(Mark Pellin, Headline USA) Demands being exacted to keep pace with a radical green energy agenda being pushed by the Biden administration helped trigger a strike by the United Auto Workers union against Detroit’s Big Three automakers.
The 146,000-member union announced Thursday that workers would be no-shows on Friday at three auto plants, testing the waters for a full-blown strike for all its members that would impact plants at Ford, General Motors and Stellantis.
“For the first time in our history, we will strike all three of the Big Three at once,” UAW President Shawn Fain said Thursday. “We are using a new strategy, the ‘stand-up’ strike. We will call on select facilities, locals or units to stand up and go on strike.”
The strike comes less than two weeks after Biden met with union leaders and walked away boasting, “I’m not worried about a strike … I don’t think it’s going to happen,” Reuters reported.
The UAW has been increasingly critical of Biden’s radical push for electric car and truck subsidies, along with lodging concerns that the shift would cost union jobs and paychecks, according to Politico. “Actions are going to dictate endorsements, so we’ll see how things continue to play out, and we have a lot of issues to resolve,” UAW’s Fain said.
“There’s a lot with the EV transition that has to happen, and there’s hundreds of billions of our taxpayer dollars that are helping fund this, and workers cannot continue to be left behind in that equation,” the union boss added.
Leading up to Thursday’s strike announcement, Ford President and CEO Jim Farley told CNN that he wasn’t opposed to making reasonable pay concessions to workers, Breitbart reported.
“But if it prevents us from investing in this transition to EVs and in future products like the ones we have now like a new F-150,” Farley said they had to draw the line because the added costs would drive them into a financial ditch of bankruptcy.
Mark Pellin is an editor at Headline USA. Follow him at twitter.com/sabrepaw70.
