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    British Conservatives’ Commitment to Green Policy Is Tested

    British conservatives kept a seat in a recent election by opposing an ultralow emissions zone, and some are now questioning ambitious emissions-reduction targets.Britain, blanketed by cool, damp weather, has seemed like one of the few places in the Northern Hemisphere not sweltering this summer. Yet a fierce political debate over how to curb climate change has suddenly erupted, fueled by economic hardship and a recent election surprise.The surprise came last week in a London suburb, Uxbridge and South Ruislip, where the Conservative Party held on to a vulnerable seat in Parliament in a by-election after a voter backlash against the expansion of a low-emission zone, which will penalize people who drive older, more polluting cars.The Conservatives successfully used the emission zone plan as a wedge issue to prevail in a district they were forecast to lose. It didn’t go unnoticed in the halls of Parliament, where even though lawmakers are in recess, they have managed to agitate over environmental policy for four days running.Britain’s Conservative government is now calling into question its commitment to an array of ambitious emissions-reduction targets. Tory critics say these goals would impose an unfair burden on Britons who are suffering because of a cost-of-living crisis. Uxbridge, they argued, shows there is a political price for forging ahead.With a general election looming next year, the Tories also see an opportunity to wield climate policy as a club against the opposition Labour Party, which once planned to pour 28 billion pounds, or about $36 billion, a year into green jobs and industries but scaled back its own ambitions amid the economic squeeze.On Monday, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said he would approach environmental policies in a “proportionate and pragmatic a way that doesn’t unnecessarily give people more hassle and more costs in their lives.”It was a strikingly circumspect statement given Britain’s self-proclaimed leadership in climate policy, which goes back to Margaret Thatcher and includes hosting the annual United Nations climate conference in 2021. And it clearly reflected the new political thinking in the aftermath of the Uxbridge vote.Government officials insist Mr. Sunak is not giving up on a ban on the sale of fossil-fuel-powered cars by 2030. Britain remains committed to a benchmark goal of being a net-zero — or carbon neutral — economy by 2050, which is enshrined in law. But on Tuesday, a senior minister, Michael Gove, said he wanted to review a project to end the installation of new gas boilers in homes.Traffic at the edge of the London Ultra-Low Emission Zone this month.Neil Hall/EPA, via ShutterstockEven before Mr. Sunak’s comments, critics contended that Britain’s historically strong record on climate policy had been waning.The Climate Change Committee, an independent body that advises the government, recently said Britain “has lost its clear global leadership position on climate action.” The group cited the government’s failure to use the spike in fuel prices to reduce energy demand and bolster renewables. It also noted Britain’s consent for a new coal mine, and its support for new oil and gas production in the North Sea.Last month, Zac Goldsmith quit as a minister with a climate-related portfolio, blaming “apathy” over the environment for his departure, though he was also a close ally of the former prime minister, Boris Johnson. In a letter to Mr. Sunak, Mr. Goldsmith wrote, “The problem is not that the government is hostile to the environment, it is that you, our prime minister, are simply uninterested.”Climate experts said Britain’s economic troubles fractured what had been a broad political consensus on the need for aggressive action. The schism isn’t just between the two main parties: Even within the Conservative and Labour parties, there are fissures between those who continue to call for far-reaching goals and those who want to scale back those ambitions.“This used to be an issue of across-party consensus; now it is not,” said Tom Burke, the chairman of E3G, an environmental research group. “The Tories have gone out of their way to turn it into a wedge issue, and I think that’s a mistake.”In Uxbridge, however, the strategy worked. The district, with its leafy streets and suburban homes, has one of the capital’s highest ratios of car dependency. That made plans by London’s Labour mayor, Sadiq Khan, to expand an ultra-low-emissions zone to encompass the district a potent issue for Conservatives, who opposed widening the zone.While the plan aims to improve London’s poor air quality, rather than reach net-zero targets, it was vulnerable to accusations that was piling on costs to consumers — in this case drivers of older, more polluting, vehicles.“It’s a really big impact at a time when people are concerned more generally about the cost of living,” said David Simmonds, a Conservative lawmaker in neighboring district of Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner. “In the short term, a lot of people who don’t have the money to buy an electric vehicle or a compliant vehicle are caught by this.”Zac Goldsmith quit as a minister with a climate-related portfolio.Matt Dunham/Associated PressThe surprise Conservative victory also sent alarm bells ringing within Labour. It caused tension between Mr. Khan, who insists the expansion will go ahead, and the party’s leader, Keir Starmer, who seemed to want a delay.“We are doing something very wrong if policies put forward by the Labour Party end up on each and every Tory leaflet,” Mr. Starmer said after the defeat. “We’ve got to face up to that and learn the lessons.”Even before the by-election, Labour had backtracked on its plan to invest billions a year on green industries. It blamed rising borrowing costs, which spiked during the ill-fated premiership last year of Liz Truss. Now, instead of rolling out spending in the first year of a Labour government, the party said it would phase it in.Labour’s fear was that voters would conclude the incoming government would have to raise taxes, which would give the Tories another opening. “Economic stability, financial stability, always has to come first, and it will do with Labour,” Rachel Reeves, who leads economic policy for the Labour Party, told the BBC.Such language is worlds away from a year ago, when Ed Miliband, who speaks for Labour on climate issues, told Climate Forward, a New York Times conference in London, that “the imprudent, reckless thing to do is not to make the investment.”He did, however, also argue that consumers should not carry all the burden of the transition. “The government has to collectivize some of those costs to make this transition fair,” said Mr. Miliband, a former party leader.Climate activists said Labour had made a mistake by highlighting the costs of its plan at a time of tight public finances. But given the broad public support for climate action, particularly among the young, some argue that a debate over which climate policies are the best need not end in failure for Labour.