Divide and Conquer

One of the great divide-and-conquer tricks the ruling class has played on the working class of this country is to [get them to] see politics like a spectator sport. It wants everyone who chooses to wear a red hat to hate everyone who votes blue; if you’re on the blue team, you have to hate everything the red team does. Both sides talk about bullshit issues to hype up their fan bases, while the real issues that impact working-class people are never addressed.

In the labor movement, at our best, we have a different way of doing politics. We don’t make politics about personalities or parties; we see politics as a negotiation. We don’t sit down to negotiate with corporate executives because we like them or trust them. We focus on what we need as a working class and what the hell it’s going to take to get it, and we do that whether we’re sitting across from the friendliest CEO or the meanest Wall Street con artist.

Politics is just like contract negotiation. You win what you have the power to fight for, and that’s exactly the situation we find ourselves in right now.

We’re not aligning everything we do with the Trump administration — we don’t align with any politician or president. We’re negotiating with the Trump administration; our approach to President Donald Trump is no different than our approach was to President Joe Biden, and it’s no different than our approach at Stellantis or Columbia University or General Dynamics.

I keep hearing people say, “UAW loves Trump now,” or “The UAW only supports Democrats.” It’s all bullshit. Our union has a clear North Star, and that’s the working class. The working class’s issues don’t change because somebody has a D or an R next to their name.

Ending the Free-Trade Disaster

For decades, our unions fought to end the free-trade disaster, and that was true under Republican and Democratic administrations. When we say we will never give up our First Amendment rights to speak out, whether it’s against genocide or for our union rights, that’s true no matter who’s in office; it’s true no matter who agrees or disagrees. That’s not flip-flopping. It’s called integrity.

We’ve seen some reckless and chaotic activity on trade from this administration, and there’s a lot of fear of disruption. But what we have to remember is that disruption is not new to factory workers in this country — disruption is what we’ve been living with for thirty years under a free-trade disaster.

It doesn’t mean we support reckless random tariffs. I don’t believe that’s the answer to all this. But there is a reason for tariffs, and it’s also a mistake to just defend the status quo, especially when it comes to free trade.

A lot of politicians and pundits are suddenly concerned about our trade agreements. But where was that concern when we lost four million manufacturing jobs in less than a decade in the 2000s? Where were the pundits when 90,000 plants closed in the wake of NAFTA [the North American Free Trade Agreement] ? Where was Wall Street when the Big Three closed over sixty facilities in the past twenty years?

That’s the difference. When working-class people suffer, it’s just the cost of doing business. When it’s Wall Street’s asses on the line, then it’s a crisis.

I know we’re all tied up in the fate of this economy; we can’t afford a recession. My question to the country is this: Can we afford 90,000 more plants closed? There are thirteen million manufacturing workers left in this country. We can’t afford to let employers threaten thirteen million families every day with destroying their jobs if they dare to demand their fair share. Free trade has been the most harmful government policy of my entire work life, and almost all of our entire work lives. We have to end this free-trade disaster, and we don’t care if it’s a Democrat or a Republican who ends it.

Against Trump’s Vision of America

How do we not only bring back and protect our jobs, but also protect our right to organize and our right to collectively bargain? How do we fight to blow up the billionaire economy while also defending [against] attacks on our right to protest, our right to retire with dignity, and our right to health care?

It’s not enough for politicians to talk a good game about wanting to bring back jobs — they need to be good union jobs, with good standards. And we have good reason to be suspicious that the Trump administration is not interested in supporting the right to organize or bargain.

Because here’s what we’ve seen so far from the Trump administration: we’ve seen the destruction of bargaining rights for a million federal workers. That’s not good for the working class. We’ve seen attacks on the National Labor Relations Board, including illegally firing a board member, leading to deadlock on workers’ cases. That’s not good for the working class. We’ve seen attacks planned on Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, programs that millions of workers depend on. That’s not good for the working class.

We’ve seen the absolute trampling of constitutional rights. We have seen the First Amendment go up in smoke at college campuses — with detentions, deportations, expulsions, and firings of people who dared to speak out against and protest against a war, just to call for a cease-fire. We have seen the right to due process disappear as working people are deported for no crime and no reason. That’s not good for the working class.

