US unions

Subterms

    Latest story

    188 Shares45 Views

    Trader Joe’s and Starbucks are helping Elon Musk undermine the US government | Steven Greenhouse

    by

    Elon Musk boasts that he’s a “free speech absolutist”, but that didn’t stop his rocket company, SpaceX, from firing eight workers who had criticized him for making light of reports that SpaceX had settled a sexual harassment claim against him.Not stopping there, SpaceX has moved to put the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the US’s top labor watchdog, out of business. Earlier this year, a day after the board accused SpaceX of illegally retaliating against those workers, SpaceX filed a first-of-its-kind lawsuit that seeks to have the labor board – which has successfully overseen relations between business and unions since the 1930s – declared unconstitutional and shut down.In so doing, Musk and SpaceX have joined a broader, rightwing effort that hopes to hobble the federal government’s ability to regulate business. Indeed, SpaceX’s lawsuit could serve as a potent wrecking ball in the right’s push to weaken and perhaps demolish the administrative state – the network of federal agencies that the US Congress created to, among other things, promote workers’ safety on the job, prevent fraud in financial markets, protect workers’ right to unionize, limit environmental hazards, make sure consumer products are safe and administer social security for seniors.With their lawsuit, SpaceX and Musk – who owns 42% of that company’s shares and controls 79% of its voting power – are seeking not just to silence the eight employees who criticized Musk, but also to shut down the agency that protects such workers’ rights to speak out at all. Musk, the $180bn man, is throwing a legal temper tantrum because the NLRB has sought to hold him and SpaceX accountable.Those employees wrote a letter saying: “Elon’s behavior in the public sphere is a frequent source of distraction and embarrassment for us.” They wrote that letter after Business Insider reported that SpaceX had paid $250,000 to silence a company flight attendant who accused Musk of exposing himself and propositioning her for sex. Musk dismissed her in a tweet, saying she was a “liar” and that the incident “never happened”.The NLRB’s complaint against SpaceX is based on a law, the National Labor Relations Act, that makes it illegal for companies to fire or otherwise retaliate against workers who join together to push to improve work conditions. In their letter, the eight employees also called on SpaceX to spell out its anti-harassment policies and enforce them more effectively.If SpaceX’s lawsuit succeeds in getting the federal courts to declare the NLRB unconstitutional, it could set a dangerous precedent that other courts seize on to weaken or even eviscerate other federal agencies, such as the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (Osha), and perhaps even the Federal Election Commission (FEC) and the Social Security Administration.SpaceX’s lawsuit seeks to build on a case in which George R Jarkesy Jr, a rightwing activist and radio talkshow host, persuaded the hard-right fifth circuit court of appeals to declare the Securities and Exchange Commission unconstitutional after it fined Jarkesy hundreds of thousands of dollars for defrauding investors.In their effort to blow up the NLRB, Musk and SpaceX are hoping to capitalize on the federal judiciary’s sharp rightward turn – a shift accelerated during Donald Trump’s presidency. It shouldn’t be a surprise that SpaceX filed its lawsuit in Texas, the state that arguably has the nation’s most extreme, most activist conservative federal judges. Following SpaceX’s lead, Amazon, Trader Joe’s and Starbucks also filed legal papers seeking to have the NLRB declared unconstitutional.Like SpaceX, those companies face NLRB charges of illegally retaliating against workers. One way to look at all this is that a band of billionaires – Elon Musk, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Starbucks’ Howard Schultz, and Trader Joe’s German owners, the Albrecht family – are seeking to kill the federal agency that protects typical workers when they seek to unionize or merely speak up for better conditions.Using uncharacteristically tough language, Jennifer Abruzzo, the labor board’s general counsel, slammed SpaceX, Starbucks and the other companies as “deep-pocketed, low-road employers” that seek to stop the NLRB from fulfilling its pro-worker mission “because they have the money to do so”.“Unfortunately,” Abruzzo added, it seems that SpaceX and the others “would rather spend money initiating court litigation than improving their workers’ lives”.If these “low-road employers” prevail, the whole NLRB process of holding union elections and prosecuting companies that violate labor laws could crumble. This “would leave US workers more vulnerable to exploitation”, Kate Andrias, a law professor at Columbia, wrote recently.Of course, for Starbucks and Trader Joe’s, this effort to have the NLRB declared unconstitutional could backfire – sabotaging the “progressive” image they have long sought to cultivate. Many Starbucks and Trader Joe’s customers might be outraged that the companies that furnish them with lattes and organic produce have joined this conservative legal and political assault.Many legal experts have derided one of SpaceX’s main arguments: that the labor board’s administrative law judges – who determine, for instance, whether a company violated the law by firing pro-union workers – should be deemed unconstitutional. SpaceX asserts that the NLRB’s judges exercise executive functions and therefore that the president, as the head of the executive branch, should be free to fire them. (Under federal labor law, they can be fired only for cause.) SpaceX makes this argument even though it’s crystal clear that the labor board’s judges merely do what judges do: issue judicial decisions.Moreover, what SpaceX is demanding would allow Trump, if re-elected, to do something that corporate America would hate – fire labor board judges because they upset him by ruling in favor of companies whose CEOs had criticized him or not donated to his campaign. Administrative judges – whether labor board judges, immigration judges or social security judges – have legal protections against being summarily fired so that they can make honest, independent decisions without fear of being terminated for political reasons.It is sad, if not altogether surprising, that SpaceX, Amazon, Starbucks and Trader Joe’s have joined a rightwing effort to destroy the federal agencies that set the rules that helped make the US the world’s richest nation and Musk, Bezos, Schultz and other billionaires fabulously wealthy. Now these billionaires are seeking to destroy the NLRB so that they can become even more fabulously wealthy.This is yet another unsettling example of plutocrats exercising their financial might to reshape government to their liking. It’s an effort that, if successful, will hurt millions of average Americans – consumers, workers, small investors and anyone who wants the environment protected.Here’s hoping that public interest prevails over Musk and the billionaires.
    Steven Greenhouse, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, is an American labor and workplace journalist and writer More