“Voters want something done,” Mr. Burke said. “They don’t want to pay the price for it but equally, they don’t want the government to say they are not doing anything about climate change.”Protesters rally against the Ultra-Low Emission Zone, or ULEZ, this month in London.Andy Rain/EPA, via ShutterstockFor all the new skepticism, climate policy is also deeply embedded in the Conservative Party. Mrs. Thatcher was one of the first world leaders to talk about the threat to the planet from greenhouse gases in 1989. A former prime minister, Theresa May, passed the net-zero pledge in 2019, and Mr. Johnson, as mayor of London, conceived the low-emission zone that boomeranged against Labour in Uxbridge, which Mr. Johnson had represented in Parliament, last week.Alice Bell, the head of climate policy at the Wellcome Trust, noted that some Tory lawmakers were rebelling against Mr. Sunak because they were worried about losing their seats by appearing to be against firm action on climate change.Extreme weather, she said, would continue to drive public opinion on climate change. While Britain’s summer has been cool, thousands of Britons have been vacationing in the scorching heat of Italy and Spain, to say nothing of those evacuated from the Greek island of Rhodes in the face of deadly wildfires.“I’m wondering if we’re going to have some people coming back from holiday as climate activists,” Ms. Bell said. More

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    United Auto Workers Hold Off on Backing Biden, for Now

    A memo by the union’s president underscores how some of President Biden’s moves to fight climate change could weaken some of his political support.The United Auto Workers, a politically potent labor union, is planning to withhold its endorsement of President Biden in the early stages of the 2024 race, according to an internal memo from its president to members on Tuesday.The memo, written by Shawn Fain, the Detroit-based union’s president, said the leadership of the United Auto Workers had traveled to Washington last week to meet with Biden administration officials and had expressed “our concerns with the electric vehicle transition” that the president has pursued.The memo underscores how some of Mr. Biden’s boldest moves to fight climate change, which animate his liberal base, could at the same time weaken his political support among another crucial constituency. The U.A.W. has shrunk in size in recent decades, but it still counts about 400,000 active members, with a robust presence in Michigan, a critical battleground state for Democrats.In April, the Biden administration proposed the nation’s most ambitious climate regulations yet, which would ensure that two-thirds of new passenger cars are all-electric by 2032 — up from just 5.8 percent today. The rules, if enacted, could sharply lower planet-warming pollution from vehicle tailpipes, the nation’s largest source of greenhouse emissions. But they come with costs for autoworkers, because it takes fewer than half the laborers to assemble an all-electric vehicle as it does to build a gasoline-powered car.In the memo, Mr. Fain provided “talking points” for members about why the union was not immediately lining up behind Mr. Biden, writing that if companies received federal subsidies, then workers “must be compensated with top wages and benefits.”“The EV transition is at serious risk of becoming a race to the bottom,” the memo reads, referring to electric vehicles. “We want to see national leadership have our back on this before we make any commitments.”Mr. Fain won the U.A.W. presidency as an insurgent candidate this year, toppling the incumbent, Ray Curry. Mr. Fain promised a more confrontational path ahead of contract talks. In the memo, he notes that 150,000 autoworkers are fighting for a new contract with the so-called Big Three auto companies in September, writing, “We’ll stand with whoever stands with our members in that fight.”Labor support is a key part of Mr. Biden’s political coalition and his portrayal of himself as a fighter for the middle class.Within hours of Mr. Biden’s formal entry into the 2024 race, a number of top labor unions backed Mr. Biden, including the Amalgamated Transit Union, the Service Employees International Union and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers.“Several national unions were quick to endorse,” Mr. Fain wrote in his memo. “The United Auto Workers is not yet making an endorsement.”Mr. Biden’s campaign trumpeted his support from other labor unions in a news release. Notably, Mr. Biden’s first public appearance after announcing his re-election campaign last week was addressing a labor conference in the nation’s capital.“I’ve said many times: Wall Street didn’t build America,” he told the cheering union crowd last week. “The middle class built America, and unions built the middle class!”The United Auto Workers, which has historically endorsed Democrats and supported Mr. Biden in 2020, makes clear in the memo that it has no intent of backing the Republican front-runner, former President Donald J. Trump. Withholding a formal endorsement for now instead appears to be a bid for leverage or concessions from the administration.“Another Donald Trump presidency would be a disaster,” reads Mr. Fain’s memo, which was first reported by The Detroit News. “But our members need to see an alternative that delivers real results. We need to get our members organized behind a pro-worker, pro-climate, and pro-democracy political program that can deliver for the working class.”Mr. Biden has sought to accelerate the transition to all-electric vehicles as a centerpiece of his effort to tackle climate change. A 2021 report by the International Energy Agency found that nations would have to stop sales of new gasoline-powered cars by 2035 to avert the deadliest effects of a warming planet.To help reach that goal, Mr. Biden has pushed a fleet of policies designed to promote electric vehicles. The Biden administration’s proposed climate regulations announced in April are designed to add legal teeth to consumer incentives, compelling automakers to manufacture and sell more electric vehicles. The Environmental Protection Agency rules, however, are not yet final: They are open for public comment, and could still be weakened or otherwise changed before being completed next year.As the Biden administration prepared to unveil the new clean car rules last month, officials planned for Michael S. Regan, the head of the E.P.A., to announce the policies in Detroit, surrounded by American-made all-electric vehicles.But as auto executives and the United Auto Workers learned the details of the proposed regulations, some grew uneasy about publicly supporting it, according to two people familiar with their thinking. No one from the United Auto Workers attended the unveiling, according to the organization’s spokesman, although representatives from Ford, General Motors and Mercedes-Benz were there.And the setting was moved from Detroit to the E.P.A. headquarters in Washington. More

