Originally published on Labor Today – https://labortoday.luel.us/en/
Tuesday, August 20th, 2024, United Auto Workers (UAW) President Shawn Fain gave a speech at the Democratic National Convention (DNC) endorsing Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. Fain would go on to talk about how Harris is “one of us”, a “fighter for the working class”, and how both Harris and Walz have “stood shoulder to shoulder with the working class”. He would also go on to proclaim Republican nominees Donald Trump and JD Vance “lap dogs of the billionaire class” as well as calling Trump a “scab”.
Many of Fain’s comments are true. Trump laughed about Elon Musk firing striking workers and Republicans often use race, LGBTQ+ and the border issue to keep the working class divided. There is no doubt that corporate greed and stock buybacks hurt the working class. But to claim that because Harris walked a couple picket lines with UAW (one in 2019 and another in 2023 allegedly) she is suddenly an advocate for workers wipes away how President Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have actively aided the bosses. Let us not forget in December 2022, Biden used the Railway Labor Act to prevent a railroad strike and instead forced workers to accept the tentative agreement even though it had been rejected by a majority of rank and file union members.
This is especially egregious considering at the time, negotiations had been ongoing since 2019. Companies like BNSF were granting workers zero sick time and with the implementation of precision scheduled railroading, gave workers less free time, required them to be on call for weeks at a time and saw railroad fatalities increase from staffing cuts. President Biden objectively helped the bosses in preventing a strike in an industry where workers are abused daily and that is in need of tremendous reform. Simply walking a picket line is using workers as a prop to claim a pro-worker image.
Then there’s her work as an Attorney General in California. Harris was notorious for being the “Sheriff of Silicon Valley”, but even worse was her opposition to releasing non-violent offenders from prison (even after they served their full sentence) claiming it would hurt the prison’s labor program. Prison labor is well-known for paying abysmal wages, often pennies per hour, for products to be manufactured and even recruiting inmates into fighting California wildfires.
Shawn Fain’s comments on auto plants closing while “Trump did nothing” during his presidency and Biden walking picket lines acting as a catalyst towards the UAW win undermines the work that union rank-and-file members put towards securing a huge win with the big three auto manufacturers (Ford, GM, Stellantis).
Fain’s cheap use of the phrase “which side are you on”, a common lyric from a song by Florence Reese (and later sung by Pete Seeger) of the same name, to describe this upcoming election, is insulting. In the song, Reese describes the fight the United Mine Workers (UMW) went through in Harlan County and that “you’ll either be a union man or a thug for J.H. Blair”. Divorcing the phrase from the struggle for workers’ rights to then use it in reference to voting in an election between two parties that are both objectively puppets of the bosses spits in the face of those who have fought hard for workers across this country.
It is true, the American working class “is fired up and fed up”. Workers are seeing their paychecks swallowed by inflation while they’re given crumbs and told they should be grateful. The solution to this though, is not to entice them to vote for Democrats once again. A party that, as of 2022, has shown how it really feels about workers.