by The United Automobile Workers union will endorse President Biden on Wednesday, providing an influential boost to a president who faces a battle against former President Donald J. Trump to win the support of labor groups, according to a person familiar with the plan.
Biden, who appeared on a picket line with striking union workers in the fall, was set to deliver the keynote address at a union conference in Washington and address “the major issues facing working-class Americans,” according to a press notice for the event.
The union was expected to announce the endorsement at the event, according to the person familiar, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the plan.
The value of the union’s endorsement of Biden may lie less in persuading members to back him than in motivating them to vote. the union has My dear that only about 30 percent of its members supported Trump in 2016. But without the union’s formal endorsement and turnout investments, Biden could see a decline in members showing up to vote in critical swing states like Michigan .
Before the president’s speech, several members said they expected the endorsement to go to Biden and that a directive from UAW President Shawn Fain would decide which way they would vote. But several also said they had seen how the war in Gaza had divided their ranks.
“There are people in these ranks who are hurting,” said Daniel Dunbar, 67, a retired autoworker from Flint, Michigan. “They have family there and they fear for them.”
Fain has been an outspoken critic of Trump and criticized some Republican policies as divisive and harmful when he spoke at Monday’s conference.
He said the party takes stances against transgender and gay people “so they don’t have to talk about who you work for, where the profits go and who benefits.” He also criticized Republican lines of attack on immigration to the United States.
“Right now, millions of people are being told that the biggest threat to their livelihoods is immigrants crossing the border,” Fain said. “The threat we face at the border does not come from migrants. “It’s from the billionaires and politicians who get workers to point fingers at each other.”
Biden, who calls himself “the most pro-union president in history,” has appeared at several UAW events to demonstrate his good faith with the group’s leadership and rank and file.
“I’ve been involved in the UAW longer than you’ve been alive,” the president, then 80, told the boisterous crowd at an event in Illinois in November, after the union reached a deal with Ford, General Motors and Stellantis on a contract that included wage increases and reopened a plant in Belvidere, Illinois.
At that event, he criticized Trump for insisting that electric vehicles would lead to the loss of thousands of manufacturing jobs.
“Well, like almost everything he said, he’s wrong,” Biden said at the time. And you’ve proven him wrong. Instead of lower wages, they made record profits. Instead of fewer jobs, we got a commitment for thousands more jobs.”
Union officials often say that Biden has been more vocal than any president in decades in his support for unions. He appeared in a video As Amazon workers in Alabama sought to unionize, they warned that “there should be no intimidation, no coercion, no threats, no anti-union propaganda,” and criticized Kellogg for its plans to permanently replace striking workers. (The strike was resolved before the company took that step.)
The UAW was early to support Biden’s green energy policies, but was frustrated by the lack of support for unionized auto industry jobs in the Inflation Reduction Act, the major climate bill the president signed. in 2022.
“The transition to electric vehicles is at serious risk of becoming a race to the bottom,” Fain wrote in an internal memo last May announcing that the union planned to withhold its endorsement of Biden, at least temporarily. “We want the national leadership to support us on this before we make any commitments.”
The following month, Mr. Fain expressed frustration that the Biden administration had given Ford a $9 billion government loan to build three electric vehicle battery plants in Tennessee and Kentucky without any commitment from the company to create high-paying union jobs there.
Biden’s team redoubled its efforts to engage the union. He turned to Gene Sperling, a veteran Democratic politician from Michigan, to act as his liaison to the union and the auto industry. In August, the president’s administration unveiled $12 billion in grants and loans for electric vehicle manufacturing, which would prioritize companies that support good-paying jobs in unionized areas. Mr Sperling was also in regular contact with senior union leaders in the run-up to the strike and during the strike itself.
Biden’s decision to appear on the Michigan picket line infuriated auto industry executives, according to administration officials, who said the president was nevertheless determined to make clear where he stood in the labor dispute.
