President Joe Biden visited the striking United Auto Workers members Tuesday despite his own role in ruining the auto business, Breitbart reported. Biden spent a total of 12 minutes on the visit before jetting off to a fundraiser.
Members of the UAW are striking against auto companies Ford, General Motors, and Stellantis. The terms of the strike include better wages for workers burdened by inflation, thanks to Biden's economic policies.
The UAW is asking the companies for cost-of-living increases amid historic inflation. The companies have sought to compromise by offering inflation pay bonuses to no avail as workers understand the threat of inflation is not over as long as Biden is in the White House.
The president has exacerbated their plight by pressuring the auto business with his Electric Vehicle mandates, which have contributed to conditions causing the strike. Workers are worried about their jobs as electric vehicles require fewer employees to assemble.
Biden has promised there will be a glut of "clean and green" jobs created that would help those displaced workers, but that promise has yet to materialize. Also, the few green jobs that have been created in manufacturing have all been in right-to-work states that are against union control.
However, the threat of job loss is also coming from overseas. Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) warned that future jobs required to fulfill the EV mandates will likely go to China.
"The more the Big Three’s business model relies on global supply chains and non-union labor, the less the UAW can effectively push for higher wages," Vance said in an op-ed published last week. "Their leverage decreases every time a consumer buys a car made without an Ohio worker, and yet the policies of the Biden administration are explicitly designed to shift the auto industry offshore," he added.
Former President Donald Trump had a similar warning. "The auto workers will not have any jobs … because all of these cars are going to be made in China. The electric cars, automatically, are going to be made in China," Trump said.
"Those jobs are all going to be gone, because all of those electric cars are going to be made in China," Trump also said about the mandates to switch to electric vehicles. "That’s what’s happening," he added.
Moreover, many of the necessary components that go into making electric vehicles are already produced in China. For the elements to make the batteries, 95% percent of the manganese, 73% of the cobalt, 70% of the lithium, 70% of the graphite, and 63% of the nickel for the world all come from the communist nation.
Several components are already primarily made in China. The communist nation manufactures 99% of the LFP cathodes, 92% of the anodes, 82% of the electrolytes, 77% of the cathodes, 74% of the separators, and 73% of NMC cathodes.
The confluence of all of these factors has left the auto industry in a tough spot and its workers at a loss. Meanwhile, Democrats are ever dependent on them as a voting bloc, which is likely why Biden decided to grace them with his presence.
Unfortunately, the visit turned out to be little more than a photo op. In the few minutes he was there, Biden only spoke for 87 seconds before leaving for a series of fundraisers in California. He never once mentioned his outsized role in their predicament.
Biden has ruined many sectors of the economy, but his radical green policies have decimated the auto industry. There isn't much he can do to overcome that fact, and a few minutes with the striking workers is worse than doing nothing.