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    United Auto Workers Usher In New Era of Leadership

    Shawn Fain, who ousted the incumbent president, is presiding over a convention to chart the union’s approach in contract talks this year.The United Auto Workers union has opened a new chapter in its storied history, and it may end up looking a lot like its combative past.Over the weekend, the 88-year-old union confirmed that an outsider, Shawn Fain, had prevailed in a hotly contested election for president, ousting the incumbent. An electrician whose father and grandfathers were also U.A.W. members, Mr. Fain has promised to take a tough negotiating line for increased wages in contract talks this year with the three Detroit automakers.“It is a new day for the U.A.W.,” Mr. Fain said on Monday at the start of a three-day convention, where hundreds of delegates will hammer out priorities and strategies for the contract talks that will formally open this summer.“We are here to come together for the war against our one and only true enemy — the multibillion-dollar corporations and employers who refuse to give our members their fair share,” Mr. Fain said.He opened his address by shouting, “Let’s get ready to rumble!” — drawing out the final word in the style of the famed boxing ring announcer Michael Buffer.Mr. Fain, 54, won by a razor-thin margin after prolonged vote-counting and more than two weeks of wrangling over some 1,600 challenged ballots. With the count nearly complete, Mr. Fain had 69,459 votes — 483 more than the incumbent, Ray Curry. Mr. Fain was declared the victor, and Mr. Curry conceded, when the margin exceeded the number of ballots still under challenge.The election was the first in the U.A.W.’s history in which the president and the union’s other senior executives were chosen through direct balloting of members. In the past, the leadership was chosen by delegates, a system in which favors and favoritism played a heavy role.T-shirts on display at the convention showed support for the union faction led by Mr. Fain. Rebecca Cook/ReutersThe democratic election had been mandated by a court-appointed monitor who has been overseeing the U.A.W.’s efforts to carry out anti-corruption reforms. The monitor was appointed as part of a 2021 settlement of a federal investigation that found that top union officials had embezzled more than $1.5 million from membership dues and $3.5 million from training centers, and had spent some of the money on expensive cigars, wines, liquor, golf clubs, apparel and luxury travel. More than a dozen U.A.W. officials, including two former presidents, pleaded guilty.Mr. Curry was not a target of the corruption investigation but many members saw him as linked to the establishment that had been running the union for years.Mr. Fain takes office along with several other outsiders running on his slate who were elected to senior posts by convincing margins. They won support from members who were angered over the corruption scandals and wanted an executive team that would push harder for higher wages and other demands in contract talks with General Motors, Ford Motor and Stellantis, the automaker formed through the merger of Fiat Chrysler and Peugeot S.A.Decades ago, the U.A.W. had more than 1.5 million members and the power to influence presidential elections and demand steady increases in wages and benefits. When the manufacturers resisted, it called strikes that shut down a large part of the industry. Over the years, the U.A.W.’s gains helped lift wages and living standards for a broad swath of manufacturing workers across the United States.But its influence declined as the Detroit automakers struggled. When G.M. and Chrysler were reorganized in bankruptcy court in 2009, the union made concessions on wages and benefits that it has not won back, and it has had to weather the closing of dozens of plants. It now has about 400,000 members.The contract talks come after years in which G.M., Ford and Stellantis have been reporting record results and have paid significant sums to workers in profit-sharing bonuses. In 2022, for example, G.M. made a profit of $9.9 billion and paid a bonus of $12,750 to each of its U.A.W. workers.Members want Mr. Fain to fight for wage increases to offset inflation, an end to a two-tier wage system that pays newer workers significantly less than veterans and assurances that new plants will be built in the United States rather than abroad.At the convention, the rank and file appeared to back Mr. Fain, despite his narrow margin of victory.“I’m ready to strike,” said Romaine McKinney III, an electrician at a Stellantis stamping plant in Warren, Mich. “We have to show these companies that we are ready to walk out.”Jamonty Washington, a worker at a Detroit plant where Stellantis makes Jeeps, said he started his job 12 years ago making just under $16 an hour — working next to a colleague making $31 an hour. He has worked his way up to $30 an hour, he said, but thinks the union has to fight to eliminate such differences in pay.“Equal pay for equal work,” he said. “It’s time for this union to get back to being militant — not asking but demanding.” More

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    President Is Ousted in United Auto Workers Election

    Shawn Fain, an insurgent, edged Ray Curry after calling for a harder line in contract talks. The union has been dogged by corruption scandals.An insurgent candidate has won the presidency of the United Auto Workers union, potentially setting the organization on a more confrontational path as it heads into contract talks this year with the three Detroit automakers.Shawn Fain, a 54-year-old electrician who has been a member of the union for almost three decades, defeated the incumbent, Ray Curry, after a monthslong election battle in which Mr. Fain’s allies won seats across the union’s executive board.Mr. Fain claimed victory on Saturday, and Mr. Curry conceded, as a court-appointed election monitor neared the end of the vote count.Mr. Curry, a 57-year-old former assembly line worker with a master’s degree in business administration, was appointed president in 2021 after a broad federal investigation into a series of corruption scandals. He had carried out a number of reforms but ultimately was seen by many members as not enough of a break with previous presidents and executives linked to wrongdoing.Ray Curry was appointed president of the United Auto Workers in 2021.Carlos Osorio/Associated PressWith the count nearly complete, Mr. Fain had 69,459 votes, or 50.2 percent, and Mr. Curry had 68,976, according to an unofficial tally. The count had gone on for weeks, prolonged by the inspection of challenged ballots.Mr. Curry said Mr. Fain would be sworn in on Sunday and would preside over a convention to hammer out plans for the contract talks.The vote was a runoff after a contest in November in which Mr. Curry collected about 600 more votes than Mr. Fain but neither man reached the 50 percent threshold to be declared the winner.