Mahmoud Khalil, who has now been detained for over a month for protesting the war, is a former UAW member. Grant Miner, the president of UAW Local 2710 at Columbia

University, was expelled for protesting the war the day before the bargaining was going to start. Rümeysa Öztürk, a Service Employees International Union [SEIU] member at Tufts University, has been detained for writing an op-ed. Kilmar Abrego García, a sheet metal apprentice in Maryland was deported for no reason, no crime, to a prison in El Salvador. We’ve seen the arbitrary and unlawful termination of hundreds of our members’ visas, which may lead to their unjust deportation. And the list goes on.

There is a reason we campaigned aggressively against this vision of America in the last election. We will continue to speak out and mobilize against it.

Our union participated in mass protests across the country as part of our campaign to kill the cuts at the National Institutes of Health [NIH]. The NIH is a part of the federal government that funds essential scientific research. That’s not waste; it’s not fraud; it’s not abuse. We represent five thousand members who just won their first union contract at the National Institutes of Health. We also represent tens of thousands of members whose jobs rely on funding provided by NIH at universities across the country. When we cure cancer, when we save lives with new medications, it’s because of these workers who bust their asses on high-level research that changes the world.

Our government should expand funding for life-saving research and allow researchers in the United States to be the first to find cures for diseases like cancer and Alzheimer’s. Cutting research funding kills union jobs, and even worse, it kills the hope of working people who rely on this research to see new treatments to save their loved ones’ lives. It kills the hopes of the millions of Americans who are caring for family members with Alzheimer’s to see advances in prevention and treatment. It kills the hope of a parent of a child with a rare disease whose only shot at survival is a clinical trial.

One of the first things the Trump administration did was go after NIH funding. Why did they do it? For the same reason as so much of their agenda: to steal money from the public to pay for billionaires’ tax cuts. This is the same reason they’re going after higher-education workers and institutions — because they want to use political leverage to claw back funds to pay out to the billionaires. We have joined a lawsuit to kill the cuts to NIH funding across the country. [Last week,] we hit the streets and rallied in DC, New York, Philadelphia, Seattle, LA, the Bay Area, and many more cities to save thousands of jobs and life-saving research.

We’re beginning to see the results. On Friday, [April 4,] a judge ruled against the Trump administration’s first round of cuts at the National Institutes of Health, and we’re already seeing more NIH funds being released. But the fight’s far from over.

“Free Trade” and the Working Class

When we speak out against these actions, we get called liberals by the right-wingers; when we speak out in support of tariffs, we get called right-wingers by the liberals. People say we’re flip-flopping or doing a 180. The truth is, what we are doing is acting with integrity. If you want to destroy our unions and our government and attack our members, we’re going to oppose you every step of the way. If you want to undo our broken, unfair trade system and raise the standards for factory workers, we’ll go to the mat to support that. Because we aren’t Democrats and we’re not Republicans — we are trade unionists.

I want to take some time to dig into what’s going on with trade and these tariffs. There’s a lot of confusion, a lot of hype, and a lot of chaos. If we were running the show, it would look a lot different. But there are a few things we should all understand about our trade rules and about these tariffs, because they affect your life, your future, and your family.

We need to acknowledge free trade has been a disaster for the working class. This is how the free-trade scam works: The government gives a green light to companies to build their product wherever they can find the most exploited workers — countries where desperate people work for $3 an hour, where there are no labor laws or environmental regulations. Then the companies kill jobs in the United States and run a race to the bottom around the globe. They force workers to compete with one another across borders, and the companies ship product back in at a massive profit, which they pocket for the executives and for the shareholders, and pay off the politicians for good measure.

Meanwhile we get Flint; we get Lordstown; we get Belvidere. We get communities that look like a bomb got dropped [on them]. We get divorce; we get drug addictions; we get suicide; we get deaths of despair.

What do consumers get? They get price gouged. What does Wall Street get? Massive profits. What do politicians get? They get huge campaign contributions from companies and billionaires flush with cash. What do voters get? They get politicians bought off by corporate America, who continue to pass laws that harm the working class.

And what do foreign workers get? In Mexico, they’ve seen their real wages cut in half since NAFTA passed. The big promise of NAFTA was it was going to lift up the standard for everybody. But taking inflation into account, the average real wages of Mexican autoworkers were about $6 an hour in 1993; today the average hourly wage of an autoworker in Mexico is $3 an hour. NAFTA has been devastating for autoworkers in the United States and Mexico.

