Big political plans to reshape the economy need to answer a simple question, says labor historian Nelson Lichtenstein: Who is the constituency backing the...
The United Auto Workers strike is about more than just the relationship between a few companies and their workers. The union is effectively demanding a bigger say in how billions of federal dollars are spent on electric vehicles. That puts it squarely in the middle of the fight over the Biden administration’s effort to reshape the economy through a new industrial policy.
Nelson Lichtenstein: One of the problems of the Clinton era, one of the reasons for the failure to push forward an industrial policy is, who are the troops? Where’s the army that’s going to help you do that? Otherwise, the argument that you’re picking winners and losers, it’s crony capitalism, that has more weight.
Successful strikes take place when the interests of the union coincide with the interests of the larger polity. Today, in effect Fain and the UAW, their demands are to make the green transition work. If you’re going to have battery plants in the Midwest, and it’s going to have public support, OK, we need higher wages and unionization in the battery plants.
And for the labor movement, when a movement is showing a sense of dynamism and a sense of momentum, then it makes its arguments attractive, in a broader way.That’s an important question because Tesla is super important. Elon Musk could have a remarkably successful car company and keep throwing stuff into outer space, or whatever, even if all his workers were unionized.Well, they tried to do it.
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