“The winds of change run strongly through this election,” said Harley Shaiken, a professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, who has followed the U.A.W. for more than three decades. “It defines the direction of the U.A.W. going forward.”Mr. Fain said he intended to be more confrontational in contract negotiations, a position that appealed to members after years of concessions on wages and benefits and following corruption scandals that ended with two former presidents serving time in prison.“This is the end of company unionism, where the companies and the union work together in a friendly way, because it hasn’t been good for our members,” he said in an interview as the vote count neared completion. “These companies have enjoyed record profits for a decade, and our workers are still regressing and struggling to get by.”Insurgents aligned with him won a majority of offices on the union’s international executive board — an outcome widely seen as reflecting the members’ desire for significant change at the top of the union.But Mr. Fain and the new administration have little experience in running the union’s operations.It was the first election open to all members of the union, and had been mandated by a court-appointed monitor who has been overseeing the union’s efforts to wipe out corruption. Previously, the union’s presidents and other senior officials were chosen by delegates to a convention, in which the result was often determined by favors and favoritism and did not always reflect the sentiments of rank-and-file workers.“I knew our members were fed up,” Mr. Fain said. “It was just a matter of whether they were willing to vote for change, because they’ve never been able to do that before.”The shake-up comes as the U.A.W. is about to start talks with General Motors, Ford Motor and Stellantis on four-year labor contracts. The talks come as the automakers are again earning significant profits. G.M. reported profits of $9.9 billion for 2022. Ford reported a loss, but its North American operation remains its main profit generator. Stellantis, which was formed by a merger of Fiat Chrysler and France’s PSA in 2021, made 17 billion euros, with a large share coming from North America.It also occurs as the automakers are making the transition from gasoline-powered vehicles to electric ones, which have fewer moving parts and require less labor.“The union is in the midst of a most important transition since the introduction of the assembly line with the move toward electric vehicles, and that could result in the loss of a lot of automotive jobs,” Professor Shaiken said. “How the new leadership navigates that will impact the U.A.W. and the labor movement.”For decades after its founding in 1935, the U.A.W. had the power to influence presidential elections and consistently won middle-class wages and benefits that set the standard for workers in many industries across the country. At its peak, in 1979, it had 1.5 million members.But the U.A.W.’s membership and influence steadily declined as the Detroit automakers faced increasing competition from Toyota and other foreign automakers that were building nonunion plants across the South. As those rivals gained a greater foothold, the American companies reduced their payrolls and shut factories.The 2009 bankruptcy filings by G.M. and Chrysler — which is now part of Stellantis — forced the union into major concessions, including a wage system that left newcomers earning substantially less than veteran workers.While diminished, the U.A.W. still has influence. “The union can still turn out voters in critical states like Michigan and Ohio and other states that can determine a presidential election,” Professor Shaiken said.The U.A.W. now has about 400,000 active members, including college teaching assistants and casino workers as well as auto manufacturing workers. Both active members and the union’s 600,000 retirees were eligible to vote in the elections. For the last several years the U.A.W. has been reeling from a federal corruption investigation that eventually found a number of schemes in which senior officials embezzled millions of dollars from union coffers. They spent some of the money on expensive cigars, wines, liquor, golf clubs, apparel and luxury travel.In total, federal investigators found that $1.5 million had been siphoned from membership dues, and $3.5 million from union training centers. More than a dozen U.A.W. officials pleaded guilty, and two former presidents, Gary Jones and Dennis Williams, were sentenced to prison. Each was released after serving nine months.As part of a consent decree settling the investigation, the U.S. District Court in Detroit appointed an outside monitor to oversee the implementation of democratic and transparency reforms. One of the mandated reforms was a one-person-one-vote election. More

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    A New Voice for Winning Back Lost Democratic Voters

    Representative Marie Gluesenkamp Perez chose her guest for last month’s State of the Union address in order to make one of her favorite points. She invited Cory Torppa, who teaches construction and manufacturing at Kalama High School in her district in southwest Washington State, and also directs the school district’s career and technical education program. President Biden did briefly mention career training that night in his very long list of plans; still, Ms. Gluesenkamp Perez wasn’t thrilled with the speech.“I went back and looked at the transcript,” she said, “and he only said the word ‘rural’ once.”It’s safe to say that Ms. Gluesenkamp Perez was one of very few Democrats in the room listening for that word, but then she didn’t win her nail-biter of a race in a conservative district with a typical Democratic appeal. To court rural and working-class voters who had supported a Republican in the district since 2011, she had to speak to them in a way that her party’s left wing usually does not — to acknowledge their economic fears, their sense of being left out of the political conversation, their disdain for ideological posturing from both sides of the spectrum.She came to Congress in January with a set of priorities that reflected her winning message, and she is determined to stress those differences in a way that might help Democrats lure back some of the voters it has lost, even if it means getting a lot of puzzled looks and blank stares in the Capitol.Ms. Gluesenkamp Perez was already an unexpected arrival to the House. No one predicted that she would win her district, and her victory (by less than one percentage point) was widely considered the biggest electoral upset of 2022. The Third Congressional District is exactly the kind that Democrats have had trouble holding on to for the last 10 years: It’s 78 percent white, 73 percent without a