    More stories

    • 175 Shares54 Views

      in US Politics

      Shawn Fain, president of the UAW: ‘Workers realized they’ve been getting screwed for decades’

      by

      From Amazon and UPS to Starbucks and Hollywood studios, organized labor is making a comeback in the US after decades of decline. Shawn Fain thinks he knows why: “Workers have realized they’ve been getting screwed for decades, and they’re fed up.”The United Auto Workers (UAW) president has emerged at the front of the pack of a new generation of labor leaders as a galvanizing voice in a critical year for the labor movement and American politics.A soft-spoken but unrelentingly blunt midwesterner, Fain has met the moment in his role as the union’s newly elected president. Having beaten the US’s big three automakers into a landmark new union contract, Fain’s members have been courted by both Joe Biden and Donald Trump. Fain has gone all in for the Democrats despite some reservations and the misgivings of some of his members.Now he faces bigger tests. The UAW is taking its fight to states that have long, successful records of seeing off union drives – and he must hold his new coalition together as the US enters a fractious election cycle that will pit worker against worker.The union boss’s political ascendancy was crowned by his recent appearance as a guest at Joe Biden’s State of Union address, where both he and the union were called out in a nationally-televised salute from the commander-in-chief.Sporting a new, closely cropped beard and wearing a dark business suit and tie for the Capitol occasion, Fain responded with a raised power fist, telegraphing in one succinct image how much organized labor’s message and tone have changed of late, along with their popularity.View image in fullscreenThe winning trajectory of the union and its new, class-conscious president have caught carmakers off guard, no more so than when Fain, 55, contrasts his workers’ declining wages with corporate share buybacks and the lavish compensation bestowed upon automotive CEOs.Not without irony, Fain’s ascent almost certainly wouldn’t have been possible but for the 2022 federal felony convictions of more than a dozen union officials, as well as three Stellantis executives, for fraud and corruption, including embezzlement of union training funds. A UAW dissident with near 30 years’ previous service as a Stellantis (formerly FCA and Chrysler) electrician in Kokomo, Indiana, Fain unseated the union’s long-entrenched leadership cabal in 2023, vowing to root out corruption and change what he viewed as the union’s overly accommodating posture toward their employers.Speaking recently with the Guardian in his office at the UAW’s Detroit headquarters – Solidarity House, a brutalist four-story structure built in the 1950s along a grim stretch of East Jefferson Avenue, overlooking the Detroit River – Fain without naming names derided previous leadership. “The corruption was one thing. But even prior to that. What they call ‘working together’, I call ‘company unionism’. All we witnessed out of that philosophy is losing plants, losing jobs. We watched over 20 years as 65 factories [owned by] the big three, disappeared. ‘Working together’ in the spirit of what I view it as would be when it’s a win-win for everybody. It’s not one-sided.”View image in fullscreenFain was a national bargaining negotiator during the Great Recession and the 2009 Chrysler bankruptcy. “I saw how the company really went after everything, took advantage of a bad situation while our workers bore the brunt of all that sacrifice. Moving forward, we’ve sat here for over a decade, watching the big three make massive profits. I ran for this reason, to change this union, to get us back to what it is supposed to be and hasn’t been in my lifetime. Right from the beginning, we had to set the tone and do things differently. We ran the contract campaign to define the narrative and define the issues. In the last decade, the [big three] companies made a quarter trillion dollars in profits. CEO pay went up 40% in the last four years. And our pay went backwards. So that was really setting the table.”Cleaning house at the union’s headquarters, Fain brought in new staff experienced in the use of social media, something that helped galvanize his campaign to lead the UAW. “I didn’t have the advantages that [predecessors] had because they were in power. They could fly all over the country on the union’s dime and visit plants under the guise of union business. People like me who were running had to take vacation [time] and go stand out at plant gates and hope to catch workers coming and going.”Fain turned to social media to interact with members all over the country. “We were doing this as a way to communicate with our members. But it turned into a lot more because social media brought in anyone that wanted to come in. The general public was paying attention, the news media paid attention. And I think it was really effective because when it got time to go on strike, 75% of Americans supported us.”The big hree were caught flat-footed by the fresh approach. “I think they just thought that it was talk,” Fain said. “They’re used to hearing talk. Companies were used to having their way, saying what they wanted and getting it. I don’t think they really knew how to handle leadership that wasn’t operating in that mode. I mean, our leaders in the past, they’d stand up and beat the podium and say, ‘We’re gonna fight, we’re gonna fight, fight, fight!’ and then when they got into negotiations, they’d roll over. Obviously, I don’t think they expected this and, let’s be honest, they didn’t expect me to be president.”View image in fullscreenBreaking with precedent, where just one of the trio of American legacy makers would be “targeted” for a strike, the UAW launched simultaneous strikes against all three, then shrewdly conserved strike funds by closing individual plants rather than all at once. The 46-day “Stand Up Strike,” begun after contract negotiations with General Motors, Ford and Stellantis collapsed, ended in a resounding victory for the UAW. Since then, with the wind at its back, the union has taken the fight to the many non-union auto manufacturing plants dotting the country, including many in southern, so-called “right to work” states.News last month that 96% of unionized workers at Daimler Trucks North America plants in North Carolina, Georgia and Tennessee voted to authorize a strike should ongoing negotiations fail to yield a satisfactory replacement for a contract expiring in April, brought fresh evidence that the record gains in its 2023 campaign against the big three have drastically altered the wider industry’s state of play. So did the UAW’s successful drives to have elections held at Volkswagen’s Chattanooga, Tennessee, and at Mercedes-Benz’ Vance, Alabama plants.Fain is bullish on the possibility of extending the union’s gains to non-union automobile factories. Notable among the Detroit settlements’ broader impact has been how, in efforts to avert unionization, several non-union carmakers, including Toyota, Honda, Tesla, Nissan, Subaru, Volkswagen, and Hyundai hurried to give workers unsolicited raises and, in some cases, improved benefits and eliminated the two-tier wage structures, where new hires, often classified as temporary, are paid substantially less than veteran workers.Fain said he believes these companies all have more to give, as does Tesla, which, despite recent share losses, has been one of the world’s most profitable makers of electric vehicles. Elon Musk, the company’s CEO, is a vociferous foe of unionization. Recently, following a complaint filed against his SpaceX company, the rocket and satellite maker joined Amazon, Starbucks and Trader Joe’s in suing the NLRB, challenging the constitutionality of the almost 90-year-old agency.View image in fullscreenFain’s