UAW retiree says Cameron is misleading voters about the UAW strike
By BERRY CRAIG
American Federation of Teachers
Attorney Gen. Daniel Cameron said the United Auto Workers strike against Detroit's Big Three automakers was caused by inflation and "Bidenomics," a claim hotly disputed by Jerry Sykes, an 81-year-old UAW retiree from western Kentucky.
“It’s not surprising to see that [UAW members are]...having to fight for additional pay because right now, ‘Bidenomics’ is destroying your wallet," WKYT’s Jessica Umbro quoted Cameron, the GOP gubernatorial hopeful, at a recent event. "Inflation is hurting the savings and the purchasing power of our citizens."
Sykes, from Marshall County, doesn't buy what Cameron is selling. “What he said is totally false. This strike doesn’t have anything to do with inflation. It has everything to do with corporate greed.”
“This all goes back to one thing: corporate greed,” UAW President Sean Fain told MSNBC’s Ali Velshi on Sept. 26, the day President Biden. sporting a black UAW baseball cap, visited a UAW picket line in Belleville, Mich., near Detroit.
Fain accompanied Biden. He told Velshi that the president’s trip was “a historic day just from the fact that the president chose to come and stand up with workers….It’s a great testament to see him come here and, you know, I think his comments were very well received.”
The UAW has yet to endorse Biden, but Fain made it clear that the union would never endorse Trump. Before Trump traveled to Michigan, Fain warned, “Every fiber of our union is being poured into fighting the billionaire class and an economy that enriches people like Donald Trump at the expense of workers. We can’t keep electing billionaires and millionaires that don’t have any understanding what it is like to live paycheck to paycheck and struggle to get by and expecting them to solve the problems of the working class.”
Sykes, who worked at Chrysler, now Stellantis, for 30 years, is not a Trump fan either.
The hard-right Cameron, who is seeking to unseat moderate Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear, never misses a chance to tout his Trump endorsement. On Sept. 27, Trump addressed a group of blue collar workers at a non-union parts plant in Clinton Township, Mich., also close to Detroit. The New York Times reported that it was uncertain if there were more than a few UAW members in the crowd.
Before the president and the former president, who wants his old job back, came to Michigan, the UAW put out a video citing “corporate greed” as causing the strike.
“The video digs down into statistics showing how UAW members were left behind as the Big Three funneled their extreme profits to CEOs and wealthy investors,” said a story about the video on the UAW website that listed a half-dozen bullet points, declaring that "over the last four years:"
- Big Three profits have gone up 65 percent
- CEO pay at the companies has gone up 40 percent
- Big Three spending on stock buybacks is up 1,500 percent
- Average new car prices are up 34 percent
- Inflation is up 20 percent
- Autoworker wages are up just 6 percent”
Mum was the word from Cameron about any of that.
The video quoted Fain: “[General Motors, Ford and Stellantis]…pretend that the sky will fall if we get our fair share of the quarter of a trillion dollars the Big Three has made over the past decade. They want to say that our righteous fight for a higher quality of life for the working class would wreck the economy. We’re not going to wreck the economy, we’re going to wreck their economy because it only works for the billionaire class.”
Sykes said the UAW is trying to win back numerous concessions the union made to help save the auto industry in the economic crisis 14 years ago. “This strike has nothing to do with inflation. These companies have made billions since 2009. We want to recoup what we lost.”
“In 2009, the Big 3 − Ford, GM and Chrysler − were on the ropes, and while Ford did not require a government bailout, GM and Chrysler each took a bailout from the federal government,” wrote Ben Brady, the Greater Cincinnati UAW CAP Council chairman, in a Cincinnati Enquirer op-ed earlier this month.
“But for each company to survive long-term, UAW members made steep concessions in pay, gave up cost of living inflation pay, loss of benefits, loss of pensions for anyone hired after 2009 and other quality of life issues such as scheduled shift hours, overtime requirements and the ability for each company to place a two-tier wage structure which required any new employees to start at roughly half the wages of the legacy employee with a longer term to make top-out pay.”
At least Cameron is consistent. Conservatives like him never link inflation to what economist Robert Reich calls “the concentration of the American economy into the hands of a few corporate giants with the power to raise prices.”
In a video, titled "The Truth About Inflation," he explained that “if the market were actually competitive, corporations would keep their prices as low as possible as they competed for customers. Even if some of their costs increased, they would do everything they could to avoid passing them on to consumers in the form of higher prices, for fear of losing business to competitors.
“But that’s the opposite of what we’re seeing. Corporations are raising prices even as they rake in record profits....So the underlying problem isn’t inflation per se. It's a lack of competition. Corporations are using the excuse of inflation to raise prices and make fatter profits."
Corporate executives like the CEOs at the Big Three are enjoying stratospheric-level salaries: Mary Barra, General Motors, $29 million; Carlos Taveres, Stellantis, $24.8 million; and Jim Farley, Ford, $21 million.
"I want to see a swift resolution of this and certainly support the workers," Cameron also told Umbro.
Support the workers? Cameron favors state "right to work" laws, which allow workers in unionized workplaces to enjoy union-won wages and benefits without joining the union or paying the union a service fee to represent them. The idea is to weaken organized labor by encouraging workers not to join unions. (His running mate, state Sen. Robby Mills voted for Kentucky's "right to work law" when he was a state representative.
The Kentucky State AFL-CIO, which includes UAW locals (UAW Local 862 is on strike at Ford's Kentucky Truck Plant in Louisville) endorsed Beshear and Lt. Gov. Jacqueline Coleman again. Both oppose RTW.
Cameron frequently ties the popular Beshear to Biden, who is unpopular in Kentucky, according to polls.
"Daniel Cameron is actually running against President Biden, not Gov. Beshear," said Sykes, who is in Beshear's and Biden's corners. "So don't be misled about what he says about inflation and President Biden."