Where do tariffs come into play? In our view, tariffs are a tool in the toolbox — they’re a first step. They have to be well-designed; they need to be paired with other policies and changes, but they are a start to stop the bleeding.

How Tariffs Can Help Autoworkers

Here is our position as a union on tariffs and free trade. One: free trade has been a disaster for the working class, and we have to end these broken anti-worker policies. Two: we can and should reshore tens of thousands of jobs in very short order, which would raise the standard for all workers. Strategic tariffs can play a role in that. Three: the automakers, the auto market, and corporate America can afford it.

Right now, there are three main kinds of tariffs on the table. Some of these tariffs target entire countries, and some target specific industries. We support some use of tariffs on auto manufacturing and other similar industries. We don’t support the use of tariffs for political gains about immigration or fentanyl; we do not support reckless chaotic tariffs on all countries at crazy rates. We support and have always supported tariffs on the auto industry, on heavy trucks, and on agricultural implements.

The difference is, the auto tariffs are designed for a specific purpose. They raise the costs of the companies that have killed good jobs in a race to the bottom for cheap labor elsewhere while Wall Street makes a killing. Specifically, we have industries where right now there are active plants operating under capacity in the United States, while workers outside the US are exploited for $3 an hour.

We have excess auto-production capacity in the US: We could bring back tens of thousands of jobs in a matter of months. That’s before we even talk about building new plants; we’re talking about adding shifts, adding lines, and adding jobs, making products that we know are profitable. Companies could do this immediately and bring back tens of thousands of jobs.

An example: Six months ago, over a thousand workers were laid off at Stellantis’s Warren Truck Assembly Plant. For eighty years, that plant has operated and built profitable vehicles. Recently the company decided to move production of the Ram truck to a plant in Mexico, where workers make $3 an hour — instead of paying workers $37 an hour, they’re paying workers $3 an hour.

But when they do this, the price of the truck doesn’t go down, and the wages in Mexico don’t go up. Instead, company executives and shareholders pocket the difference while a thousand workers’ lives are upended here in Michigan.

There are tons of plants all over this country just like that. We took a look at a handful of Big Three plants, and we asked ourselves how many more vehicles we could produce if we went back to the levels that those plants operated at just ten years ago. The answer was staggering: twelve Big Three plants that are still in operation were producing over two million more vehicles every year. These plants still have that capacity; that’s tens of thousands of jobs that we could bring back right now.

Our research tells us that if the Big Three alone got their currently active plants up to 100 percent capacity, they could add 50,000 jobs. That’s not even including closed plants like Lordstown Assembly in Ohio, which could bring thousands more jobs back. That’s not including building new plants.

For every hundred auto assembly jobs that are created in the United States, there are another seven hundred jobs created in the supply chain. Fifty thousand more jobs in the Big Three means hundreds of thousands of more jobs at parts suppliers and other businesses that support them. That’s not even including non-US automakers.

The other thing we hear about these auto tariffs is that they’ll be too expensive for working people — the automakers can’t afford it, so they’ll pass the cost on to the consumer. We call that what is: it’s bullshit. It is exactly what we heard in our stand-up strike; it’s what the bosses say whenever workers have the courage to demand more of their fair share. Back in 2023, we said record profits mean record contracts. Company executives said our demands to raise wages and end tiers would force them to raise prices. They said the industry would never survive.

It turns out the companies lied: they could afford to do the right thing then and they can afford to do the right thing now. Here’s a chart that shows the price of a new car next to the automakers’ price gouging.

See how the profit goes up right alongside the price? That’s because they’re price gouging, and they’ve been price gouging for years. That tells us that we shouldn’t trust the companies when they say they can’t afford it. It also means there’s flexibility in the price: they don’t need to pass the cost of auto tariffs on to consumers, because they’re already making plenty of money.

And where do those profits go? Wall Street. The profits don’t get reinvested in new plants; they don’t go to the workers; they don’t go to the federal government to fund Social Security or Medicare or Medicaid.

In the past fifteen years, the top ten automakers have made $1.6 trillion in profits. They have funneled $367 billion into stock buyback schemes that artificially inflate the value of company shares and further enrich company executives and the 1 percent. They could have built dozens of plants with that money — they chose not to. They chose to loot the Rust Belt to pay off Wall Street.

