Some days, you just have to sit back and wonder why the opposition never learns.
Then, of course, there are other days where you watch them slowly dig a hole that they have no idea is leading them to a place they will never be able to crawl out of. That's when you hope you have an adequate amount of Cherry Coke and some Raisinets to just sit back and enjoy the show.
That is what UAW leadership is doing right now with their act of not taking a look at their own corruption over the past 30 years but focusing on the big orange boogeyman that is Donald Trump. I suspect more and more blue-collar types are going to be wondering what are they paying leadership for very soon.
I wrote a bit earlier this week: The UAW Should Be Striking the Biden Administration Over the Push to End Auto Jobs. Turns out, I was spot on with this, and we shall see why in a moment.
However, let's first grab a glimpse of what I wrote from the article linked above.
When I read this piece here and looked at some of the numbers of how many jobs would be lost to the transition to electric vehicles I was amazed that the union leadership even gives a dime to the Democrats.
President Joe Biden praised General Motors chief executive Mary Barra at a 2022 event, saying "we owe you big" for pushing the auto industry towards all-electric production over the next decade. The president’s kind words for Barra, and their decision to team up to back a transition to electric vehicles, could come back to haunt both parties amid a historic United Auto Workers strike.
The 150,000-member union has singled out Barra as an example of corporate greed at the "Big Three" automakers, a group that also includes Ford and Stellantis. UAW, which launched a strike at four auto plants last week, took a shot at Barra over her industry-leading $29 million annual salary. UAW president Shawn Fain declared "war" on the Big Three last month, citing the $200 million Barra has raked in over the past decade. The union wants a hefty increase to salaries and benefits for its members, along with assurances that jobs will be protected during the transition to EV production.
That dramatic shift will likely come at a steep cost in terms of auto industry jobs, and the transition to electric vehicles is at the center of the auto workers' complaints. According to one estimate, the transition to EV production will come at the cost of 117,000 auto jobs.
This, to me, was the final kick in the nether regions if I were a worker for the United Auto Workers.
"The workers who are making engines and transmissions today, their jobs will be eliminated when we make a transition to electric vehicles," UAW research director Jennifer Kelly said earlier this year. And Jim Farley, the CEO of Ford, said last year he expects electric vehicles will require 40 percent less labor to produce than traditional automobiles.
So, the UAW President took a break from acting like he cared about his membership and said a couple of things that contained some cool nuggets right here.
I mean, cool if you are totally unaware.
UAW President Shawn Fain took a shot at former President Donald Trump this week in an emailed statement, saying that we shouldn’t be electing “billionaires and millionaires.”
Go on, Shawn, tell us how you really feel.
Fain’s statement came following the news that Trump would skip the second GOP debate to instead visit striking auto workers in Michigan.
“Every fiber of our union is being poured into fighting the billionaire class and an economy that enriches people like Donald Trump at the expense of workers,” Fain said in a statement. “We can’t keep electing billionaires and millionaires that don’t have any understanding what it is like to live paycheck to paycheck and struggle to get by and expecting them to solve the problems of the working class.”
Yikes.
How about electing those who make sure their son, who has had a problem or two in the past, gets high-paying gigs that he does not have a shred of experience for so that he can give his "cut" to the big guy?
I'm sure the kids over at Solidarity House just plain missed this piece from Nick Arama which helped explain that both Joe and Hunter are millionaires. Oversight Dems Just Made Huge Admission About Relationship Between Hunter's Biz Associate and Joe Biden.
However, as we've noted before, you had millions of dollars from the foreign dealings going into Biden family accounts. You also had a lot of conflation of the money between Joe and Hunter Biden, including money from Hunter going to Joe. So let's grill Schwerin over all those instances and how much of "Hunter's" money went to Joe, and let's get that on the record since Schwerin was also taking care of Hunter's finances. Let's start putting Biden family members and more associates under oath as well.
So, if most of the Democrats who receive UAW contributions and have spent a lifetime in public service are millionaires, why do the union folks in leadership keep supporting them?
It's lip service, folks.
The Dirty Little Secret revealed by the federal investigation into UAW leadership a number of years back that resulted in two former UAW presidents spending some time in the pokey is that the union leadership is every bit as corrupt as the CEOs of the corporations they represent their membership against. They had been ripping off union dues and their ilk for years, and they just got so sloppy at it that they got caught.
So, as the 2016 election proved for Donald Trump, even though he won by a slim margin, blue-collar workers crossed the voting line and voted for him. Trump making the decision to skip the second GOP debate in California and do a speech here in Detroit on September 27th has got Shawn and the kids a little bit worried that his message is going to resonate a bit too close to home and make the rank and file wonder.
How can you criticize billionaires and millionaires when you actually support them with union dues?
How can you criticize a former president who was actually willing to put up tariffs to support your jobs here and go to war trade-wise with China?
Also, one who is not in love with electric vehicles and doesn't want to put over 100,000 UAW members out of work in the transition to going all-electric vehicles?
So, enjoy more empty rhetoric from all sides while this strike goes longer. However, expect the union leadership to start sweating a bit more when it goes long enough where that 500-dollar-a-week strike fund starts to stretch a striking family a bit thin with the high cost of living under millionaire Joe Biden and his Bidenomics plan.
Let me know what you think by clicking on my BIO right here or scrolling down a bit and letting me know what you think in the Comments. You can reach me on Facebook, X (The Platform Formerly Known as Twitter), or my email address. I have no fear of listening and or reading people who I do not see eye to eye with.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member