overarching optimism is grounded, he insists. “Workers have realized they’ve been getting screwed for decades, and they’re fed up … If Volkswagen workers had Ford’s [new] agreement, they would have got $23,000 profit-sharing checks this year. Instead, they got zero … We made a big deal in the big three contract fight that these companies made a quarter trillion dollars in profits in the last decade. But the Japanese and Korean six [with US factories] made $480bn. The German three made $460bn in profits worldwide. Toyota alone made $256bn profit in the last decade. Their profit margins are obscenely more gross than they were at the big three, and yet their workers get less. I truly believe we’re going to see a huge shift this year. I think we’re gonna win in the south.” And Musk? A somewhat tougher nut to crack, Fain concedes, adding: “He’s the epitome of everything that’s wrong with this world.”Not one to mince words, Fain’s bold rhetoric harkens to a long-gone era, his regular use of stark terms like “billionaire class” recalling, for this reporter, childhood remembrances of elderly trade unionist relations recounting 1930s Labor Day marches down New York’s Fifth Avenue. Fain credits his old-school class consciousness to the experience of his grandparents – poor people who emigrated from the south during the Depression to the north to work in the newly unionized automobile industry, affording them a middle-class life. He also notes the importance of his faith. An unthinking churchgoer as a youth, he said adulthood brought a renewed interest in religion. “I started reading the Bible. I pray every day when I wake up. I do a daily reading. And everything I read about it, no matter what religion someone is, whether you’re Muslim or Christian, whatever your belief is, all religion speaks to one thing, it’s love of your fellow human being. With the greatest excess in the history of the world, why don’t we work with a mindset of what works for human beings?”What he doesn’t have faith in is the likelihood that corporations will use technology to make life better for his members. “[Legendary UAW leader] Walter Reuther [who died in a 1970 plane crash] had this famous saying, ‘We have to master technology, not let it master us,’” said Fain.“As we have advancements in technology, it should be making life easier for people and workers’ lives. But what happens? When technology advances, the companies find ways to eliminate jobs, close plants, exploit workers in other places. And then the people that are left with a job, they want them to work longer and harder … The companies have to realize they’ll still make their profits; government should be subsidizing some of this. And everyone wins in this equation. Workers have better lives, working class people have better lives. The companies are profitable. The money’s there. This can all happen but let’s go back to the central issue of this. It’s corporate greed and a miniscule amount of people, the billionaire class, who want to concentrate all the wealth in their hands and screw everybody else to do it.”View image in fullscreenFain objects strongly to those who would place the blame for rising car prices on union contracts. “Another myth. Five to 7% of the cost of a car is labor. [Carmakers] could give us everything they gave us in that contract and not raise the price of cars a penny and still make massive profits. Why are they not saying what $20 billion in [additional] corporate dividends and stock buybacks cost them? That affects the bottom line more. That money somehow just disappears and doesn’t count, right? All they want to talk about is our wages and our benefits. People forget, over the last four years, the price of vehicles went up 35% on average. But our wages didn’t go up. Our benefits didn’t get better. Nothing changed for us. [Price hikes are] because of two things: corporate greed and consumer price gouging. They just pile all those costs on and then try to blame the workers for it.”A latter day rise in the union’s long-sagging fortunes – its membership dwindled from 1.5m in the 1970s to its current 380,000 – has been seen by some hopeful observers as early evidence of a burgeoning reversal of the downward trend that began with the punishing defeat of the air traffic controllers’ union early in the Reagan administration. In hindsight, Fain, who was a teenager at the time, suggests “all labor, not just union labor, should have come together then. I wish they would have. Because what’s happened over the last 40 years? Reagan and the ‘greed is good’ idea and the new philosophy of the rich getting richer. Forty years of going backwards for the working class … people understand that they’ve been left behind. Workers are now scraping to get by, while working multiple jobs, seven days a week, 12 hours a day and living paycheck to paycheck. That’s not a life. When I was a kid it didn’t matter if you worked at a grocery store, or if you worked at an assembly plant, a one-person income could sustain a family. That’s not the case anymore … workers, union and non-union, have to harness the power that we have and take back our lives.”Asked about the parallels between Reagan and Trump, charismatic presidents who quietly championed the interests of wealth and organized capital while retaining a strong following among the working class, Fain acknowledged the undeniable presence of a voluble Maga contingent among autoworkers including members of his own union. But he played down the political division within the ranks.Trump, a lifelong anti-union voice, has singled out the labor organization and Fain, in particular, for derision. Calling the union corrupt and Fain “a weapon of mass destruction” for jobs, Trump traveled to Detroit during the high-profile strike to a staged rally purportedly in support of auto workers but opposed to the union. Held at a non-union plant that charged his campaign $20,000 for its use, the event featured a crowd containing no actual auto workers, anti-union or otherwise.In January, Fain, who has said Trump represents the billionaire class and “doesn’t give a damn about working-class people” endorsed Biden’s re-election bid on the union’s behalf. “As I tell our members, ‘Look, this isn’t a Democrat-Republican issue. This isn’t a party issue. This wasn’t my opinion. Let’s look at their own words and their own actions.’” Fain credits Biden and Democrats with the federal government’s rescue of the domestic industry during the 2008-2009 recession, as the newly-installed Obama administration pro-actively addressed the bankruptcies of GM and Chrysler. “They worked on a path forward for [the US car business] to come out of this and to live, they battled for the American worker. Trump, at the same time, was blaming the workers for everything that was wrong with these companies.”Last Fall “[f]or the first time in American history, a sitting US president [Biden] joined workers on the picket line. Trump had that opportunity in 2019, when GM was on strike for 40 days. He never said a word about the strike. He never did a damn thing to support it.”Auto worker support could well be critical in determining the allegiance of Michigan’s electoral college delegates, as well as those in other swing states. There’s no doubting where Fain thinks their best interest lie. “Joe Biden has a lifelong history of serving others and in standing with working-class people. President Trump has a lifetime history of serving himself and the billionaire class. And so there’s a stark contrast there. When you look at those things, the decision for us is very easy about who has our interests at heart. And who doesn’t. Sure, some of our members are still going to vote for Trump. But at the end the day we have to put the facts out there, we have to talk to our members about that and hope like hell we don’t have another disaster for four years.” More