bachelor’s degree or higher, and made up of a low-density mix of rural and suburban areas. It voted for Barack Obama once, in 2008, and Donald Trump twice, and the national Democrats wrote it off, giving her almost no campaign assistance.But as the 34-year-old mother of a toddler and the co-owner (with her husband) of an auto repair shop, she had an appealing personal story and worked hard to distinguish herself from the usual caricature of her party. She said she would not support Nancy Pelosi as speaker, criticized excessive regulation of business, and said there should be more people in Congress with grease under their fingernails. But she also praised labor unions and talked about improving the legal immigration system, boosting domestic manufacturing, and the importance of reversing climate change. In the face of this pragmatic approach, her Republican opponent, Joe Kent, followed the Trump playbook and claimed the 2020 election had been stolen and called for the F.B.I. to be defunded. She took a narrow path, but it worked, and you might think that Democratic leaders would be lined up outside her office to get tips on how to defeat MAGA Republicans and win over disaffected Trump voters.But some Democrats are still a little uncomfortable around someone who supports both abortion rights and gun rights, who has a skeptical take on some environmental regulations, and who has made self-sufficiency a political issue.“It’s a little bit of a hard message for them to hear, because part of the solution is having a Congress who looks more like America,” she said in an interview last week. “It can’t just be rich lawyers that get to run for Congress anymore.”She said there is a kind of “groupthink” at high levels of the party, a tribalism that makes it hard for new or divergent ideas to take hold. But if Democrats don’t pay attention to newcomers like Ms. Gluesenkamp Perez, they risk writing off large sections of the country that might be open to alternatives to Trumpism.“The national Democrats are just not ever going to be an alternative they vote for, no matter how much of a circus the far right becomes,” she said. “But I think there obviously can be competitive alternatives. There are different kinds of Democrats that can win, that avoid the tribalism.”She mentioned Representatives Jared Golden of Maine and Mary Peltola of Alaska, and Senators Jon Tester of Montana and John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, as examples of elected officials with an unusually broad appeal because they understand the priorities of their districts or states.In her case, those priorities center on relieving economic despair and providing a future for young people who have a hard time seeing one, particularly if they are not college-bound. Pacific County, on the western end of her district, had an 8.4 percent unemployment rate in January, compared to the 3.4 percent rate in tech-saturated King County, home of Seattle, just 150 miles to the northeast. Not everyone needs a four-year college degree, or is able to get one, but the economy isn’t providing enough opportunities for those who don’t take that path. Many high school students in her districts are never going to wind up in the chip factories that get so many headlines, or the software firms further north, but without government support they can’t even get a foothold in the construction trades.She supports what has become known on Capitol Hill as “workforce Pell” — the expansion of Pell grants to short-term skills training and apprenticeship programs, many of which are taught in community colleges. The idea has won approval among both conservative Republicans and Democrats like Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia. She said she could not hire older teenagers as apprentices in her auto repair shop because it would bump up her liability insurance. (A local nonprofit group has helped her shop and other businesses cover the extra cost, giving many students the opportunity for on-the-job training.)“My generation was the one where they were cutting all the shop classes and turning them into computer programming classes,” Ms. Gluesenkamp Perez said. “It took 10 or 15 years for that to hit the market, but now, coupled with the retirement of a lot of skilled tradespeople, there’s a six-month wait for a plumber or a carpenter or an electrician. You’d better be married to one.”She is also critical of putting certain environmental concerns ahead of human ones, a position sure to alienate some in her party.“My mom grew up in Forks, Washington, which is sort of epicenter of the spotted owl, and that decimated jobs,” she said, referring to the federal decisions in the 1990s to declare the northern spotted owl as endangered, closing off millions of acres of old-growth forest to logging. “People had trouble feeding their families. That indignity cast a really long shadow. People felt like they were being told they couldn’t work.”The Trump administration opened up much of that habitat to logging in its final days, but that decision was later reversed by the Biden administration. (The congresswoman hasn’t weighed in on that reversal.)Winning over lost voters can often mean just talking about the kinds of daily concerns they have, even if they are not monumental. That’s why Ms. Gluesenkamp Perez is an enthusiastic supporter of the right-to-repair movement, which promotes federal and state laws to give consumers the knowledge and tools to fix their own products, whether smartphones, cars, or appliances. Many companies make it virtually impossible for most people to replace a phone battery or make an adjustment on their car.“From where I live, it’s a three-hour round trip to go to the Apple Store,” she said. “Right to repair hits people on so many levels — their time, their money, their environment, their culture. It’s one of the unique things about American culture. We really believe in fixing our own stuff and self-reliance. D.I.Y. is in our DNA.”She and Neal Dunn, a Republican congressman from Florida, introduced a bill last month that would require automakers to release diagnostic and repair information about cars so that owners wouldn’t have to go to a dealership to get fixed up. That’s probably not a surprising interest for the owner of an independent repair shop, but it’s not something most Democrats spend a lot of time talking about.It’s the kind of thing, however, that may spark the interest of swing voters tired of hearing Republican candidates talk about cultural issues that have no direct relevance to their lives.“We have to stop talking about these issues of ‘oh, the creeping dangers of socialism,’ and start talking about getting shop class back in the high schools,” she said. “I don’t know anybody who stays up at night worrying about socialism. But they worry about a kid who doesn’t want to go to school anymore. Or, am I going to lose the house? Is there a school nurse? Those are the things that keep people up at night, and we have to find a way to make their lives better.”

