Joe Biden, the multimillionaire president who likes to play up his “working man” roots, took the unusual step this week of walking a picket line, joining in solidarity with striking workers at an auto parts distribution warehouse outside of Detroit.
Historians said they could not recall a time when a sitting president joined an ongoing strike, since it can be a politically risky endeavor, depending on how long the strike goes on and how much damage it does to the economy.
That aside, it is ironic for Biden, one of the champions of electric vehicles and all things “green,” to be saluted by United Auto Workers members, since the president’s energy policies are contributing to their anxiety about their future employment in the auto industry.
One of the reasons the UAW is fighting so hard for higher pay, shorter hours and job security is because they know that the government-enticed trend toward electric vehicles means the automakers will need fewer employees. Battery-powered vehicles, because they have fewer parts, can be made with fewer workers than vehicles powered by internal combustion engines. Electric vehicles, according to reporting by CNN, could need up to 30% less labor to assemble than gasoline-powered vehicles.
Let’s say that the UAW is successful in securing with its next contract most of its demands against the Big Three automakers. The dramatically higher labor costs will make vehicles of all types less competitively priced than that of foreign-owned automakers, whose factories are often non-unionized. It will also increase the gap in price between electric vehicles and gasoline vehicles, since any job protections for EV production means they will be made less efficiently than would otherwise be the case.
One of the major reasons, besides human beings’ natural resistance to change, that EVs are still only slowly catching on is because of that price differential, which presently averages about $12,000 between electric and gasoline vehicles. Make that gap wider, and the only way that this country comes anywhere close to the Biden administration’s goals for EV manufacturing is if the government increases how much it subsidizes consumers to purchase the vehicles.
So, when the president is out there with his bullhorn, encouraging striking workers not to cave until their demands are met, he is also in effect cheering for higher taxes and higher debt.
