2023-09-26 20:39:06
President Joe Biden stands next to United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain (left) Tuesday in Belleville, a suburb of Detroit, Michigan. EVELYN HOCKSTEIN/REUTERS
By appearing in Detroit in an unprecedented gesture for an American head of state, the president is making a risky bet.
Joe Biden is the first sitting president of the United States to appear on a picket line in support of workers. Neither Franklin Delano Roosevelt nor Harry Truman dared to do so, despite their sympathies for the unions. The handshakes of the president, dressed in a jacket and wearing a cap displaying the logo of the auto workers’ union, in Belleville, in the suburbs of Detroit, with striking GM workers, are therefore in every respect historic. The opportunity to address the crowd, megaphone in hand, affirming that the workers deserve a “significant increase” salary, of the order of 40%. What was demanded by the strikers. “Wall Street did not build the country. The middle class built the country,” he continued.
By politicizing the strike launched on September 15 by the United Auto Workers (UAW), the sole union of workers on the General Motors (GM), Ford and Stellantis lines, Joe Biden is taking a risky bet. In the middle of…
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