Unlike other prominent unions, the auto workers are taking their time to ensure that the vice president is aligned with them on key policy questions.
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Shawn Fain, president of the United Automobile Workers union, at a rally outside a General Motors plant in Michigan during a contract dispute last year.
A succession of unions and labor federations this week have endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, but one prominent group has stood out for its relative silence: the United Automobile Workers.
The union, which has been a close ally of President Biden, noted in a statement after his withdrawal from the race that Ms. Harris had “walked the picket line with us” during a 2019 strike at General Motors. Ms. Harris, it said, “along with President Biden has brought work and jobs back to communities like Lordstown, Ohio, and Belvidere, Illinois,” where auto plants had been shuttered. But the U.A.W. has yet to offer its endorsement.
During an interview on MSNBC on Monday, the union’s president, Shawn Fain, said the union’s board would discuss the endorsement over the next few days and that it was seeking input from its members.
A person familiar with the board’s discussions said that the U.A.W. was likely to endorse Ms. Harris but that it wanted indications that she understood the importance to the union of two key issues: continuing Mr. Biden’s agenda of investing in U.S. manufacturing jobs, and being more outspoken on the need to end the war in Gaza and attach strings to U.S. aid to Israel.
On Tuesday, the U.A.W. joined a coalition of several unions that sent a letter to Mr. Biden urging him to “immediately halt all military aid to Israel as part of the work to secure an immediate and permanent cease-fire in the war in Gaza.”
The person familiar with the board’s discussions said that the union wanted to make sure its members would be excited about volunteering for the Democratic nominee in battleground states like Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Nevada and Arizona, and that Ms. Harris’s views on these two policy questions would affect its members’ enthusiasm.
The U.A.W. has many members in Michigan, where there is a sizable Arab American presence and pro-Palestinian sentiment. It also represents tens of thousands of graduate students and other academic workers, many of whom have been outspoken in their opposition to the war in Gaza. The union formally called for a cease-fire in Gaza in December.
When the union confers with the vice president’s team, “we want to have input and talk about what we’re seeing and what we’re hearing from our members and from our board,” Mr. Fain said in the MSNBC interview. As far as an endorsement, he said, “we’re not going to rush in and just throw it out there.”
A spokesman for the Harris campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment, and a union spokesman declined to comment.
Mr. Fain has interacted with Ms. Harris several times since becoming U.A.W. president early last year. He said on MSNBC that Ms. Harris had called him on Sunday, but that he was on an airplane and unable to take the call.
Noam Scheiber is a Chicago-based reporter who covers workers and the workplace. He spent nearly 15 years at The New Republic, where he covered economic policy and three presidential campaigns. He is the author of “The Escape Artists.” More about Noam Scheiber
See more on: 2024 Elections, U.S. Politics, United Automobile Workers, Kamala Harris
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Source: nytimes.com
