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**FEBRUARY 6, 2024**
On the Prospect website
Pre-Preemption
Conservative states have now taken to blocking liberal cities from even
thinking about legislating on behalf of their residents. BY HAROLD
MEYERSON
Casualties of a Failed Health Care System
Why even an elite Boston hospital can feel like a makeshift infirmary in
a war zone BY ROBERT KUTTNER
Will Biden Get Chip Markets Right?
A new paper outlines how to avoid worsening market concentration in
semiconductors with billions in subsidies for U.S. onshoring. BY LUKE
GOLDSTEIN
The Mission
Tom Tomorrow brings you This Modern World BY TOM TOMORROW
Meyerson on TAP
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**** Pro-Union Joe and Grad Student Misgivings
Some UAW teaching assistants object to their union's endorsement of
Biden. That's understandable but idiotic.
Lamentably but predictably, some of the graduate student teaching and
research assistants who are members of the United Auto Workers have
denounced their union for endorsing Joe Biden's re-election bid last
month. Their anger at his still unconditional support for Israel in its
war on Gaza is completely understandable. What they don't seem to
understand is that their call for their union to repudiate Biden is also
a "fuck you" to the majority of UAW members who are actually
autoworkers.
At the risk of belaboring what should be obvious, no American president
ever backed unions generally, and the UAW in particular, in the way that
Biden has. Joining the union's picket line in its strike against the
Big Three automakers, appointing officials at the Department of Labor
and the National Labor Relations Board who have pushed the pro-worker
envelope beyond all expectation, Biden has worked to advance unions and
collective bargaining in a way that no other president or elected
official ever has. For that matter, it's only due to the decisions by
Democratic appointees to the NLRB that graduate students at private
colleges and universities even have the right to join unions and win
contracts. And by virtue of groundbreaking rulings by Biden's
appointees, undergraduate college employees and athletes can now
organize as well (the Dartmouth men's basketball team will shortly
vote on unionizing in a first-ever NLRB-run election for college
athletes).
It's not as if other pro-union presidents didn't have progressive
blemishes. Franklin Roosevelt largely accommodated himself to the Jim
Crow outrages and strictures imposed by the white Southern Democrats who
were part of his party's base. He refused to help Spain's democratic
government in its fight against Franco's fascists. That said, he had
the enthusiastic support of virtually all unions (and, in 1936 and 1944,
the American Communist Party) in his bids for re-election, due to his
precedent-setting support for unions-which still falls short of the
level of support that Biden has given unions.
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In its strike against the Big Three, the UAW won record contracts for
its members (most particularly, its lowest-paid members) and is now
conducting what could be a historic organizing campaign of the non-union
auto factories in the South. (Just today, it announced that 50 percent
of the workers at Volkswagen's factory in Chattanooga had signed union
affiliation cards.) It's impossible to quantify how much the support
from the Biden administration has helped the union and its members, but
the UAW's leaders-including those representing New York, New
England, and the West Coast, which have heavy concentrations of grad
student members-understand just how much Biden's support is without
precedent, and how total a disaster Trump's election would be for
American workers.
Ironically, in the larger world of American voters and American unions,
Biden's political problems are precisely the reverse of what we've
just seen within the UAW. Polling shows him leading Trump among the
college-educated and trailing badly within the Democrats' onetime
working-class base. For that matter, breaking down the exit poll numbers
from the 2020 presidential election shows that Biden carried the vote of
union members with college degrees by an overwhelming
48-percentage-point margin, but lost the vote of union members with no
such degrees by six percentage points. That means that members of the
two unions representing teachers (the American Federation of Teachers
and the National Education Association), whose combined membership comes
to about one-third of the nation's union members, voted decisively for
Biden, while his support among blue-collar and retail-sector union
members was a sometime thing, at best.
Biden not only needs to make our support for Israel conditional on
ending its war, supporting a two-state solution, and demolishing its
West Bank settlements. Even more fundamentally, he needs to run on a
future of industrial renewal (green variety), paid sick leave,
affordable child care, a decent family policy (expanded child tax
credits, for instance), higher taxes on the rich and corporations, and
reining in the profit margins that have inflicted higher prices on
American families. All that would not only help him with both sides of
the UAW divide, but with both sides of the class divide in the American
electorate.
~ HAROLD MEYERSON
Follow Harold Meyerson on Twitter
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