[Since United Auto Workers union members struck the Big Three
automakers, GOP candidates have confirmed that the party of Eisenhower
is now the party of unreconstructed reactionaries. ]
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DEMOCRATS WALKING THE PICKET LINES VS. ANTI-WORKER REPUBLICANS  
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John Nichols
September 26, 2023
The Capital Times (Madison, WI)
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_ Since United Auto Workers union members struck the Big Three
automakers, GOP candidates have confirmed that the party of Eisenhower
is now the party of unreconstructed reactionaries. _

United Auto Workers members march through downtown Detroit on Sept.
15., Paul Sancya - staff, AP

 

When Dwight Eisenhower was running for president in 1952 as the
nominee of a saner Republican Party, he appeared at the American
Federation of Labor convention and delivered a full-throated embrace
of industrial unions.

“Today in America unions have a secure place in our industrial
life,” Eisenhower told the delegates. “Only a handful of
unreconstructed reactionaries harbor the ugly thought of breaking
unions. Only a fool would try to deprive working men and women of the
right to join the union of their choice.”

Well, Ike, meet the Republicans who are running for your party’s
2024 presidential nomination. Since United Auto Workers union members
struck the Big Three automakers, GOP candidates have confirmed that
the party of Eisenhower is now the party of unreconstructed
reactionaries.

While Democrats such as President Joe Biden and Wisconsin U.S. Rep.
Mark Pocan have joined UAW picket lines — and echoed the union
critique of the auto companies, declaring that “record corporate
profits should be shared by record contracts for the UAW” —
Republicans like Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina want to fire the
strikers.

Recalling former President Ronald Reagan’s decision to dismiss
striking members of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers
Organization in 1981, Scott said, “I think Ronald Reagan gave us a
great example when federal employees decided they were going to
strike. He said, ‘You strike, you’re fired.’ Simple concept to
me, to the extent that we can use that once again.”

The anti-union senator’s proposal to extend Reagan’s assault on
public-sector workers to the private sector drew a stiff rebuke from
the UAW. Union President Shawn Fain ripped Scott’s remarks as
“just another example of how the employer class abuses the working
class in America; employers willfully violate labor law with little to
no repercussions.”

Fain filed a complaint against Scott with the National Labor Relations
Board on Thursday and declared, “Time for more stringent laws to
protect workers’ rights!”

Scott was hardly an outlier among the top GOP contenders.

Former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley, an anti-union zealot in the mode of
former Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, denounced both Biden and the UAW
strike.

“When you have the most pro-union president and he touts that he is
emboldening the unions, this is what you get,” griped Haley. “The
union is asking for a 40% raise, the companies have come back with a
20% raise. I think any of the taxpayers would love to have a 20% raise
and think that’s great.”

What she neglected to mention, however, is that the UAW asked for a
sizable wage boost — over a number of years — to make union
members whole after they sacrificed earnings, cost-of-living increases
and benefits to keep the auto companies afloat during the Great
Recession. According to the Economic Policy Institute, “Across the
U.S., auto manufacturing workers have seen their average real hourly
earnings fall 19.3 percent since 2008.”
And of course Haley failed to acknowledge that the union demand for a
40% pay bump merely parallels the increase in pay for CEOs in an
industry that has made $250 billion in profits over the past decade.

As ugly as the anti-worker rhetoric from Scott and Haley has been,
there’s a case to be made that the most crudely anti-union
sentiments were expressed by Donald Trump, the former president who
for years has sought — cynically, but with some success — to fool
industrial workers into imagining him as their ally. Since the strike
began, Trump's rhetoric has been even more anti-union, and more
disingenuous, than that of the CEOs of GM, Ford and Stellantis.

During an appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press” last week, Trump
was asked which side he was on in the strike. Trump pointedly avoided
taking the side of the strikers and their union. “I’m on the side
of making our country great,” he announced, before launching into a
critique of electric vehicles.

As part of his diatribe, Trump ripped into UAW leaders and members for
focusing in negotiations on preserving jobs and improving pay and
conditions as the industry transitions to electric vehicle production.

“The auto workers are being sold down the river by their
leadership,” claimed Trump, who alleged that Fain is “not doing a
good job in representing his union, because he’s not going to have a
union in three years from now. Those jobs are all going to be gone,
because all of those electric cars are going to be made in China.”

Trump’s playing one of the oldest cards in the corporate deck,
seeking to drive a wedge between workers and their union. He planned
to up the ante Wednesday with an appearance in Detroit. But the union
is having none of it. Though the UAW has not made an endorsement in
the presidential race, Fain ripped into Trump.

“Every fiber of our union is being poured into fighting the
billionaire class and an economy that enriches people like Donald
Trump at the expense of workers,” said Fain. “We can’t keep
electing billionaires and millionaires that don’t have any
understanding what it is like to live paycheck to paycheck and
struggle to get by and expecting them to solve the problems of the
working class.”

Trump would have done better to study up on the perspective of
Eisenhower, who referred to right-wingers who attacked labor laws as
“stupid” and said, “I have no use for those — regardless of
their political party — who hold some foolish dream of spinning the
clock back to days when unorganized labor was a huddled, almost
helpless mass.”

There is nothing huddled or helpless about the UAW. It’s fighting
for worker rights, and polling shows that — no matter what these
Republican presidential contenders say — 75% of the American people
are on the union’s side.

_John Nichols is associate editor of The Capital
Times. [email protected] and @NicholsUprising. _

* Republicans and the Strike; United Auto Workers Strike;
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