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    The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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    United Auto Workers Appear to Rebuke Leaders in First Vote by Members

    Insurgent candidates showed strength, citing corruption scandals and calling for a tougher bargaining approach. The union president seems headed for a runoff.Shawn Fain, a challenger who has been a United Auto Workers member for 28 years.Sarah Rice for The New York TimesRay Curry, president of the United Auto Workers.Paul Sancya/Associated PressThe first United Auto Workers election open to all members appears to have produced a wave of opposition to the established leadership, signaling the prospect of sweeping changes for a union tarnished by a series of corruption scandals.As the count neared completion on Friday, the current president, Ray Curry, was in a close contest with an insurgent challenger, Shawn Fain, with each getting slightly under 40 percent. The remaining votes were scattered among three dark-horse candidates.If those results are confirmed by a court-appointed monitor overseeing the count, Mr. Fain and Mr. Curry will head for a runoff election in January.“If these results hold, it can only be seen as shocking,” said Harley Shaiken, a professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, who has followed the U.A.W. for more than three decades. “It’s a major upset for the incumbent administration. The union is entering a new and profoundly different era.”In an interview as the results were tallied, Mr. Fain said he believed the vote reflected a desire for broad change, citing not only the corruption scandals but also an inability to win broad wage and benefits improvements over the last decade as the three Detroit automakers rang up significant profits.“I think it definitely shows the pulse of the membership and the pure fact that they’re fed up,” said Mr. Fain, an electrician who has been a member of the union for almost three decades. “I think the members want to get this union back in line and see the election as their shot.”A union spokeswoman said Mr. Curry would make a statement on the election after the results were certified.The strength of outsider candidates aligned with Mr. Fain was seen in voting for several other national and regional positions. In a two-way race for secretary-treasurer, the union’s second most powerful post, an ally of Mr. Fain had more than 60 percent of the vote.In addition to the union’s 400,000 active members, 600,000 retired members were eligible to vote in the leadership election, though not to seek office. About 106,000 ballots were cast.Since its founding in 1935, the U.A.W. had used a system in which its president and other senior officials were chosen by delegates to a convention, with results often shaped by favors and favoritism rather than the views of the rank and file.This year’s “one person, one vote” election was one of the measures that the union had agreed to as part of a settlement of a federal investigation that uncovered widespread corruption at the top of the organization. A dozen senior officials, including two former U.A.W. presidents, were convicted of embezzling more than $1 million in union funds for luxury travel and other lavish personal expenses.Last year, a court appointed a monitor to ensure that the union followed through on anticorruption reforms.Mr. Curry, 57, a former assembly-line worker from North Carolina who holds a master’s degree in business, was named president in 2021 with the task of instituting those changes after years of scandals tarnished the union’s image. He has held senior positions in the union for a decade, and many U.A.W. members see him as the candidate of the establishment.Mr. Fain, 54, and his slate are backed by a dissident group, Unite All Workers for Democracy. He has called for a wholesale turnover in the union’s leadership and a more confrontational approach to negotiating with manufacturers.The election comes at a critical time for the union. The U.A.W. is working to organize several battery plants that the three Detroit automakers have built or are building with partners — factories not automatically covered by its contracts with the manufacturers. Workers at one, a General Motors plant in Ohio that opened last summer, are scheduled to vote on U.A.W. representation on Wednesday and Thursday.G.M. is building two other battery plants in Tennessee and Michigan. Ford Motor is building two in Kentucky and one in Tennessee. Stellantis, which was formed through the merger of Fiat Chrysler and the French automaker Peugeot, intends to build a battery plant in Indiana.Next year, the U.A.W. is set to negotiate new labor agreements with the three automakers, and challengers to Mr. Curry campaigned on promises of taking a more confrontational stance. Members have demanded a resumption of cost-of-living wage adjustments, once a key element of U.A.W. contracts, which had been forgone in recent years when inflation was mild and the automakers were struggling to survive.Members also want an end to two-tier wage and benefit packages. Workers hired in 2007 or earlier have a standard wage of $32 an hour and are guaranteed pensions. Workers hired after 2007 start at lower wages and can work up to the top wage over five years. They also get a 401(k) retirement account instead of a lifelong pension.In the last decade, the automakers have rebounded strongly and now earn substantial profits. In the first three quarters of this year, G.M. generated $8 billion in net income. Ford and Stellantis earned less but still posted solid profits.Decades ago, the U.A.W. wielded immense political power, and at its peak represented more than 1.5 million workers. It lost clout as the Detroit automakers scaled back in the face of rising competition from foreign-owned competitors like Toyota and Honda. Despite attempts, it has not been able to organize workers at any of the foreign-owned auto-assembly plants that have sprung up across the South and the Midwest.Around 2014, the union became the focus of an investigation by the U.S. attorney’s office in Detroit. The inquiry revealed that top officials had embezzled membership dues and money set aside for training centers and used it for expensive cigars, wines, liquor, golf clubs, apparel and luxury travel.More than a dozen U.A.W. officials pleaded guilty. Gary Jones, a former president, served nine months of a 28-month sentence before being released from federal prison this year. Mr. Jones’s predecessor, Dennis Williams, was released after serving nine months of a 21-month sentence. More

