Biden’s auto strike embrace is an unprecedented error
Tiana Lowe Doescher
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The oldest president in the nation’s history has just shattered another glass ceiling. Amid the worst inflationary crisis in 40 years, one driven in significant part by an unprecedented labor shortage, Joe Biden has become the first president to join the front lines of a labor strike, this time with the auto workers in Michigan.
The political calculus Biden believes is obvious. Four years after Hillary Clinton’s historic upset in the Great Lakes State, Biden won Michigan by fewer than 160,000 votes, a slightly larger margin than Donald Trump’s victory in 2016 but significantly smaller than Barack Obama’s in 2012. Pressured by the same left-wing activists who have driven his regulatory agenda, Biden is betting that a public show of support for the labor unions will help shore up the Rust Belt vote crucial to clinching an Electoral College majority.
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But of course, Biden is operating under the same delusion that led him to believe that branding the catastrophic economy “Bidenomics” would win him back some favor. In practice, Biden’s unprecedented embrace of the United Auto Workers is likely an unparalleled unforced error.
The UAW is a private sector union in the same way that a glass of wine constitutes a serving of fruit. Even after Republicans were moronic enough to effectively federalize the domestic auto oligopoly with the $85 billion boondoggle bailout during the Great Recession, the UAW continues to act as a clearinghouse for Democrats, who received 99% of all UAW donations in the 2022 election cycle. Now, as the union lobbies against the taxpayers who have directly and indirectly funded them, Biden has decided to side with the minority of workers over the majority of consumers.
So what exactly do the auto workers want? While average prime-age workers work more than 40 hours a week, the UAW strikers want to work only 32 hours per week — but with a pay raise of 46% and a defined benefits package. The axiomatic opposition to such a proposal is that, by definition, increasing pay while decreasing productivity is a wage-price spiral. But in simpler terms that anyone can understand, the union wants to take advantage of preexisting inflation and make the problem worse.
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According to the consumer price index, new car prices are up 21% since Biden took office, and used car prices are up more than 27%. Car parts are 22% more expensive, and auto repair prices are up 26%. Mind you, this is well above the 17% overall increase to the CPI since the start of Biden’s presidency, and more than 10 times the Federal Reserve’s maximum target of a 2% annual inflation rate. Hourly wages across industries are up only 13%, constituting a real wage cut, yet the autoworkers union — which, again, is effectively a public sector union lobbying against the taxpayers — wants an effective near-doubling of hourly wages.
Biden’s best defense in the future, when the public inevitably turns on a strike that exacerbates the car price crisis, is that useful idiot “Republicans In Name Only” in the Senate have followed suit in paying their indulgences to the posers on the picket lines. But the unprecedented stunt is that Biden is a president palling around with the strikers while the rest of the workforce is waking up to the consequences of the labor shortage.