A First Step

The auto tariffs are a first step in ending the free-trade disaster. We don’t need to trust Donald Trump or any politician to fix it for us. But the Trump administration is the first administration in my lifetime that’s been willing to do something about this broken free-trade system. Tariffs are the first step, but we need to put out our vision for an auto industry that doesn’t leave behind working-class people, and then we need to fight like hell for it.

In 2026, the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement [USMCA], which is the new rendition of NAFTA, is up for review. Under the USMCA, autoworkers are still living under a race to the bottom. Mexican autoworkers are still having their union rights trampled on; American autoworkers are still under constant threat of plant closures.

We want to sit down at the bargaining table and renegotiate the USMCA trade deal today. A new trade deal for North America should have a manufacturing minimum wage. A new trade deal for North America should make it so if you want to sell product in a country, you have to make a product in that country. That would be good for Canada, for the United States, and for Mexico.

A new trade deal should fix the race to the bottom in the supply chain also — we don’t want our independent parts suppliers members, who are just as essential to this industry, to be left behind. We need enforcement mechanisms to make sure that trade is tied to how these companies treat their workers, and we need a trade agreement that guarantees that labor rights are protected in Canada, the US, and Mexico.

That’s what we’re fighting for, and already dozens of members of Congress have called for renegotiating the USMCA. But we also know that new trade policy won’t fix it all. We also need a plan to rebuild the auto industry beyond fair-trade rules. We need to invest in America.

Under the Biden administration, we started to see some of that investment. We need to be there when rules are put in place, to make sure investment isn’t abused by corporate America to undermine workers or the auto industry standards we’ve won. We had to spell that out for the Biden administration, because when it started their trade deals, again, working-class people were an afterthought.

We also need new labor policy. We’ve talked for years about the broken labor laws in this country that make it nearly impossible for millions of workers who’d like to join a union to actually do so. It wasn’t corporate America that built the American dream; it was the labor movement, and it’s the labor movement that will save the American   dream. But our laws have to change in order to do that.

Finally, we need to seriously take on Wall Street. There was a time in this country when it was illegal to do stock buybacks to pump up your share price. You couldn’t just strip companies for parts and sell them off to make a buck for shareholders [and] corporate executives had reasonable limits on compensation. There was a time when there was a corporate tax rate that pushed companies to reinvest in their companies instead of looting them.

Putting Workers First

Right now, trade is on the table — think about it as collectively negotiating job security with the federal government. But we’re not stopping at trade. We’re coming for our fair share across the board, and we’ve been clear about what that looks like. It goes back to our four core issues.

One, a living wage for everybody. Not a minimum wage, a living wage — a wage you can support a family on. Two, health care for all. We can’t keep living like this, where people can’t afford to go to the doctor or risk bankruptcy. Three, a dignified retirement. The majority of the working class in this country have no retirement savings. We need to expand Social Security and Medicare so people can actually have a life after they give decades to these companies. We’re going to the mat in May 2028 to win that at the Big Three after years of being left behind. Four, a life off the job. Nobody should have to work two or three jobs or spend eighty hours a week in a factory just to live paycheck to paycheck.

We disagree with 99 percent of what the Trump administration is doing, when it comes to attacks on labor and working-class people and attacks on free speech. We are supporting national mobilizations against the Trump administration’s attacks on federal workers and immigrants. We’ve joined lawsuits against the Trump administration’s attacks on higher-education institutions. And I cannot stress enough how strongly we oppose this administration’s attacks on our freedom of speech and basic civil liberties.

We also oppose the free-trade disaster. We oppose these policies under Republicans and Democrats, and we will support their reversal under Republicans and Democrats. We aren’t going to change our position on ending free trade just because Trump is president.

But no matter what party you voted for, understand there is a direct line between the free-trade disaster and the political chaos in this country. Plant closures and mass layoffs resulted in intense pain and suffering and anger for hundreds of thousands of working families in our country. All that pain and anger had to go somewhere — a lot of it went to support Donald Trump for president, and now it’s being directed at immigrants, at transgender people, at higher education.

That’s the wrong target. The right target is corporate America, and the sooner both parties understand this, the sooner our country will begin to deal with our real issues. We need to build a political movement that can put the working class first, and to do that we’re going to need working-class people to step up, to speak up, and take on corporate America, from the bargaining table to the ballot box. No matter who’s on the other side of that table or in that office, we’re going to have to stand up and stand strong with integrity on our issues.