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    How the Price of Gas Became America’s Most Important Political Issue

    President Biden knows the political power of the price of gasoline.About two weeks ago, fearing what an uptick in gas prices might do to Democrats at the ballot box in the midterms, Mr. Biden announced the release of 15 million barrels from the United States’ emergency petroleum stockpile in an effort to drive down prices. A gallon now costs $3.78 on average compared with $5.03 five months ago, but that is still higher than what Americans want to pay.To show he means business, Mr. Biden went a step further this week, calling on Congress to consider a windfall profits tax on oil companies, which are reaping record gains since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and a spike in oil prices. “It’s time for these companies to stop war profiteering,” Mr. Biden said.As he contemplates whether these measures will be enough to save his party on Tuesday, he seems to be recalling the early days of his political career. Mr. Biden entered the Senate in 1973, at the age of 30, just as the energy crisis of the 1970s was changing life as Americans had known it. In October of that year, in response to America’s support of Israel in the Yom Kippur War, OPEC’s Arab members imposed an embargo on the United States, sending prices soaring by more than sevenfold.To understand the consequences of this price hike, the young senator from Delaware hitched a ride on a 47,000-pound big rig hauling hollow-shell pipe for a 15-hour, 536-mile journey through five states. After talking to hundreds of angry truckers at a stop in Shiloh, Ohio, Mr. Biden was sympathetic. The winter storm he had just driven through was, he said, “nothing compared to the snow job truck drivers I met believe the government is handing them.”The energy situation would spell political trouble for President Richard Nixon, already deeply wounded by Watergate, as Americans blamed elected officials for their troubles. Millions of Americans were waiting in lines to fill up their tanks and feeling the pinch of higher prices on their family budgets. “What is worse than ‘Watergate’ and all the various charges against the president? Answer — the gas crisis in Bergen County,” a suburban New Jersey man wrote to his senator. “We the American People are tired of the lack of competent and effective leadership,” the Concerned Citizens of Maryland told Mr. Nixon.Jimmy Carter, then the governor of Georgia, accused his predecessors of “gross mismanagement” as he ran for president seeking to quell the energy crisis. But after his 1976 election, Mr. Carter wasn’t so lucky: A second oil shock struck in 1979, this one triggered by unrest in Iran. Prices soared again, up more than 1,000 percent since the start of the decade. “I’ll give it to you straight,” Mr. Carter said in 1979. “Each one of us will have to use less oil and pay more for it.”There was a “panic at the pumps,” as a New York service station representative called it at the time, leading to gas riots, violence, economic chaos and more. Long lines lasted for hours and soaring prices broke the dollar-a-gallon barrier, resulting in a sense of defeat and national decay. Americans are being “crucified on the cross of inflation,” a group of Chicago truckers said. “People are freaking out,” the California Energy Commission’s chairman said. No one came in for more blame than Mr. Carter. “Energy affects the life of every goddamn American, and most of them are mad at us,” a White House aide told Newsweek. “Energy is our Vietnam,” another official said.In 1980, Ronald Reagan defeated Mr. Carter — the first Democratic president of Mr. Biden’s political career — in a landslide.By the end of the 1970s, the price of a gallon of gasoline had become one of the most explosive issues in American political life. It still is. When presidents see gas prices tick up, they inevitably get a sick feeling in their stomachs. Rising gas prices tend to correlate with a decline in presidential approval ratings, which in turn erodes support for the incumbent party at the polls.In times of economic instability, gas prices are the most visible and easily understandable gauge of how the nation is faring: Outsize placards on every street corner and at every rest stop are a constant reminder for many citizens that times are tough, neon signs that shine projections of pocketbook pain down to the thousandth of a decimal. You don’t need to know much about macroeconomics or public policy to know that you’re being squeezed.America lives under the shadow of King Oil because our lives are organized around our cars and our cars run on gasoline.The roots of this dependence go back to before the 1970s oil shocks, to the postwar years when America’s economy boomed, thanks to cheap and plentiful gas. The country was building a massive system of interstate highways made possible by the 1956 Interstate Highway Act; developers erected single-family suburban homes that required a car trip just to pick up a pint of milk; the government failed to invest in mass transit. Gas stations competed with giveaways and free windshield washings. The drive-in movie theater and the drive-through restaurant had become icons of American culture. Cars grew and grew in size until they became living rooms on wheels. With their tail fins, luxurious interiors and powerful engines, cars were the embodiment of American freedom.Until they weren’t. “The great American ride is ending,” the title character in “Rabbit Is Rich,” John Updike’s iconic novel of late-’70s America, thinks to himself as he surveys his car lot. Instead of singing about the open road, Johnny Cash made commercials, paid for by oil companies, about the need to “drive slow and save gas.”Gas lines in Midtown Manhattan in May 1979.