Evan Vucci/AP Photo
President Joe Biden greets striking United Auto Workers on the picket line, September 26, 2023, in Van Buren Township, Michigan.
The Revolving Door Project, a Prospect partner, scrutinizes the executive branch and presidential power. Follow them at therevolvingdoorproject.org.
The Democratic Party has its faults. It is too corporatized, often too hung up on assumptions about the electorate, and will show a genuine unwillingness to act when even the least savvy of politicos can see something is an easy win. That said, for the most part, Democrats are aligned on specific boilerplate issues. Yes, there is a spectrum of policy prescriptions, but ultimately everyone wants the same thing. One such issue is supporting labor rights and unions. Democrats are the pro-worker party—which is a relatively recent development. Just witness President Biden, who was known principally as a loyal advocate of Delaware’s credit card companies and as the author of the disastrous bankruptcy reform bill in 2005, making history by becoming the first sitting president to visit a picket line of striking autoworkers in Michigan.
Some Democrats are very unhappy about this development. Take one former Obama official turned pundit, Steve Rattner, who recently wrote a piece in The New York Times attacking the United Auto Workers for demanding too much from the big automakers. Maybe it is time the media stopped listening to someone clearly out of line with basic values his alleged party supports.
Rattner has a history here. He was appointed by President Obama as the “car czar” to oversee the auto bailout in 2009. Indeed, the punishing conditions he imposed on the auto unions in that bailout—which came mere months after Wall Street got a far larger bailout, with virtually no strings attached, after causing the economic crisis that nearly killed the auto industry in the first place—are one of the main causes of the strike.
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Still, Rattner’s central role in the bailout grants his voice a lot of legitimacy on this issue in elite media outlets (he’s also a talking head on Morning Joe). And since voters tend to associate the mainstream media with the Democratic Party already, it’s easy to see how his talking points could be taken as the party’s own line. “I’m all for the auto workers getting paid more,” Rattner wrote. “But this increasingly militant U.A.W. is overplaying its hand … I worry about the implications for our economy and for President Biden.”
Rattner—who, after a long career on Wall Street (and pay-to-play allegations), is now Michael Bloomberg’s personal money manager—tries to establish his pro-worker bona fides by vaguely endorsing some sort of a pay raise, but then pivots hard to associating the UAW with general Democratic anxieties, especially associating the union with a pre-existing bugbear for his co-partisans. But he’s not the only one following this formula: The structure of Rattner’s complaint is very similar to how so-called populist Republicans are talking about the strike.
As Luke Savage writes in Jacobin, these conservatives are splitting hairs to sound vaguely pro-worker without actually saying anything pro-union or anti-business. To hear them tell it, the strike is a people’s revolt against the U.S. ever breaking its addiction to fossil fuels.
“Auto workers deserve a raise—and they deserve to have their jobs protected from Joe Biden’s stupid climate mandates that are destroying the US auto industry and making China rich,” Sen. Josh Hawley tweeted. (Incidentally, back in 2015 Hawley lamented the failure of an attempted override of a Missouri anti-union bill by tweeting: “Time for an end to union-backed candidates in GOP.”) “Autoworkers are getting totally ripped off by crooked Joe Biden and also their horrendous leadership,” former President Donald Trump said at a rally, adding that “these people are allowing our country to do these electric vehicles that very few people want.”
Conservatives are splitting hairs to sound vaguely pro-worker without actually saying anything pro-union or anti-business.
The same role that a general anxiety about the election serves for Rattner’s Democratic readers, a general anxiety about green energy serves for Hawley and Trump’s fellow Republicans. But in both cases, this “pay raise yes, everything else no” formula actually reflects the Big Three’s own talking points.
They’ve already offered the UAW higher wages, though not as high as the union wants. In fact, the union was insulted by some of the offers. But pay is ultimately a secondary issue in this strike. The UAW’s foremost concerns are ensuring that EV manufacturing plants have good union jobs, reinstating pensions and other benefits, and ending the current contract’s tiered system, which offers benefits and compensation based on seniority, which artificially divides workers based on their hiring dates.
UAW President Shawn Fain’s bold demands and uncompromising critique of the Big Three’s greed immediately rallied 75 percent of the country to his side of the fight. That’s 15 more points of popularity than the U.S. military, our highest-polling institution for decades.
As a result, progressives like Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) and Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Sherrod Brown (D-OH) ran to walk the picket line in full-throated endorsement of the strikers, followed by President Biden. But conservative Republicans like Hawley and Trump, and conservative Democrats like Rattner, have been much more equivocal.
You can tell how flimsy Rattner’s word-association-as-argument is by how he doesn’t even try to substantiate it. The UAW is “Risking Our Economy and the Election,” Rattner’s headline blares in the Times. Then he just notes how important Michigan is to 2024 (and isn’t that a reason to give Michigan voters what they want?) and never explains how the strike risks Biden’s presidency.
Indeed, in a piece over 1,000 words long, Rattner never actually identifies anything the UAW is doing wrong. He admits that autoworkers never recovered from the 2009 rescue he negotiated, but insists without evidence that “in their zeal, they are asking for too much.” Then he uses the language of sober economic analysis to dress up a threat: It sure would be a shame if the Big Three moved all their production to Mexico, wouldn’t it?
And this is not the first time Rattner has criticized the UAW. In 2011, despite the concessions the UAW made during the bailout discussions, Rattner suggested that the autoworkers should have had their pay cut. It’s rhetoric like this that opened the door for Trump in 2016 to appeal to Rust Belt workers with phony promises of a manufacturing renaissance.
Clearly, the Biden administration sees the value in standing with the autoworkers, as shown by Biden’s decision to join the union on the picket line—just hours after Fain invited Biden to do so. Naturally, Rattner was enraged by this move, telling NBC in an interview: “For him to be going on a picket line is outrageous … he bowed to the progressives, and now he’s going out there to put his thumb on the scale. And it’s wrong.”
Outrageous to him, but who else? The overwhelming support for the strike, even among a large chunk of Republicans, suggests that most Americans understand when they are being screwed over by big corporations. They understand what it is like to be treated unfairly by an employer. It’s perhaps not surprising that Wall Street money managers with a long history of inflicting unfair treatment are so out of touch with the American people. But they have no place in today’s Democratic Party.