    • 138 Shares129 Views

      in US Politics

      Biden gains union worker support but faces ceasefire protests in Michigan

      by

      Joe Biden won a strong pledge of support on Thursday from union autoworkers crucial to his re-election bid in Michigan, while yet more protests over his backing of Israel’s actions in Gaza put pressure on the trip.The president’s travel to the battleground state was intended as a celebration after the United Auto Workers (UAW) union recently endorsed his re-election bid. But his visit was also met with protests amid the state’s sizable Arab American community, demanding Biden seek a ceasefire in the Israel-Gaza war, and refusing to meet his campaign.Biden visited a UAW union hall in Warren, Michigan, where UAW members plan to work a phone bank on his behalf ahead of the state’s 27 February nominating contest.He was greeted by UAW president Shawn Fain, who last week gave a full-throated endorsement of the Democratic incumbent and a sharp rebuke of Republican frontrunner Donald Trump.As the crowd chanted, “Joe, Joe”, Fain promised Biden: “We’re going to fight like hell” for him to win the November presidential election.“Wall Street didn’t build the middle class. Labor built the middle class, and the middle class built the country,” Biden said. “When labor does well, everybody does well.”He later joked: “Besides, you built my ’67 Corvette.”The campaign kept specific details of Biden’s visit private in the face of expected opposition until just before his arrival.Ahead of his motorcade, about 100 protesters marched down a street toward the UAW location, chanting “Genocide Joe has got to go” and waving Palestinian flags.Before heading to Michigan, Biden attended the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington. He said he was working to resolve the Gaza conflict, including a two-state solution for Palestinians and bringing home the hostages still held following Hamas’s 7 October attack on southern Israel.“We are actively working for peace,” he said at the breakfast.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTrump on Wednesday met with the Teamsters, one of the US’s biggest unions representing truck drivers, airline pilots and others, as he competes for their backing.Ahead of Biden’s visit to the Detroit area, protesters amassed in cars and vans with blue and white “Abandon Biden” signs and Palestinian flags, planning to rush to wherever he appeared.Arab Americans account for 5% of the vote in Michigan and Biden’s margin of victory over Trump was less than 3 percentage points in 2020.Reuters contributed reporting More

