Carlos Osorio/AP Photo
United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain addresses delegates at the union’s 2023 Special Bargaining Convention, March 27, 2023, in Detroit.
Shawn Fain, the newly elected president of the United Auto Workers, and his fellow insurgents who ousted the ancien régime in the recent elections to the union’s executive board pledged a more confrontational approach to the auto companies in the course of their campaigns. That approach—or at least one of tougher bargaining—has now been extended to their relations with the Biden administration.
A story in today’s New York Times reports on an internal memo that Fain sent out to members on Tuesday. In it, he explained that the union would withhold an early endorsement of Biden’s 2024 candidacy (while also making clear it would never support Donald Trump) over its concerns about the administration’s new climate regulations, which stipulate that by 2032, two-thirds of all new passenger cars must be all-electric. The problem for the autoworkers is that all-electric cars have fewer parts than gas-powered cars, and producing them requires fewer than half the number of workers needed to turn out the gas-guzzlers.
There’s no question that the legislation Biden got through Congress in 2021 and 2022 is already bolstering manufacturing, and domestic manufacturing at that. There’s also no question that his is the most pro-labor administration in the nation’s history, and that his appointees at the National Labor Relations Board and the Department of Labor have been working to make the right to form a union more real, despite the substantial revocation of that right by decades of court rulings and legislative nibbling. Absent an actual reform to the National Labor Relations Act, however, which Democrats have sought since the 1960s without ever coming up with enough Senate votes, there are limits to what they can do to make those rights real again.
All that, however, is quite distinct from the problem facing the autoworkers, which is the elimination of jobs, union and otherwise, due to shifting factors of production. This is nothing new, of course: Machinery, robots, and the like have already eliminated millions of jobs in manufacturing and construction. (The shop floor of a modern steel mill, for instance, is all but devoid of people.) What’s different here is that the elimination of jobs is effectively hastened not by changes in the manufacturing process, but by governmental action.
The real question, then, is largely one of “just transition”—whether the government can devise and enact policies that provide autoworkers who lose their livelihoods in the transition to electric with a comparable level of economic standing and security. As events would have it, the “justest” transition I’m aware of was at least partly devised by a then-former director of research for the UAW: economist Nat Weinberg, who was also dubbed “Walter Reuther’s brain trust.” Working for the UAW from the 1940s through the 1970s, Weinberg figured out how to actualize Reuther’s most innovative proposals, including annual wage increases keyed not just to the cost of living but also to the productivity advances of the Big Three automakers. He also devised the union’s “guaranteed annual wage,” in which the auto companies agreed to supplement their workers’ unemployment insurance to the level of their regular pay during those weeks every year when they shut down production to reconfigure their assembly lines to the demands of their new cars.
After he retired, Weinberg came to the aid of San Francisco Rep. Phil Burton, Congress’s foremost labor-leftist. Burton had introduced a bill that would greatly expand the Redwoods National Park, which ran parallel to the California coast north of San Francisco. The expansion, however, would mean the permanent loss of jobs to several thousand loggers, and thus sparked the opposition of unions whose causes Burton had invariably championed. Burton then turned to Weinberg, who came up with legislation that allocated federal funding to those loggers at the same level as their pay and benefits, for six full years (11 if they were near retirement age). A legislative wizard, Burton then got the bill through Congress.
What the new-model UAW appears to be doing is leaning on the administration to do more to ease its members’ transition. Seems to me like they need a new-model Nat Weinberg, too.
