Photo: United Auto Workers Strike 2023; creator: White House; public domain
CNN reports that union members, once uniformly Democrat in voting, have increasingly shifted to vote Republican. It’s not difficult to see why, especially if you are willing to honestly assess the issues surrounding the United Auto Workers strike. The UAW strike is music to the ears of far-Left Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT), who quickly piled on by deploring “the outrageous level of corporate greed.” His slovenly-dressed comrade in the U.S. Senate, the foul-mouthed John Fetterman, joined picketing strikers.
The radical new UAW president Shawn Fain declared that “billionaires in my opinion don’t have a right to exist. The very existence of billionaires shows us that we have an economy that is working for the benefit of the few, and not the many.” With comments like that from Fain, is it any wonder why conservative auto workers who believe in the American dream are having difficulty identifying with the goals of their union? As soon as the strike was announced, a central demand by the militant new UAW leadership was to shrink to a 4-day work week while insisting on full 5-day pay. This would harm the competitiveness of the Detroit automakers, and set the precedent for a broad reduction in other services to the American public, such as reduced mail delivery.
At a time when the economy is struggling so badly, the last thing America needs is more people sitting around at home, whether due to unemployment or underemployment. The radical leftists that make up the UAW’s leadership aren’t interested in giving workers the chance to be paid well for a hard day’s work. They only want to take as much as they can take while giving as little as they can give, all justified in the name of class warfare.
The future for American workers is conservatives’ consistently strong stance against losing automobile jobs to China and against subsidizing electric cars that Detroit cannot afford to make. Rather than be left behind due to their outdated class warfare rhetoric, the UAW leaders should identify with conservatives’ message to attain employment growth with good-paying manufacturing jobs.
This post originally appeared at https://www.phyllisschlafly.com/liberalism-and-conservatism/leftist-leadership-at-uaw-misses-the-mark/
Phyllis Schlafly