    • 163 Shares159 Views

      in US Politics

      ‘We want everybody walking out’: UAW chief outlines mass strike for May 2028

      by

      Shawn Fain, the United Auto Workers president, criticized Donald Trump on Monday but declined to back Joe Biden as he reaffirmed plans to lead a general strike in the US in 2028.Speaking to union members at the UAW national political conference in Washington DC, Fain said it was time for union members to come together.“We have to pay for our sins of the past. Back in 1980 when Reagan at the time fired patco workers, everybody in this country should have stood up and walked the hell out,” Fain said. “We missed the opportunity then, but we’re not going to miss it in 2028. That’s the plan. We want a general strike. We want everybody walking out just like they do in other countries.”He reaffirmed ambitious plans to organize a general strike for 1 May 2028, coinciding with International Solidarity Day or May Day.The UAW rescheduled the expiration of their union contracts with the US’s big three automakers to align on this day in the contracts it reached late last year and has been encouraging other labor unions to schedule contracts to expire on this day to maximize the participation from workers across different industries.A general strike is a mass strike across various industries around similar demands or bargaining positions. In the US, they have been virtually non-existent in recent decades given the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947 that restricted secondary strikes and the decline of labor unions in the US since the 1970s.After successfully taking on the US auto companies, Fain has emerged as a potent political figure, courted by Trump and Biden.Fain also used his speech to criticize Trump, telling reporters that Trump “is as a person … pretty much contrary to everything we stand for”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBut the UAW has yet to formally endorse Biden, who was the first president to walk on a picket line with striking workers in September 2023. Fain told reporters the union will be holding formal discussions on an endorsement amid rumors that Biden may address the union in person later this week.
      Reuters contributed reporting More

    • 138 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      Senator John Fetterman vows to block ‘outrageous’ $14.9bn US Steel sale

      by

      The US senator John Fetterman has vowed to block the multibillion-dollar sale of US Steel to the Japanese company Nippon Steel, calling the potential deal “outrageous”.The former mayor of the south-west Pennsylvania town of Braddock, which is home to a major US Steel plant, Fetterman has long advocated for the rights of American steel workers and positioned himself as a pro-union Democrat.In the video posted to X and taken from the roof of his house in Braddock, which overlooks the plant, Fetterman criticized the proposed $14.9bn sale, decrying US Steel for selling itself “to a foreign nation and company”.“Steel is always about security,” Fetterman said. “And I am committed to anything I can do, from using my platform or my position, in order to block this.“I’m going to fight for the steelworkers and their union way of life here as well, too.”The acquisition was announced on Monday and saw US Steel’s stock price jump 25%. The company confirmed the deal in a statement on Tuesday, saying its board unanimously approved the acquisition and calling Nippon Steel “a global leader in steelmaking, innovation and decarbonization”.The United Steelworkers (USW) union, meanwhile, denounced Nippon Steel for agreeing to an acquisition deal without prior approval from the union, Axios reported.David McCall, the president, called the deal “greedy” and a “violation” of a union agreement that requires any buyer of US Steel to agree to a new labor agreement prior to any sale.“Neither US Steel nor Nippon reached out to our union regarding the deal, which is in itself a violation of our partnership agreement that requires US Steel to notify us of a change in control or business conditions,” McCall told Axios, calling the sale “shortsighted”.A previous buyout offer in August, worth $7.3bn, by rival company Cleveland Cliffs, was rejected by US Steel. That offer did have the support of the USW union, which praised the Ohio-based Cleveland Cliffs as being “in the best position to ensure that US-based manufacturing remains strong in this country”, and noted it didn’t cut jobs during previous acquisitions in 2019 and 2020. More

    • 125 Shares199 Views

      in US Politics

      Sanders intervenes after Republican senator challenges union boss to fight

      by

      An Oklahoma senator and a union boss squared off in a congressional hearing on Tuesday, each daring the other to “stand your butt up” and fight in an exchange the chair of the Senate labor committee, Bernie Sanders, struggled to contain.“Sit down!” Sanders shouted at Markwayne Mullin, the Republican on the dais beside him. “You’re a United States senator!”Mullin, 46, called Sean O’Brien, president of the Teamsters union, a “thug”.O’Brien, 51, said Mullin was acting like “a schoolyard bully”.Sanders, 82, banged his gavel in vain.The face-off began when Mullin read out a tweet O’Brien sent earlier this year, after another committee-room confrontation.In the tweet, O’Brien called Mullin a “greedy [chief executive] who pretends like he’s self-made. In reality, just a clown and fraud. Always has been, always will be. Quit the tough guy act in these Senate hearings. You know where to find me. Anyplace, Anytime cowboy. #LittleManSyndrome.”Before entering Congress, Mullin made his money in plumbing. He is also a former cage fighter who in 2021 had to reassure voters he did not think he was Rambo, after trying to enter Afghanistan during the US withdrawal.In his initial response to O’Brien’s tweet, Mullin offered to fight him for charity. In Tuesday’s hearing, Mullin finished reading the tweet, then told O’Brien: “You want to run your mouth? We can be two consenting adults, we can finish it here.”O’Brien said: “OK, that’s fine, perfect. I’d love to do it right now.”Mullin said: “Then stand your butt up then.”O’Brien said: “You stand your butt up.”Mullin stood his butt up – and began to advance.Sanders took action, shouting: “No, no, sit down! Sit down! You’re a United States senator!”Mullin sat down.The two men continued to squabble, Sanders banging his gavel.O’Brien said: “Can I respond?”Sanders said: “No, you can’t. This is a hearing. And God knows the American people have enough contempt for Congress, let’s not make it worse.”Elsewhere on Capitol Hill on Tuesday a Republican congressman from Tennessee, Tim Burchett, took “a clean shot to the kidneys” from the speaker he helped eject last month, Kevin McCarthy of California, as a reporter watched.The Senate labor committee hearing continued to descend into disorder, Mullin saying: “I don’t like thugs and bullies.”O’Brien said: “I don’t like you, because you just described yourself.”Sanders banged his gavel again, cueing Mullin to speak.“All right,” Mullin said. “Let’s do this because I did challenge you and I accepted your challenge. And you went quiet.”O’Brien said: “I didn’t go quiet. You challenged me to a cage match, acting like a 12-year-old schoolyard bully.”Sanders intervened again.“If you have questions on any economic issues, anything, go for it,” he said. “We’re not here to talk about physical abuse.”Mullin said he wanted “to expose this thug for who he is”.O’Brien said: “Do not point at me, that’s disrespectful.”Mullin said: “I don’t care about respecting you at all.”O’Brien said: “I don’t respect you at all.”Shouting, “Hold it, no,” Sanders banged his hammer again.Outside, public approval ratings for Congress and its members continued their downward march. More

