Trump and Biden Battle for Auto Worker Endorsement | CLIP | Crossroads

Good evening and welcome to Crossroads. A battle is unfolding in the American heartland. It's between the workers and the state, between the nationalists and the globalists, the populists and the elite establishment. It's a focal point of the nation. The political debate now unfolding in Detroit in particular over the autoworkers, the unions, and the future of the country. Now, United Autoworkers, UAW, they're one of the largest autoworker unions in America. They're currently on strike with demands including 40% wage increases, four-day work weeks. You know, it's the usual demands from the unions that they make against the industries, but this time something else is happening. President Donald Trump began calling on the union to endorse him or vote out their own union leaders. On the same night that other Republican candidates for the 2024 elections held their next debate, Trump announced he would hold a speech to autoworkers in Detroit, thereby squashing a lot of the viewership of the Republican debates and bringing the attention to this instead of what's happening with the union protests taking place right now. Soon after this, President Joe Biden also announced he would head to Detroit scheduled for the day before Trump's speech, interestingly, and this transformed the union protests into a focal point of the whole country's political debate around what's happening there. Now, when Joe Biden landed, he was cautiously praised by the establishment media for making history. For the first time, an American president picketed alongside the union, and they were cautious in their praise for one key reason. He faces embarrassment if he doesn't get the union endorsement, and the optics of this also blur the line between the unions and the state. Now, we had our own reporters on the ground. I went there as well. And what unfolded, at least at the Biden speech, was honestly a bit strange. Biden's event was first announced on one location, but then switched to another. The press, supporters, protesters, they went and waited for Biden to arrive only to find he'd changed locations. Instead of going to where he was originally said to go, he went to a more private event, and there he was joined by around 20 people or so with the apparent uniforms and uniform ideas mainly around him. He picketed alongside the unions, but it was in front of the union leadership and also in front of a curated group of news reporters from the White House press pool. Here's what Biden had to say. I've watched a lot of the UAW picket lines when I was a senator since 1973, but I tell you what, first time I've ever done it as a president. Significant raise you need and other benefits. Let's get it! Get back who we lost, okay? Yeah! It's about time they step up for us. Thank you. Now, Biden then did something else. He introduced UAW President Sean Fain, the union leader. Here's what he had to say. This is a historic moment. The first time in our country's history that a sitting USA president has came out and stood on the picket line. Our president chose to stand up with workers in our fight for economic and social justice. It's about the autoworkers who are part of the fabric of the working class of this country. We're the people that make the world run. It's not the billionaire class, not the elite few. It's the working class of the billions of people who have been left behind. That's what this battle is about, changing that. Now, there's a few ways to view this. On one side, the people on the ground, the union workers, they actually did seem to appreciate Biden's support. For them, Biden showing up alongside the heads of their unions seemed to suggest that their demands are in the bag. The president of the United States is backing their pay raises in shorter work days. But for others, it actually meant something else. The future of their own industry might be at stake, as the union seems to be aligning with stated political goals from Biden against the automotive industry itself, at the very least against gas cars. And for many of them, even those who said they were Democrats, there really was a very noticeable concern that soon electric vehicles are going to destroy the factories that make the engines and many other car parts, and those jobs are going to be moved to other countries. They're not going to be American. Instead, they're likely going to head to China, which has a monopoly on batteries and key materials for the electric vehicle industry. Now, front of mind for a lot of them was Biden's executive order from August of 2021. That was when he set a new target to make half of all new vehicles sold in America electric cars by 2030. When the New York Times framed the story at the time, they noted that Biden was pushing to, quote, phase out gas cars. And for these autoworkers, those gas cars are their livelihood. The industry that their fathers and grandfathers worked in and an industry as well that some of them told us that their children are hoping to work in as well, that's going to get siphoned off. So yesterday I went to Detroit to talk to people on the ground and hear what their thoughts were on what's happening. The first person I spoke with on this was picketing outside of Mopar headquarters. He works as a machine operator in the plant that makes many of the car parts that electric vehicles would then render obsolete. And for him, the focus is more on jobs, really, with all this, and more on the wants for the union demands and really more on better pay for the rank and file. But despite this and despite saying that he would really, I think, align with Democrats essentially, the concern over the future of the industry was still very much real. All the cars might be made in China if everything is going the way it's going. And we don't want the jobs that leave here. If you turn everything into EV, 30% of these people are gone because you don't need the engines, you don't need the transes. I didn't think about that. Yeah, you don't need none of that. So all the employees that were sitting in the assembly line are all going to be gone. You're going to have a shell go on top of a battery. No different than a golf cart. So you're going to be losing 40, 50% of your workforce. Now, around the other side of the building was another group of picketers, and these ones were marching with signs blocking an entrance and exit to the building. Cars of some of the employees that they brought in to replace them were trapped for a little bit in the company parking lot, which the union members held up a bit before letting go with a few shouts as they left. We want a wage increase. We haven't had a wage increase in years, and the prices is going up, and our wages are staying the same. We want a COLA, cost of living. We would like to get that back, which we gave up during that 2009, during that recession. Now, that was the picketers, of course. The tone was a lot different at the Trump event, but really politics aside and partisanship aside, the core concerns between them was actually very similar. Concerns the industry is about to go away, worries that the jobs are going to be shipped elsewhere, the threat of electric vehicles, the future of cars that they make, the monopoly of China over whether really politics is going to take over this whole thing from them.