Shawn Fain, President of the United Auto Workers (UAW), during a campaign event with former American vice-president Kamala Harris, Flint, Michigan, Friday October 4, 2024.
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President Trump’s announcements on prices have dismayed many of his former supporters at Wall Street. Suddenness – and the slope – prices announced last Wednesday have prompted certain world manufacturers to suspend shipments in the United States and have led economists to increase the chances of recession.
But an earlier set of prices still has the support of Shawn Fain, president of the united workers.
Fain supported Democrat Kamala Harris with a discourse from the Ardent Convention in 2024, and opposed many Trump positions on union work, but argues that the president made a blow that the leaders of the two parties resisted for decades.
Fain represents nearly a million current and retired workers in several industries, which he estimates that a few hundred thousand are now employed by the automotive industry. It is a spectacular decline of 1.5 million cars alone that the UAW represented in the middle of the 20th century.
You will find below the strengths of an NPR interview with an unconventional supporter of the prices. Some responses have been slightly modified for length and clarity.
He is not sure of all prices but promotes them for his industry.
Fain referred to the announcement last Wednesday of world prices as “reckless”, but firmly supports a series of previous prices on the American automotive industry. These prices help and harm American car companies because they produce so much in Canada and Mexico. Automobile parts generally cross the border several times when a car is assembled. GM has already said that it returns a certain production in Indiana – but Stellantis has ordered layoffs.
For Fain, the prices deal with a historic harm. “We have sat here in the past 30 years, with the creation of (the North American free trade agreement) in 1993-1994, and saw our manufacturing base in this country disappear,” he said.
He does not care much about the decline in the stock market.
“You know, half of the Americans have no stock,” he said. (Some estimates say that more than half of Americans have stocks.)
“Sixty percent of Americans have no retirement savings,” he said. “So when I hear all the tears on the stock market, it is only Wall Street. These are people who are already rich, and at the end of the day, most people in the working class are trying to survive at the moment. And it is exasperating that our livelihoods are eliminated for decades and nobody cares.”
He recognizes that prices can increase prices.
Most economists said the cost of import taxes was passed on to consumers. When asked if it was good for the working class, Fain replied: “Well, no, but that’s a choice. This is the problem with our system. It is so upside down. The billionaire class and the business class, they always get their profits. They always take their cut, and they always transmit something to consumers.”
Fain has nevertheless recognized that he considers prices as a way to avoid exceptionally low prices trained by cheap workforce: “The point of prices is to eliminate the race at the bottom where we exploit people.”
Despite the suddenness of Trump’s decision, he insists that the automotive industry can adapt.
Fain called Warren, Michigan, from which Stelllantis recently moved a certain production in Mexico. “There are 2,000 workers who were dismissed. They could put them back to work in a month and build ram trucks there,” he added.
He rejects the idea that the disturbance may not work
Fain rejected Wall Street’s warnings from a recession, including one by an economist JP Morgan.
“Where was JPMorgan, all these people, when companies increased prices and prices were touched over the past three and four years?” He said. “Where was their outcry at the time? As long as the stock market is fine, that’s all that indicates it.”
He also minimized an idea advanced by many economists: that all factories “raised” to the United States are probably very automated, due to the progress of robotics and the high cost of labor. He said such factories would at least require “qualified commercial jobs that are even better paying. We just have to train people”.
“The sad reality of this is (the idea that) is a bad thing that we are putting in this country because the work is expensive. It is pathetic. I think it was one of the former presidents (who) said, I am mercy on the businessman who wants to make a coat so cheap that the person who makes the coat will put hungry in the process. I mean,” said Fain.
The audio version of this interview was produced by Mansee Khurana and edited by Arezou Tervani. The digital version has been produced and modified for the web by Majd al-Waheidi.