    • 213 Shares179 Views

      in US Politics

      Biden is right to praise the auto strike. His climate agenda depends on it | Kate Aronoff

      by

      Joe Biden had to choose a side in the United Auto Workers’ contract fight with the “big three” American automakers, and he did. This week, he became the first US president to walk a picket line while in office when he joined strikers in Belleville, Michigan, offering enthusiastic support for their demands. Biden should be thanking the UAW for handing him a golden opportunity: to prove that the green jobs his administration is creating will be good, union jobs, too, and that climate policy will bear dividends for the working class.Republicans cosplaying solidarity have tried to exploit the strike to score cheap political points. As Republican presidential hopefuls debated this week, Donald Trump told a rally at a non-union plant in Michigan that the strike wouldn’t “make a damn bit of difference” because the car industry was “being assassinated” by “EV mandates”. (Whether there were any union members or even autoworkers in the room isn’t clear.) Ohio senator JD Vance has similarly blamed autoworkers’ plight on “the premature transition to electric vehicles” and “Biden’s war on American cars”.These are cynical, false talking points from politicians who couldn’t care less about autoworkers – but they aren’t going away. (Although similar lines are old hat in the US, they’re finding new purchase in places like 10 Downing Street: Rishi Sunak, the British prime minister, has recently taken a “U-turn” on climate goals, citing “unacceptable costs” for “hard-working British people”.) Optimistically, the UAW strike could be a chance to dismantle the rightwing myth that reducing emissions hurts working people – not by pointing to the jobs that will trickle down from the bosses of the energy transition, but by standing with the unions fighting to make those jobs better.Being willing to go on offense against automakers’ bad behavior is a great start and a big shift. The Biden administration has routinely praised car manufacturers as climate heroes poised to decarbonize the country and create millions of middle-class jobs along the way, turning the industry into a sort of mascot for its climate agenda. “You changed the whole story, Mary,” Biden told General Motors’ chief executive, Mary Barra, a frequent White House guest, in 2021. “You electrified the entire automobile industry. I’m serious.”White House climate policy will be good for Barra and her colleagues at the top. The business-side tax credits and government-backed loans furnished by the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) are already helping the big three retool factories to produce EVs and their component parts. The IRA’s consumer-side subsidies for American-made electric cars – worth up to $7,500 – will boost demand.Yet no one should confuse companies taking advantage of tax breaks with a commitment to the climate fight. The big three lag well behind their competition in the US and abroad; federal incentives are helping them play catch-up. They’ve lobbied to undermine fuel efficiency and clean car standards, including through front groups like the Automotive Alliance. Like oil and gas companies, GM and Ford knew for decades that their products fueled climate change, and proceeded to double down on gas-guzzling models and political attacks on laws and regulations that might hem in their emissions. They still bankroll the campaigns of Republicans dead-set on stopping climate policy.Neither is it a given that EV subsidies benefiting companies will benefit workers there, too. Automakers are already using electrification as an excuse to supercharge attempts to ship jobs to less union-friendly states, and split workers off from their master agreement with the big three.Biden’s decision to join the strike would be remarkable on its own. Beyond the obvious symbolism, his presence there lends tangible material support to workers’ demands, handing the union leverage over companies that might otherwise reasonably assume he’d have their backs.It could also usher in a broader shift in the way he and other Democrats talk about climate policy. Impressive as the IRA is, its most direct benefits accrue largely to companies and consumers with enough cash on hand to afford up-front payments for big-ticket items like solar panels and heat pumps. Like Bidenomics more generally, its goal isn’t to reduce emissions so much as to build out domestic supply chains for clean energy goods, making US companies less reliant on and more competitive against Chinese firms in sectors that will be increasingly important over the coming decades.Targeting climate policy at corporations and affluent consumers doesn’t make a great counterargument to Republicans eager to frame it all as elitist virtue signaling, and win elections accordingly. What the Republican party can be reliably expected to do, though, is side with the bosses. That’s where even self-professed “car guy” Joe Biden might be able to set himself apart – by being willing to offend the automakers so that the rewards of America’s green industrial policy aren’t hoarded at the top.Standing alongside Biden in Belleville this week, the UAW president, Shawn Fain, offered as good a framing for that approach as any. “This industry is of our making,” he said. “When we withhold our labor, we can unmake it. And as we’re going to continue to show: when we win this fight with the big three, we’re going to remake it.”
      Kate Aronoff is a staff writer at the New Republic and the author of Overheated: How Capitalism Broke the Planet – And How We Fight Back More