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAppeals to conservation went unheeded. Americans refused to consume less; we resisted developing new forms of energy. As a result, the nation was running in place. Americans wanted everything to be the same.By the time Mr. Reagan left office in 1989, there were over 30 million more cars on the road than there had been at the start of the energy crisis in 1973. And in spite of calls for energy independence, America got more and more of its oil from the Persian Gulf. It was not a surprise, then, that President George H.W. Bush, himself an oilman, launched a military operation in 1991, Operation Desert Storm, in response to Saddam Hussein’s attack on Kuwait. “We cannot allow any tyrant to practice economic blackmail,” he said.President Bill Clinton’s term did little to wean America off its oil addiction. During his administration, S.U.V.s, which were not subject to fuel efficiency standards, were coming to dominate the market. No wonder that in 2000, as gas prices spurted up, in advance of the election, Mr. Clinton released oil from the strategic reserve, a fail-safe created in the 1970s. His solution to higher prices was to flood the market with product rather than to stem demand, hoping to bolster the electoral prospects of Al Gore, his vice president and a passionate environmentalist.That story has continued to play out. In 2008, congressional Republicans attempted to lay the blame for record-high prices on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, calling it the “Pelosi Premium.” The strategy failed, given the collapse of the economy when George W. Bush was in the White House. But the effort reflected the political reality of prices at the pump, still the case today. The question is: How long can this last?Mr. Biden has watched as his party’s political fortunes have been driven by the ups and downs of energy prices since the early 1970s. Over those nearly 50 years he has undoubtedly discovered the tension at the heart of this: While politicians live and die in the short term, it’s only long-term policies that can offer an enduring solution.Gas prices are down now, but are they down enough to help his party next week? And will they stay down ahead of the 2024 presidential election? Those questions are most likely on the top of Mr. Biden’s mind.In 1981, when Mr. Reagan, soon after taking office, used his executive authority to get rid of the price controls on oil that had come into effect during the crisis, Mr. Biden objected. “We must continue to fight for more responsible energy economic policy,” he wrote in an op-ed. By that he meant a “permanent” windfall tax on oil companies, which at the time were reaping record profits. The taxes would pay for relief from the “excessive costs” of energy.In the 1970s, Democrats thought the oil hikes that followed war and revolution in the Middle East required an equally drastic political response: price controls, rationing and corporate profit caps. Today, with OPEC price hawks taking advantage of another war, polls suggest that Mr. Biden would see enormous political and electoral dividends by imposing temporary price and profit controls on the industry. Some economists, like the Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, agree.So, too, do many members of Congress. “We know that big oil companies are exploiting Putin’s invasion of Ukraine to drive up prices at the pump for American families,” Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio, a Democrat, recently told me. “This sort of profiteering is unacceptable and we need to put a stop to it. A windfall profits tax would help us take on corporate power and deliver relief directly to families.”Now Mr. Biden is listening to the lessons of his long career. His release from the strategic petroleum reserve comes after a similar move nearly a year ago, followed up by a failed effort to get OPEC to increase its production and the jawboning of oil companies. “You should not be using your profits to buy back stock or for dividends,” the president said. “Not now. Not while a war is raging.” Instead, he said, “Bring down the price you charge at the pump.” Or else — as he told the companies this week.But just as he is trying to ease Americans’ pain, he also recognizes that the permanent solution comes from weaning ourselves off fossil fuels from foreign powers, like Russia and Saudi Arabia, that see oil as a geopolitical weapon. Even a young Joe Biden understood this: In the weeks after the 1973 Arab embargo, he was one of five senators who voted against the Trans-Alaska Pipeline and instead supported funding mass transit.What was never really on the table was using less gas and driving fewer cars. President Carter tried to solve the energy crisis, in part, with a famous prime-time speech asking the United States to change its wasteful, self-indulgent ways, as Americans were waiting in gas lines. It was a colossal failure. The installation of solar panels on the White House roof, when Mr. Carter promised that 20 percent of all energy would come from the sun and other renewable sources by 2000, also fell flat.Mr. Biden knows this. That’s why he has worked hard to make renewable alternatives a reality with the Inflation Reduction Act, a climate bill investing historic amounts into a green transition. And as much as he, like so many presidents, champions himself as a “car guy” who loves his 1967 Corvette Stingray, he has also celebrated recent pushes like Ford’s to phase out combustion engines.But those changes take time. Just as they have since the 1970s, voters want relief and they want it now. In 1973, Mr. Biden said his constituents felt that “the federal government isn’t listening.” Nearly half a century later, as Americans take to the polls, Mr. Biden wants them to know “who is standing with them and who is only looking out for their own bottom line.”Even as Mr. Biden might get minimal short-term benefits from his energy and climate policies — and minimal relief in gas prices in the near future — history may look back on his record as a turning point, when America didn’t just start ending its gas addiction but went further into alternatives that began making our country and our politics less in thrall to King Oil.Meg Jacobs teaches history and public affairs at Princeton and is the author of “Pocketbook Politics: Economic Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America” and “Panic at the Pump: The Energy Crisis and the Transformation of American Politics in the 1970s.”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More