This week, the United Auto Workers endorsed President Biden’s re-election. Biden has vigorously supported unions, both through direct policy actions, like appointing labor supporters to the National Labor Relations Board, and indirectly, by promoting a high-pressure labor market that has pushed up wages and an expanded safety net, as well as by walking picket lines and urging workers to organize.
Biden’s opponent, Donald Trump, had stacked the NLRB with union opponents, dedicated his presidency to an oligarchic agenda with attempts to cut taxes for the wealthy (successfully) and cut the social safety net and end democracy (unsuccessfully).
Given all the above, the UAW’s endorsement choice seems to have been fairly easy. However, it has drawn angry dissents. Johannah King-Slutzky, a Columbia University graduate student in English and comparative literature, complained to the Intercept, a left-wing publication with a staunchly anti-Israel line, “A president who supports genocide and is actively sending funds and weapons to Israel to kill children, families, that’s not something that I feel has earned my endorsement.”
Aparna Gopalan, also a graduate student (Harvard Anthropology) and UAW member, wrote a scathing article for Jewish Currents, a left-wing publication, decrying the endorsement. You might be confused as to why so many UAW members are graduate students at elite universities. The answer is that the UAW organized graduate students, who now account for more than a quarter of its members.
And while graduate students have material interests, they have taken, shall we say, a broader and more abstract view of how to pursue those interests. Gopalan’s article argues that the UAW has erred by confining its position to questions like labor law, economic policy, and the social safety net, which favor Biden over Trump. “In their most visionary iterations,” she argues, “U.S. unions have repeatedly reached for this capacious understanding of their role, insisting that in a globally integrated system of accumulation, everything — even foreign policy — is a ‘bread-and-butter issue.’” It may not be surprising that the graduate-student wing of the UAW has a more visionary understanding of its mission than do the people who work in car factories.
Gopalan’s story quotes fellow UAW member Adithya Gungi (also a grad student at Columbia), who says, “Donald Trump needs to be opposed. But this does not mean a full-throated endorsement of a Democratic president who has been actively supporting a catastrophic genocide in Palestine.”
Actually, that is exactly what it means. Let me explain a feature of the American political system that may not have been taught at the Ph.D. level at Harvard and Columbia but is nonetheless extremely pertinent. In a political system in which two parties compete for a series of winner-take-all state contests, without a parliamentary-style system allowing small parties to accumulate delegates, one of the two major parties is going to win.
Since Donald Trump is the all-but-certain Republican nominee, there are two possible outcomes: Either Trump will win the election or Biden will. Anything that reduces Biden’s chances of winning — say, denying him the UAW endorsement in a must-win purple state filled with autoworkers — will by definition increase the likelihood that Trump wins.
I can certainly understand why bitter critics of Israel would be reluctant to support Biden, who (even as he is working to implement a cease-fire) has taken a generally pro-Israel line. The trouble is that his opponent, Trump, is considerably less empathetic toward Palestinian lives than Biden is. He has not only given complete support to the Israeli right, but also “would support expelling Democratic representatives Ilhan Omar (D., Minn.), Rashida Tlaib (D., Mich.) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) from Congress for voting against a resolution condemning Hamas.” So, supporting Trump is a very strange position even for a single-issue anti-Israel voter.
In any case, the United Auto Workers have decided to support the pro-union candidate who denounces hatred of Muslims and Arabs but is also pro-Israel over the anti-union candidate who personally treats Muslims and Arabs as incapable of ever becoming real Americans. The logic seems straightforward, but perhaps I am just revealing my lack of an advanced degree.