    • 225 Shares129 Views

      in US Politics

      It’s fantastic that Biden is joining the UAW picket line. But he should go further | Robert Reich

      by

      Kudos to Joe Biden for joining the United Auto Workers picket line on Tuesday. He’s the first president to join a picket line in living memory.But he shouldn’t stop there.He should criticize the CEOs of America’s big corporations who are now raking in more than 350 times what the average American worker is earning. Blast corporations that are monopolizing their industries. Condemn firms that are using their profits to buy back shares of stock, polluting the planet with carbon emissions and polluting our democracy with big money.He wouldn’t be the first Democratic president to do this.On the eve of the 1936 election, President Franklin D Roosevelt warned America that business and financial monopolies and war profiteers had begun to consider the US government
      as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob … Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me – and I welcome their hatred.
      The US is again in a populist age, when a vast army of Americans have been shafted by big corporations, Wall Street and a government corrupted by monied interests.The biggest change over the last three decades – the change lurking behind the insecurities and resentments of the working middle class – has nothing to do with identity politics, “woke”-ism, immigration, critical race theory, transgender kids or any other current Republican bogeymen.It has directly to do with a huge upward shift in the distribution of income and wealth.Although total wealth is much greater now than it was four decades ago, the distribution of that wealth is far more unequal. The bottom 50% hasn’t budged. Wealth at the top has exploded.Meanwhile, a declining share of the nation’s wealth has been going to workers, and an exponentially rising share to CEOs and big investors.This change didn’t happen because of so-called “neutral market forces”. It happened because of policy decisions made over the last four decades. For example:To open the American economy wide to imports from China. To deregulate Wall Street and allow it to make bets with other people’s money.To dramatically cut taxes on big corporations and the rich. To let corporations bash unions and fire workers who try to organize.To encourage activist investors and private equity companies to take over “underperforming” companies and then promptly fire workers and sell off assets.To allow big corporations to become far larger, monopolizing entire industries.To allow pharmaceutical companies to extend their patents and jack up the prices of critical drugs. To allow oil companies access to federal lands and to benefit from special tax write-offs.To bail out the biggest banks but not homeowners who get caught in the downdrafts. To privatize higher education and force students to take out massive loans.To encourage corporations to buy back their shares of stock rather than reinvest profits.These policy decisions didn’t just happen, either. They were pushed by wealthy elites on Wall Street and in C-suites who made mammoth donations to politicians on both sides of the aisle – mostly but not exclusively Republican – to ensure that their wishes would be honored.To Biden’s credit, he and most Democratic lawmakers in Congress have pushed for policies that will make the nation more equitable, such as childcare and eldercare subsidies, student-loan forgiveness and negotiated drug prices. Kudos.But Biden seems reluctant to blame CEOs, Wall Street moguls and the super-rich for what’s happened.Yet they are to blame, as are their lackeys in Washington.They have turned their growing wealth into increasing political power to change the rules of the game in ways that further enlarge their wealth and power, while neglecting and exploiting the bottom half.Biden should condemn them, as did FDR. He should name the CEOs, leaders of finance, heads of pharmaceutical companies, defense contractors, internet moguls and “activist” investors who have profited at the expense of the rest of the US.He should unambiguously be on the side of workers in their struggle for better pay and working conditions.He should attack corporate welfare – the special tax loopholes, bank bailouts, unconditional subsidies, loan guarantees and no-bid contracts that have lined the pockets of the wealthy, paid for by the rest of us.Let Republicans criticize corporate “wokeness”. Biden should campaign against corporate greed.Let Republicans obsess about critical race theory, immigration and sex. Biden should campaign against how obscenely unfair and unequal the US has become.It’s good that Biden’s joining the UAW picket line. But if he and other Democrats don’t tell the economic truth about what’s happened and place the blame squarely where it’s deserved, the lies of Republicans will fill the void.
      Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is a professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His newest book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com More

