Explaining the United Auto Workers decision to endorse incumbent President Joe Biden in 2024, UAW President Shawn Fain delivered a detail-rich two-minute monologue underscoring the differences between Biden and former President Donald Trump as concerns how their respective policies — and presidencies — have impacted working people.
Fain, fresh off the huge UAW labor victory last fall, emphasized how the Trump administration’s tax cuts delivered, as he describes it, 85 percent of their benefits — which never expire — to the top one percent of earners, while the “miniscule” 15 percent of tax benefits aimed at working class people had an expiration date.
The interview took place on Morning Joe, but the segment below is Fain speaking straight through, unprompted and uninterrupted, to articulate the UAW’s alignment with Biden. “What it all comes down to when we look at this election,” Fain says, “is are we going to continue to go forward or are we going to go backward?”
UAW President Fain breaks down how Trump did nothing for American workers while giving tax handouts to the ultra-wealthy: Meanwhile, Joe Biden joined us on the picket line and stood with us pic.twitter.com/ieHtMhYirq
— Biden-Harris HQ (@BidenHQ) January 30, 2024
“It’s a real clear picture,” Fain says, saying Trump was “completely silent” when he could have helped union causes in 2019.
Fain asserts that 75 percent of Americans “supported us in our contract fight because the principles we’re fighting for — wages, better benefits, health care, retirement security — that’s what matters to working class people.”
Delivering a political broadside, Fain says “Donald Trump doesn’t want any of that for working class people…The only weapon of mass destruction we’ve faced in the last 40 years has been corporate greed. Because that’s what drives this and that’s Trump’s world.”
During the 2023 UAW strike, Biden famously became the only sitting President to walk the picket line with workers, while the same week Trump spoke, in contrast, at a non-Union shop. Still the Union didn’t rush to endorse Biden, though it is now making a strong case for the incumbent. Notably, Biden doesn’t carry anywhere near the support Fain claims the UAW had and the current political divisions in America render a 75% Presidential approval rating likely unattainable by anyone in the foreseeable future.
