IN DETROIT — The United Auto Workers backed Vice President Kamala Harris for president on Wednesday. This gives her union more power in the likely election against Republican Donald Trump in November.
In a statement, UAW President Shawn Fain said that defeating Trump was the union’s “job” in this year’s race. There are over a million current and retired members of the union. It has a strong base in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, which Democrats call the “blue wall” states.
Fain said, “We can elect Kamala Harris, who will fight with us in our fight against corporate greed, or we can put back in office a billionaire who is against everything our union stands for.”
After Vice President Joe Biden dropped out of the race for president, there was never any question that the UAW would back Harris. Biden got the support of the UAW in January and thanked them by giving a speech at a union election convention in Washington, D.C. The vice president was already backed by the AFL-CIO, the main labor group that includes the UAW.
Before the support, Fain had to wait for the union’s executive board to say that Harris should be endorsed. However, he has already attacked Trump many times.
In an early Wednesday post on the X social media site, Fain said, “There is only one answer to the threat we face as a nation, and it’s not another billionaire in office.”
Fain and the union have also called Trump a “scab,” which is a slur for workers who go across union picket lines and do work while there is a strike. They also said he did nothing to help Ohio workers when General Motors shut down a plant in 2019.
In January, the UAW backed Biden’s campaign for reelection. This was just a few months after the Democratic president joined the picket lines near Detroit for General Motors workers who were on strike. After small strikes at all three Detroit automakers last fall, the union got big raises.
Not long after Biden endorsed Fain, he started making a lot of TV appearances to support Biden. But those decreased as the UAW stepped up its efforts to organize car factories that were not unionized and got into a fight with a court-appointed union monitor.
A lot of the UAW’s union members and retirees vote Democratic, but the union says a good chunk of them also vote Republican. That fits with what AP VoteCast found: 56% of families and union members backed Biden in 2020, while 42% backed Trump.
Still, Trump has tried to win over union members by promising to save the car industry from “complete obliteration” when he accepted the Republican nomination.
He also told members they should fire Fain by saying false things like Fain let Chinese automakers build plants in Mexico so they could ship electric cars to the U.S. without paying tariffs. Analysts of the industry don’t know of any such plants that are being built. At this point, the auto business is still very much alive. Detroit automakers are still making a lot of money; in fact, jobs in the car industry have grown by 13.8% since Biden took office.
Trump said he would put taxes on electric cars made in China. Biden put taxes on Chinese goods coming into the US earlier this year. These tariffs included EVs.
The Teamsters union, which has 1.3 million members and a head who spoke at the Republican National Convention, has not yet backed anyone in the race.