    • 150 Shares99 Views

      in US Politics

      Rust Belt Union Blues: how Trump wooed workers away from the Democrats

      by

      Consider the following social science experiment: go into a unionized steel mill parking lot in western Pennsylvania, look at the bumper stickers and track the political messages. Given the longstanding bond between unions and the Democratic party, you might predict widespread support for Democratic candidates. Yet when the then Harvard undergraduate Lainey Newman conducted such unconventional field research during the Covid pandemic, encouraged by her faculty mentor Theda Skocpol, results indicated otherwise. There was a QAnon sticker here, a Back the Blue flag there. But one name proliferated: Donald Trump.It all supported a surprising claim: industrial union members in the shrunken manufacturing hubs of the US are abandoning their historic loyalty to the Democrats for the Republican party.“The most interesting point, how telling it is, is that those stickers were out in the open,” Newman says. “Everyone in the community knew. It was not something people hide.“It would not have been something old-timers would have been OK with, frankly. They stood up against … voting for Republicans, that type of thing.”Newman documented this political shift and the complex reasons for it in her senior thesis, with Skocpol as her advisor. Now the recent graduate and the veteran professor have teamed up to turn the project into a book: Rust Belt Union Blues: Why Working-Class Voters Are Turning Away from the Democratic Party.The book comes out as organized labor is returning to the headlines, whether through the United Auto Workers strike at the big three US carmakers or through the battle to buy a former industrial powerhouse, US Steel. In the lead-up to the 2024 presidential election, Trump is again wooing union voters. On the 3 September edition of ABC’s This Week, the Manhattan Institute president, Reihan Salam, noted that Trump “was trying to appeal to UAW members to talk about, for example, this effort to transition away from combustion engine vehicles”.Newman reflects: “It is relatively well-known [that] union members aren’t voting for Democrats like they used to. What we say is that for a very long time, Democrats did take unions for granted. They didn’t reinvest in the relationship with labor that would have been necessary to maintain some of the alliances and trust between rank-and-file labor and the Democrats.”Once, the bond was as strong as the steel worked by union hands across western Pennsylvania, especially in Pittsburgh, known to some as “The City That Built America”. Retirees repeatedly mentioned this in interviews with Newman and Skocpol. An 81-year-old explained longtime hostility to the Republican party in unionized steel mills and coal mines: “They figure that there was not a Republican in the world who took care of a working guy.” A union newsletter, one of many the authors examined, urged readers to “Vote Straight ‘D’ This November”. Even in the 1980 presidential election, which Ronald Reagan won decisively, union-heavy counties in Pennsylvania were a good predictor of votes for the incumbent Democrat, Jimmy Carter.The subsequent sea change is summed up in one of Newman and Skocpol’s chapter titles, From Union Blue to Trump Red. In 2016, the connection between Pennsylvania union voters and Democratic support all but evaporated as Trump flipped the normally Democratic state en route to victory. His showing that year set a new bar for support for a GOP presidential candidate among rank-and-file union members, bettering Reagan’s standard, with such members often defying leadership to back Trump.“It’s a myth that it all happened suddenly with Reagan,” says Skocpol. “Not really – it took longer.”‘In Union There Is Strength’To understand these changes, Newman and Skocpol examined larger transformations at work across the Rust Belt, especially in western Pennsylvania. It helped that they have Rust Belt backgrounds: Newman grew up in Pittsburgh, where she returned to research the book, while Skocpol was raised in the former industrial city of Wyandotte, Michigan, located south of Detroit.Once, as they now relate, unions wove themselves into community life. Union halls hosted events from weddings to retirement parties. Members showcased their pride through union memorabilia, some of which is displayed in the book, including samples from Skocpol’s 3,000-item collection. Among her favorites: a glass worker’s badge featuring images of drinking vessels and the motto “In Union There Is Strength”.That strength eventually dissipated, including with the implosion of the steel industry in western Pennsylvania in the 1970s and 80s. (According to one interviewee, the resulting population shift explains why there are so many Pittsburgh Steelers fans across the US.) In formerly thriving communities, cinemas and shoe stores closed down, as did union halls. The cover of Skocpol and Newman’s book depicts a line of shuttered storefronts in Braddock, Pennsylvania, the steel town whose former mayor, the Democrat John Fetterman, is now a US senator.Not all union members left western Pennsylvania. As the book explains, those continuing in employment did so in changed conditions. Steelworkers battled each other for dwindling jobs, capital held ever more power and Pittsburgh itself changed. The Steel City sought to reinvent itself through healthcare and higher education, steelworkers wondering where they stood.Blue-collar workers found a more receptive climate among conservative social organizations that filled the vacuum left by retreating unions: gun clubs that benefited from a strong hunting tradition and megachurches that replaced closed local churches. The region even became a center of activity for the Tea Party movement, in opposition to Barack Obama, a phenomenon Skocpol has researched on the national level.In 2016, although Trump and Hillary Clinton made a nearly equal number of visits to western Pennsylvania, they differed in where they went and what they said. Clinton headed to Pittsburgh. Trump toured struggling factory towns, to the south and west. In one, Monessen, he pledged to make American steel great again – a campaign position, the authors note, unuttered for decades and in stark contrast with Clinton’s anti-coal stance. As president, Trump arguably followed through, with a 2018 tariff on aluminum and steel imports. The book cites experts who opposed the move for various reasons, from harm to the economy to worsened relations with China.The authors say their book is not meant to criticize unions or the Democratic party. Democrats, they say, are taking positive steps in response to union members’ rightward shift.“We didn’t have time to research at length all the new kinds of initiatives that have been taken in a state like Wisconsin, like Georgia,” says Skocpol. “They have learned some of the lessons, are trying to create year-round, socially-embedded presences.”In 2020, Joe Biden made multiple visits to western Pennsylvania and ended up narrowly winning Erie county, which had been trending red. As president, he has sought to have the federal government purchase more US-made products, while launching renewable energy initiatives through union labor. Skocpol says Trump’s more ambitious promises, including an across-the-board 10% tariff, propose an unrealistic bridge to a bygone era.“Will Trump promise to do all these things?” asks Skocpol. “Of course he will. Will he actually do them more effectively if he becomes president again? God help us all.”
      Rust Belt Union Blues is published in the US by Columbia University Press More