The point as I understand it is that they’re allowing other unions to set their contract expiration to the same date, which increases the potential for pain during their next negotiations and makes for a quasi general strike across all unions who participated. It’s a pretty good idea all in all.
Also, it’s complicated who Sean Fain aligns with. He’s pro-tariff and praised Trump for incentivizing cars to be made in the US, although it seems like that’s the extent of it, and I wonder how he feels about it now that it’s been fully unmasked to just be market manipulation by Trump’s circle of billionaires. Sean’s speech still hit most of the socialist talking points of pro labor even though it was to a bunch of Republican donors, leading to the funniest and most revealing awkward silences after sections about how the working class is who provides all of the value in an economy.
Pro-tariff makes sense purely from a “protecting American labor” point of view. The ideal of them is to encourage internal markets to favor domestic production. However, that first requires domestic production to exist, and it also needs to be done in a way that doesn’t harm domestic production. The Trump tariffs aren’t this, obviously.
Historically, what the UAW wants isn’t necessarily good for the rest of us. The “chicken tax” that pushes larger and larger trucks in the US was done as part of LBJ negotiating with the UAW. The result was that foreign small trucks couldn’t possibly be profitable, and thus had no competition for domestic manufacturing to make the largest trucks possible and nothing else.
The point as I understand it is that they’re allowing other unions to set their contract expiration to the same date, which increases the potential for pain during their next negotiations and makes for a quasi general strike across all unions who participated. It’s a pretty good idea all in all.
Also, it’s complicated who Sean Fain aligns with. He’s pro-tariff and praised Trump for incentivizing cars to be made in the US, although it seems like that’s the extent of it, and I wonder how he feels about it now that it’s been fully unmasked to just be market manipulation by Trump’s circle of billionaires. Sean’s speech still hit most of the socialist talking points of pro labor even though it was to a bunch of Republican donors, leading to the funniest and most revealing awkward silences after sections about how the working class is who provides all of the value in an economy.
Pro-tariff makes sense purely from a “protecting American labor” point of view. The ideal of them is to encourage internal markets to favor domestic production. However, that first requires domestic production to exist, and it also needs to be done in a way that doesn’t harm domestic production. The Trump tariffs aren’t this, obviously.
Historically, what the UAW wants isn’t necessarily good for the rest of us. The “chicken tax” that pushes larger and larger trucks in the US was done as part of LBJ negotiating with the UAW. The result was that foreign small trucks couldn’t possibly be profitable, and thus had no competition for domestic manufacturing to make the largest trucks possible and nothing else.