WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden called the head of the United Auto Workers union last week to congratulate him on his new contract with General Motors and wish him a happy 55th birthday, a sign of how the relationship is improving has since developed First introductory meeting in the Oval Office on July 19th.
UAW President Shawn Fain launched the strike against GM, Ford and Chrysler owner Stellantis with the intent of forcing political leaders to choose between supporting unions or corporations. Biden had been walking this line for a long time. In his speeches, he proclaimed that unions would build the middle class, but also touted his credibility as a former senator from the “corporate capital of the world,” also known as Delaware.
The White House was determined to build trust in Fain and look past his occasional insults toward Biden. That approach, which included Biden meeting with picket workers in Michigan, helped resolve the nearly 45-day series of strikes and led to significant wage increases for workers.
But even as Biden’s sympathies publicly shifted to union members during the standoff, there is little sign that the UAW has fully embraced the Democratic president. Biden still needs to win the union’s endorsement as he seeks re-election with the message he sent to workers.
The UAW declined to discuss its relationship with the White House. A final decision on the endorsement is not expected to be made until deals with automakers are finalized, which will likely be later this month.
The relationship between Fain and Biden could be crucial to the outcome of the 2024 election. More than 380,000 UAW members are scattered in states like Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, where slim majorities have decided the overall winner of the last two presidential elections.
Gene Sperling, the White House liaison for strike talks, was in daily contact with executives from the UAW and the three automakers. Biden tasked the economic adviser, who has served in three Democratic White Houses, with building a bond with the UAW but also maintaining ties with the automakers that are helping carry out Biden’s electric vehicle agenda.
Sperling told the Associated Press that he follows a set of principles when communicating with all sides: “We are not here to intervene. We are not here to mediate. But we want to stay in touch. We want to be helpful.”
As the weeks went by, however, Biden and his team made fewer compromises and publicly moved closer and closer to the union.
At one point, Sperling emphasized the UAW’s position to automakers that new contracts required built-in cost-of-living adjustments so that wages could be adjusted for inflation. This adjustment became part of the tentative agreement, which also includes a 30% pay increase for GM workers until April 2028, when the contract expires.
Biden argued that autoworkers made sacrifices during the 2008 financial crisis to keep their employers afloat. Now that automakers are reaping billions of dollars in profits, the same workers should share in the rewards, the president said.
The politics were tricky as the president suffered from poor reviews of his economic leadership. U.S. adults have largely overlooked the healthy 3.9% unemployment rate and instead focused on inflation, including the 20% rise in new car prices since he became president.
But union budgets were also a crucial constituency for Democrats. They make up just 16% of voters nationwide, but Biden won the group by a whopping 56% in 2020, according to AP VoteCast, a national voter survey.
While organized labor has overwhelmingly supported Biden, the UAW remains a key holdout. Fain has criticized Donald Trump, the front-runner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, but there could be occasional divergences between the union leader and Biden in the weeks leading up to the strike and afterward.
When Fain went to the White House on July 19 to meet with senior officials, Biden insisted on a 30-minute meeting in the Oval Office without aides, Sperling said.
But on Labor Day, cracks began to appear in the relationship between the union and the White House. Asked by reporters about the prospects for an as-yet-unannounced strike, Biden tried to downplay the risk.
“I’m not worried about a strike until it happens,” Biden said on September 4. “I don’t think it’s going to happen.”
Fain responded to another group of reporters by claiming that Biden was wrong: “He must know something we don’t know.” Maybe the companies are planning to come by and tell us our demands the night before. I don’t know, but he’s involved in something I don’t know about.”
Sperling said the president was trying to support unions with his comments. When the president saw how his comments were being interpreted, he called Fain directly to clarify.
Biden held several discussions with the automakers and Fain before the strike deadline on September 15th. When it became clear that there would be a targeted strike at select factories, Biden showed his support for the UAW. He released a statement that echoed UAW language and said Sperling and acting Labor Secretary Julie Su would travel to Michigan to help with the talks.
But the UAW doesn’t want administration officials to come during the first week of the strike, Sperling said, because it could send a message about the status of negotiations. There was enough trust at that point that the misunderstanding did little to damage the relationship from the White House’s perspective. Sperling and Su met face-to-face with negotiators twice over the next week.
But Fain was outraged that Biden publicly suggested that negotiations had failed and that this had led to the strike.
“We agree with Joe Biden when he says, ‘Record profits mean record contracts.’ We disagree when he says negotiations have failed,” Fain said in a statement.
UAW officials told Sperling that Fain really wanted Biden to hit the picket lines, not as a political event but as a show of support for workers. Biden liked the idea. After accepting that invitation, Sperling told automakers that Biden would meet with striking workers. The companies were unhappy, but that didn’t derail the talks.
Biden’s visit to a picket line in Michigan on Sept. 26 – a first for the president – drew praise from Fain but little else. Fain said that Biden “has chosen to stand on the side of workers,” adding, “We know that the president will do the right thing for the working class, and if we do the right thing for the working class.”
But the UAW president refused to support the president who took part in the historic action.
“We’ll just see how it goes,” Fain told The Associated Press at the time. “It’s not just me. It’s up to our leadership and our membership. And we have our process that we follow. As I said, we will do it when the time comes.”
Still, the White House sought to build trust with the UAW as the talks progressed. Ford reached a tentative deal on October 25, followed by Stellantis on October 28, and GM was close to a deal.
Sperling, who was aboard an unrelated red-eye flight, texted GM CEO Mary Barra and a UAW official to notify him in case a deal was reached while he was in mid-air . Once a tentative agreement was reached, Barra told the assembled negotiators that she would have to send a text message to the White House.
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AP Auto Writer Tom Krisher in Detroit contributed to this report.