‘Eat the Rich’: UAW strike shows how fixing the economy is bigger than Biden

At your local art house cinema, the Talking Heads are celebrating a 40th-anniversary return of their iconic rock and roll documentary, Stop Making Sense. On your living room big screen, TV’s talking heads are trying to start making sense of a baffling disconnect between America’s booming economic numbers and the sour mood of the electorate. I don’t envy their task.

How could anyone make sense of this? On Friday, the U.S. Labor Department released monthly unemployment stats that surprised economists yet again with the strength of the Biden-era workplace, with a stunning gain of 336,000 new positions. The report gave President Joe Biden an opportunity that any POTUS would crave: to brag about 13.9 million new jobs since he took office in January 2021, with unemployment at levels not seen since the 1960s.

Yet just hours earlier, a nationwide poll of voters from Marquette University Law School compared the two overwhelming frontrunners — Biden and his GOP predecessor, Donald Trump — and found respondents overwhelmingly trusted Trump over the Democratic incumbent on policy over creating jobs, by a solid 50%-39% margin. That’s a voter vibe not supported by statistics — the 45th president actually had the worst jobs numbers of any modern president, dragged down by the pandemic and his response in his final year — or any lasting policy achievement.

You could give a long convoluted answer for this staggering inconsistency — one that looks at inflation and lingering consumer shock over high prices for gas or a steak burrito, but also the effect of Fox News bias and the macroeconomics of who wins and who loses under “Bidenomics.” Or you could do what Shawn Fain, the brash leader of the ongoing strike by members of the United Auto Workers, did Friday and boil it down to just three words, and splay them across your chest for the world to see:

“Eat the Rich.”

Fain elected to wear that particular shirt as he announced a major victory in his crusade to make sure that blue-collar workers rise along with America’s automakers in a time of record corporate profits, but also during a make-or-break transition away from traditional fossil fuels. The UAW had just secured an agreement from General Motors to include workers at its upcoming electric vehicle battery factory in Indiana under the union contract — sending a critical signal that America can fight climate change with domestically built electric vehicles while still providing good-paying jobs.

“We are winning, we are making progress, and we are headed in the right direction,” Fain said in a broadcast where he announced the deal while wearing his now-infamous shirt. It’s easy for folks — especially journalists — to get sucked into the day-to-day of the UAW’s picket-line battles with GM, Ford, and Chrysler-owner Stellantis, or around the latest economic statistics and the presidential poll numbers, as confusing as that analysis may be.

But there’s a much bigger picture here, and I think it goes a long way to explain why the middle class is not happy with the economy, and why efforts by Democrats to tout Bidenomics not only aren’t working but possibly backfiring, thus angering some voters who think this White House is out of touch. I think when you talk about “the economy,” millions of people aren’t seeing the monthly ups and downs of the labor market. They’re feeling a sustained beatdown on the middle class that gained steam, ironically, right around the time the Talking Heads put out Stop Making Sense, in 1983.

By any measure, working-class wages have been remarkably stagnant for about 50 years, while upper-income Americans have seen their wealth skyrocket during the same period. The Pew Research Center reported last year that middle-class families saw their share of U.S. aggregate income plummet from 62% to 42% from 1970 to 2020, while the wealthiest group saw its share rise from 29% to 50%. The average corporate CEO earned 21 times more than his employees in 1965, while that ratio had soared to 344 times by 2022.

When Ronald Reagan became president in 1981, his two most significant first-year actions were sharply lowering taxes for the wealthy and firing striking federal air traffic controllers — which was also a signal to corporate America that it wouldn’t pay a price for hardball tactics against unions. Since 1983, the percentage of U.S. workers carrying a union card has plummeted from just over 20% to just over 10% last year, and blue-collar pay and benefits have suffered under that regime.

The UAW’s Fain gets it. He’s been clear that the UAW’s labor action isn’t only to ensure that autoworkers get a steep pay raise, retirement benefits, and better working conditions, and are protected in the rush to electric vehicles. It also sends a signal to the broader economy every bit as powerful as Reagan firing those air traffic controllers, about swinging the pendulum back to the working class.

» READ MORE: UAW strike is exposing the fraud that GOP is the party of the working class | Will Bunch

“There’s a billionaire class, and there’s the rest of us,” Fain told striking workers outside a Ford plant in Wayne, Mich., recently. “We’re all expected to sit back and take the scraps and live paycheck to paycheck and scrape to get by. We’re second-class citizens.” In other appearances, Fain has slammed “corporate greed.” His message is resonating for many, but like for Biden — who historically joined the UAW leader on a picket line last month — it’s hard to cut through the political static.

As noted earlier, there are lots of transitory, short-term reasons why voters are giving Biden low marks on the economy. The higher prices shoppers see at the supermarket or gas pump still hurt while telling them the news that inflation has cooled in 2023, or that many folks are now seeing their paychecks rising faster than inflation, means little. Also, the economic statistics aren’t doing a good job of reflecting some of the things hurting everyday Americans, especially younger voters, such as the resumption of student debt payments or ridiculous big-city rents.

Also, there’s evidence that the biggest benefits of Bidenomics ― job opportunities and wage growth for workers at the bottom of the economic pyramid, who have suffered the most for decades — are the folks who rarely get interviewed or call into talk radio, while the people losing some ground, on fixed incomes and facing higher prices, tend to be louder. Especially the ones glued to Fox News or talk radio as they present a biased interpretation of the economic news.

But I can’t help but think that when millions of people say “the economy” is lousy, they’re not really comparing it to 2021 but to 1983, or at least what our young people were promised by their elders who were around in 1983. They cheer when Fain shows up in his “Eat the Rich” T-shirt because it’s been a struggle to put real food on the table for decades. What Fain and the UAW are proposing isn’t just a nice little bump in next week’s paycheck, but a return to the day when a person from the assembly line could afford a fishing cottage — or to send their kid to college.

That’s a possible world, but it can’t come overnight. It takes time, hard work, and the courage of the men and women now out braving the picket line. My biggest fear is that most voters don’t have that patience. It’s why the 91-indictment-guy who promises to blow up the American Experiment so that “I alone can fix it” is in a dead heat with Biden in those same polls.

But with so much evidence that unions are the true path back to middle-class prosperity, why elect Trump — who enacted a running series of anti-labor policies as 45th president, when he wasn’t spending his political capital on tax cuts for the wealthy and for corporations — instead of Biden, who has backed up his pro-worker rhetoric with actions and appointees at agencies like the National Labor Relations Board, aimed at helping the middle class? That would truly stop making sense, but when it comes to our twisted world of politics and economics, it wouldn’t be the first time.

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