fox News guest for being too anti-labor. āItās very tough language governor,ā he said, stuttering as he tried to process what heād just heard. āIām just wondering how union workers who are hearing you now might feel about that.ā He reminded Haley that Ronald Reagan had done well with union members.
The original āReagan Democratsā were in Macomb County, Michigan. Many of them were autoworkers. In 2016, Trump flipped Macombādefeating Hillary Clinton by nearly 50,000 votes four years after Barack Obama carried the county by more than 15,000 votes. Without Macomb, Clinton would have won the state. In 2020, exit polls showed 40 percent of people in union households voting for Trump. For context, 41 percent of self-identified independentsāa group no politician goes out of their way to insultābacked the former president. Trump knows what heās doing by traveling to Michigan next week to speak to current and former union members.
More impressively, Haley has managed to be only the second-most anti-union presidential candidate from South Carolina. At a campaign event on Monday, Sen. Tim Scott got his own question about the strike. āI think Ronald Reagan gave us a great example when federal employees decided they were going to strike,ā Scott explained in an apparent reference to the 1981 strike by air traffic controllers. āHe said, āYou strike, youāre fired.ā Simple concept to me. To the extent that we can use that once again, absolutely.ā (Reagan fired more than 11,000 members of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization, even though heād vowed to help them while successfully seeking their unionās endorsement during the 1980 campaign.)
Tim Scott on UAW strike:
āI think Ronald Reagan gave us a great example when federal employees decided they were gonna strike. You strike, youāre fired. Simple concept to me.ā pic.twitter.com/ke4hzSOTnp
ā Citizen Free Press (@CitizenFreePres) September 19, 2023
It is illegal to fire private-sector workers who are exercising their labor rights by going on strike. Nevertheless, it is helpful to know that Scott believes they should be fired. Not surprisingly, given the posture of its current and former elected officials, South Carolina has the lowest unionization rate in the country at 1.7 percent. That rate is about a sixth of the national average and well below other states in the South. As Haley can attest, union busting often works.
Trumpās speech in Detroit will happen at the same time as the second GOP debate. It sets up the possibility that Trump will be proclaiming his hollow support for striking autoworkers at the same time his distant rivals are boasting about being union busters. Appropriately enough, as Trump speaks in Detroit, the rest of the field will be assembled in California at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library.
Employers effectively organize to compensate their workers the least the job market and laws allow for, same with working conditions. Employees paid with their lives for the right to organize, strike, and collectively bargain, and these politicians and their corporate donors want to return to those days.
The last thing they want is for people to know what collective bargaining actually looks like, and the role arbitrators play, and that both unions and employers really donāt want their companies to go out of business. Collective bargaining isnāt about sapping the company dry, itās about looking at the books and coming up with an offer linked to that financial data, else itās not going to hold up in arbitration. Normally the union will present something like, ābased on the companyās finances this is our aggressive but reasonable offer,ā and the company will negotiate and concessions will be made, āwe canāt match your request for this raise increase but we can offer this and increase vacation accruals, etc.ā An arbitrator may be brought in, and either side has to ensure their negotiations are taken seriously by the third party. Then while the lawyers are duking it out, the employer will run a heavily skewed PR circus to paint the union as unreasonable, the company at the brink of failure, their PACs and politicians drumming up fear that our poor beloved employer is being bullied by these corrupt gangster unions. It becomes another political spectacle for everyone to participate and comment on. Eventually an offer is accepted and the tune changes, because the employer then has to impress their shareholders at how well they countered the union, and how stable and strong they are in the arrangement.
Yeah the alternative to unionization is revolution. Liberal unions are a means to maintain capitalism. Crush them and eventually workers will be willing to charge machine gun nests again. Already people are choosing not to reproduce because they canāt afford to raise children, and so the response seems to be to deny the ability to prevent reproduction without chastity. Well what do they think will happen when the armed workers cannot feed their children or organize for better pay?
A lot has been done to pacify unions plus liberal erasure of any notion of class consciousness. Capital also co-opts and commodifies ideas of ārevolutionā that people essentially buy in to as a form of consumption. As things degrade it will cause more social unrest but I donāt think that guarantees a revolution, cause most of the times it doesnāt.