Biden to walk the picket line in Michigan to support UAW strikers
President Joe Biden will travel to Michigan on Tuesday and walk the picket line with members of the United Auto Workers union, he announced Friday, a trip that comes after the president faced political pressure to ramp up his public support for the union members.
“Tuesday, I’ll go to Michigan to join the picket line and stand in solidarity with the men and women of UAW as they fight for a fair share of the value they helped create. It’s time for a win-win agreement that keeps American auto manufacturing thriving with well-paid UAW jobs,” Biden said in a post to X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.
Biden’s trip, and the historic presidential appearance on a picket line, underscores the political opportunity as the strike against the nation’s three largest automakers – General Motors, Ford, and Stellantis – enters its second week. It will come one day before former President Donald Trump, currently the front-runner in the GOP presidential race, is scheduled to deliver a primetime speech to an audience of current and former union members, including from UAW, in Detroit. Earlier in the week, Trump’s team confirmed he would be skipping the second Republican primary debate for the Michigan speech.
The idea that people in USA have to strike for pension and healthcare seems so absurd to me as someone from the EU.
If a president really stands in solidarity, they would be pushing for this on a federal level, ensuring this for all.
I get the resistance to social policy, using tax dollars and all, but then could you not simply mandate a minimal package that the employer has to guarantee?
It should be that easy. The US is such a bizarre place. They call themselves a developed country and have a GDP that outpaces most others, yet they can't even offer the things that many developing countries can.
But sadly, I don't think it's as simple as you hope. About half of the elected US politicians want nothing to improve. The president can't do that much on their own. If Americans gave a shit, they could fix this in a single election cycle by electing some actual progressives, but Americans are pretty fucked up and most either don't give a shit, or give negative shits (as in, they want to see things get worse for certain people).
Yea, I obviously don’t expect the president to single handedly change things, the main point was mostly that going for a photo-op is hardly showing support if you are the president, especially in a country where that title is more than symbolic.
Part of the issue is that not enough people vote, period. But the other half of the issue is that some places are highly gerrymandered, which makes voting weighted much more towards a certain party (typically republican, using rural areas to break the power of bigger, well educated cities). They do even more damage by downplaying the power of voting and calling into question the voting system itself. And occasionally making it more difficult to vote (eg, making it so you have to vote in person and stand in long, sunbaked lines when you need to be at work, reducing the time you can mail in your ballot, trying to pass laws that require IDs to be shown, or other things that make it more difficult for low income or young people to vote.)
It's a difficult problem to solve once it starts, especially since several smaller issues add up to much larger, more difficult to see issues (on voting, it looks like many areas are much more republican than they otherwise should be, even if they had history of being blue or flipping often until voting lines were redrawn. These groups that redraw voting districts are not done by independent government bodies, which makes them susceptible to corruption.)
Many people want change, but aren't well educated on how to change things, or have the leadership needed to unite areas or otherwise form coalitions.
The same way there's a vast difference between Germany, Italy, and Hungary, there's also a massive difference between Rhode Island, Kansas, and Oregon. Though we all vote in federal elections just the same.