Biden and Trump battle to be seen as the most pro-worker presidential candidate

Joe Biden this year became the first sitting US president to join a picket line. This didn’t seem a likely outcome of the 2020 Democratic primary, in which the party establishment, fearing the threat of socialist Bernie Sanders, consolidated in favour of Biden, the most conservative candidate in the race.

In late September, Biden spoke alongside Shawn Fain, the new, radical leader of the United Auto Workers (UAW). Fain has led the union into a bold strike against the Big Three auto manufacturers, which has already yielded historic wins. The union brokered a deal with General Motors, having struck similar deals with Ford and Stellantis in recent days, effectively bringing the six-week strike to an end.

One day after Biden’s picket line appearance, Donald Trump spoke to a group of non-union workers at a car parts factory in the same state. To many commentators, these appeared to be near-identical appeals to the American working class in advance of their rematch in next year’s presidential election. Looking a little closer reveals the distance between the two appeals and the two conceptions of who exactly the American working class are.

The UAW victory comes amid a resurgence in American trade unions, in secular decline since the 1970s. Since at least the Reagan administration, unions came under serious assault at federal and state level. Following sporadic but often massive labour actions in recent years, like the Red for Ed teachers’ strikes, the pandemic led to several rapid mobilisations around worker protection. Since then, inflation has made organising for better pay an urgent necessity.

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After the defeat of the second Sanders campaign, many activists disillusioned with electoral politics refocused their efforts into labour fights. Positive views of unions are at historic highs, with a recent Gallup poll showing over two-thirds of Americans approve of them – many points higher than for any political figure, party or legislative body.

Membership numbers remain low, and are even declining, but militancy is clearly on the rise in several sectors. A wave of independent organising swept through Starbucks franchises over the last three years, leading to a fierce backlash from the corporation. In New York, unions are finally making some headway in organising centres of logistics like Amazon warehouses, long a target. This month saw the largest healthcare strike in US history, with workers winning significant pay increases.

[ Joe Biden joining a picket line was a landmark moment in US’s year of strikes ]

[ Biden becomes first modern president on picket line as he backs Michigan car workers ]

Suddenly politicians of all stripes feel the need to appeal to the working class, until recently a largely forgotten constituency in US politics and a phrase you’d rarely hear uttered by a candidate 10 years ago. Since Trump rose to prominence in the Republican party, sections of the party have been loudly announcing themselves as the new party of the working class.

So-called National Conservative party intellectuals such as Sohrab Ahmari call for the party to embrace a kind of American Orbánism: strict social conservatism married to welfarist policies for preferred constituencies within the working poor. Politicians like Josh Hawley pay lip service to American workers, talking up the party’s blue-collar credentials and posing with UAW strikers in his native Missouri.

This is all fairly thin gruel. As one of the striking workers observed, Hawley opposes minimum wage increases and the union-backed PRO act, advocates for strike-breaking legislation (known as Right To Work laws), and received a 0 per cent score from the UAW for his past votes. For all the frequent crowing, the Grand Old Party remains a party controlled by and for the upper class, totally committed at national and state level to corporate power.

Hawley or Trump’s supposed proletarian fever is based not in actual support for labour struggle or workers themselves, but rather in a kind of affective appeal to nostalgic images of American labour: the white man coming home from the factory, covered in oil or soot, propping up the post-war suburbs of great American cities. These ideas bear little resemblance to the actual working class of the US today, more likely to be a non-white woman working as a home healthcare aid than a steel worker.

They are far from the first Republicans to attempt this manoeuvre. Richard Nixon in his re-election campaign effectively tapped right-wing union leaders to bolster his working-class appeal.

Since Trump rose to prominence in the Republican party, sections of the party have been loudly announcing themselves as the new party of the working class

Nixon was able to exploit real divisions within American unionism that had appeared over the previous 30 years of labour power, divisions over efforts to increase diversity in the trades and support for American intervention overseas.

Today’s GOP is attempting a similar manoeuvre, using the flash point of the Biden administration’s industrial environmental policies, centred around the Inflation Reduction Act. They warn that the car makers’ transition to electric cars will bring ruination to the American car industry, and by extension the American worker. As with the intensely cynical use of coalminers in Trump’s first campaign, impoverished workers are deployed in a rear-guard action to defend fossil capital.

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Biden’s historic decision to briefly walk the picket line should alleviate some Democrat concerns about losing union votes in the next election. Fain himself was full-throated in his distaste for Trump, refusing to meet him and stating bluntly that he doesn’t, “think the man has any bit of care about what our workers stand for, what the working class stands for. He serves a billionaire class and that’s what’s wrong with this country.”

The Democratic party is nonetheless vulnerable to attack on this flank, having abandoned its union commitments in the 1990s Clintonite makeover. Most senior Democrats are far more comfortable in a Silicon Valley boardroom than on a picket line.

Biden himself participated enthusiastically in the Democrats’ transition, and his record in office has been mixed for workers. His appointments to the National Labour Relations Board have made it the most pro-labour in decades, but he brought a brutal end to an incipient railroad strike. Biden speaks of workers getting their fair share, but Fain aims higher, recalling the ambitions of legendary UAW leader Walter Reuther that workers would not only get more compensation, but claim real power. Theirs is a fragile alliance.

Biden possesses one other advantage, however. He is of a demographic that suggests a different tradition of Democratic politician, one that would not be out of place attending a strike, whatever his real commitments may be. With other elements of his voter base splintering under the pressures of his administration’s foreign policy, he will have to hope that is enough.

Jack Sheehan is a writer based in New York