No Justice, No Jeeps!

American Workers Demand Job Security and Fair Compensation

Presidential candidate Robert F Kennedy, Jr and wife, actress Cheryl Hines, with striking Writers Guild of America (WGA) writers on picket line in Los Angeles, CA.

“For the last 40 years, the billionaire class has been taking everything and leaving everybody else to fight for the scraps…We are not the problem. Corporate greed is the problem.”

 — Shawn Fain, UAW President

On September 15, when the United Auto Workers (UAW) declared day one of an unprecedented strike against the Big Three (General Motors, Ford and Stellantis), this became the year of the American worker.

One-third of the UAW’s 400,000 members are employed by these three manufacturers. And although the union’s strategy calls for rolling walkouts, which have so far led 13,000 workers from the assembly line to the picket line, that number could balloon to 146,000. Add that to the 65,000 SAG-AFTRA members on strike, 11,500 WGA members, and thousands of hotel workers and nurses, and 2023 could end with workers and corporations in a death grip. 

The UAW strike alone is expected to have a deep and immediate economic impact, with an estimated $5.6 billion price tag for the first 10 days. The weekly losses for the Big Three could go as high as $500 million per company.

It appears that Bidenomics may not be working out for many Americans.  

Elected Democrats, who are touting last month’s low unemployment numbers, and claiming Biden’s re-election campaign is the only hope for Democracy should soak their heads in something made of equal parts shame and embarrassment. Millions of people working full-time at their temp and gig jobs, with no healthcare and zero job security, are still coming up short when it comes to paying rent and buying food. They are not experiencing prosperity and are not impressed by low unemployment numbers as they live hand-to-mouth. 

Granted, perpetrating absurd enthusiasm for a president, who can’t get through a press conference without his press secretary brandishing a Vaudevillian hook in one hand and fading in the music with the other, isn’t a crime against humanity. But it’s definitely a crime against sanity. 

When President Biden stood on stage in Hanoi extolling the virtues of the G20 Summit’s agreement to build a railroad “all the way across the African continent,” it was, historically and geographically speaking, a moment drenched in irony. Not the ha-ha funny kind, but the sort of which our national nightmares are made of. The tragic consequences of empire’s entitlement have merged with industrialized greed, dressed up to seem Earth and people-friendly. It’s the “say one thing and do another” school of thought.

Perhaps the “pro-union” president forgot that, nine short months ago, he congressionally crushed the great American dream of paid sick leave for 115,000 US rail workers, whose working conditions, in every kind of weather, are often extremely dangerous. And meanwhile the rail system is disintegrating. 

What was the reason he cited for Western altruism in Africa? Feeding people. “Let’s assume for the sake of discussion, we talk about food shortages,” he said. “Assume there was one country in that vast continent that had an excess of food stuffs and resources. How do they get it to where they are going to go, how are they going to do it?” That verbal stumbling wasn’t his stutter, it was the sound of presidential hypocrisy. 

He still hasn’t been to East Palestine, Ohio, and probably won’t visit the people of North Platte Nebraska, following the recent chemical explosion at the largest rail yard in the world. But he does have a plan for a railroad in Africa. Of course, he left out the part about how those tracks will traipse through the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), where 40,000 children, some as young as three years old, work in underground mines for one or two dollars a day. What are they mining? Cobalt and lithium. Sixty percent of the world’s lithium is in the Congo. And both minerals are essential to make batteries for electric vehicles (EVs) promoted by the Biden Administration.  

One of the demands central to the UAW’s strike is specifically about the technological shift in the industry from internal combustible engines to electric motors. Combustible engine vehicles have more parts and require more workers than EVs. As the Big Three sink billions into retooling for the greenwashing of the auto industry, the last thing they want is a powerful union of workers demanding job security. Tesla and Hyundai already make EVs and those factories are populated by non-union workers. And the generous tax incentives and federal loans for more EV facilities and modernizing of existing combustible engine factories do not prioritize union jobs.

The technological advances that empower some and enslave or impoverish others is also at the heart of the entertainment industry’s strikes. Like members of the UAW, writers and actors are seeking fair compensation and job security for work that, before the streaming services, paid a living wage and provided them with some degree of access to healthcare. Today, when actors receive residuals that used to be a few thousand dollars, their share in the profit, those checks are now as low as .06 cents. Moreover, producers can use Artificial Intelligence (AI) to write a script, and performers are being asked to sell their likenesses in perpetuity, so they can later appear in movies without actually being there; the human element of filmmaking is becoming obsolete.

Hollywood CEOs have garnered massive salary increases, while workers in that industry make less and less. Disney CEO Bob Iger, who could make as much as $31 million this year, says striking actors and writers have “unrealistic” demands. 

“The endgame is to allow things to drag on until union members start losing their apartments and losing their houses,” is how one studio executive summed up their strategy for how to deal with striking writers.

Auto industry titans, like the CEOs of Hollywood, have also seen huge spikes in their salaries. Though consumer prices have climbed 20% since the last contract the UAW signed with General Motors (GM) in 2019, wages for new auto workers are far behind where they would be if GM had kept pace with inflation.

Yet, in 2020, GM’s CEO Mary Barra was paid $538,000… a week. The lowest paid worker at GM, often a temp hire with no benefits, but hoping for a permanent job, was paid $586 a week. 

How many more people sleeping in their cars and living in poverty does this government need to see before admitting that it is failing at its most important job, which is taking care of the people? There’s no hesitation on the part of the Biden Administration and Democrats when it comes to sending billions of taxpayer dollars to fund a proxy war in Ukraine, but no mercy for American people in economic peril. Tupac Shakur said it 30 years ago: “They got money for wars, but can’t feed the poor.” 

Try this for juxtaposition of values: RFK Jr was on a picket line with hotel workers on Labor Day, and almost all of them were women and men of color. On the other end of the spectrum, Biden chose to start collecting interest again from 44 million people with education  loans— beginning on the Friday that kicked off Labor Day Weekend. 27 million of those loans are in forbearance and deferment owing more than a trillion dollars, and nearly 66% of borrowers making on schedule payments, have an ever-expanding balance.

If this keeps up, the theme song for 2024’s election season will be “The End” by The Doors, which also plays over the end titles of Apocalypse Now, as napalm bombs incinerate a Cambodian jungle. That sequence came to mind while the president doddered off stage right at that presser in Hanoi.