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United Auto Workers Hold Off on Backing Biden, for Now [1]
['Shane Goldmacher', 'Coral Davenport']
Date: 2023-05-03
The United Auto Workers, a politically potent labor union, is planning to withhold its endorsement of President Biden in the early stages of the 2024 race, according to an internal memo from its president to members on Tuesday.
The memo, written by Shawn Fain, the Detroit-based union’s president, said the leadership of the United Auto Workers had traveled to Washington last week to meet with Biden administration officials and had expressed “our concerns with the electric vehicle transition” that the president has pursued.
The memo underscores how some of Mr. Biden’s boldest moves to fight climate change, which animate his liberal base, could at the same time weaken his political support among another crucial constituency. The U.A.W. has shrunk in size in recent decades, but it still counts about 400,000 active members, with a robust presence in Michigan, a critical battleground state for Democrats.
In April, the Biden administration proposed the nation’s most ambitious climate regulations yet, which would ensure that two-thirds of new passenger cars are all-electric by 2032 — up from just 5.8 percent today. The rules, if enacted, could sharply lower planet-warming pollution from vehicle tailpipes, the nation’s largest source of greenhouse emissions. But they come with costs for autoworkers, because it takes fewer than half the laborers to assemble an all-electric vehicle as it does to build a gasoline-powered car.
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[1] Url:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/03/us/politics/biden-auto-workers-endorsement.html
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