UAW Strike: will Donald Trump support auto workers strikes in Michigan?
After a visit to a UAW picket line by President Biden, Donald Trump will also be making a stop in Michigan to speak with auto workers.
Donald Trump, the current front-runner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, will travel to Michigan on Wednesday to meet with current and retired autoworkers. However, unlike President Biden, who walked the picket line with United Auto Workers (UAW) members, Trump will speak with a different crowd.
Will Donald Trump meet with UAW leadership?
In an interview with CNN, Shawn Fain, the Presidnet of the UAW, said that he would not be meeting with Trump. Fain argued that Trump “serves the billionaire class” and that the former president does not have the needs of his members of the working class in mind. Already, these comments by the UAW Presidnet hamper any opportunity for Trump to garner support from striking workers and the vast majority of the public who support the UAW’s strike.
However, workers on the picket line who represent a wide array of political views are excited by the high-profile visits. The workers are focused on extracting concessions from the companies and hope that their struggle can avoid becoming a partisan issue.
Donald Trump to visit a non-union business in Michigan
Though Trump’s visit is high profile, it differs significantly from that made by Presidnet Biden.
According to Fox 2, an affiliate station out of Detriot, Trump will visit a non-UAW affiliated auto manufacturing plant in Macomb County to a crowd “of mostly retired UAW members.” The former president had said that he would be meeting with current UAW members as well, but Drake Enterprises, the plant Trump is set to visit, is a non-union manufacturer and supplier. Such a move by the presidential candidate’s team is not likely to be seen as an act of solidarity by UAW members entering their third week on strike.
UAW leadership call out Donald Trump and his planned trip to Michigan
The UAW’s X account called Donald Trump out, with Fain describing Trump’s decision to hold “a rally for union members at a non-union business” as “pathetic.” Additionally, the union called to attention the lack of solidarity shown by the Trump administration in 2019 when GM workers went on strike.
Fain added that if one wants to know if Donald Trump supports unions, “all you need to do is look at his track record.”
“In 2008, during the Great Recession, he blamed UAW members, he blamed our contracts for everything that was going wrong with these companies,” said Fain on Wolf Blitzer’s program.
And Trump’s attack on UAW members didn’t stop there. In 2015, when running for president, Donald Trump suggested that some UAW union jobs should be rotated to the south, believing that workers there would be willing to work for lower wages. Fain and many UAW members saw this suggestion as an attack on their livelihoods and a way to pit workers against one another.