17
votes
United Auto Workers statement: In a victory for autoworkers, auto tariffs mark the beginning of the end of NAFTA and the “free trade” disaster
Link information
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- Title
- UAW | United Automobile, Aerospace and Agricultural Implement Workers of America
- Authors
- Ben Packer, Justin Mayhugh
- Published
- Mar 26 2025
- Word count
- 1299 words
I highlight this because I think the statement is kind of insane, and secondly because it represents a challenge Democrats have right now in messaging.
Normally the far left would be on the vanguard of the "Trump bad" message, but senators like Bernie Sanders are mealy-mouthed and avoidant on the subject, likely because they have been pro-protectionism for a while, and it sounds bad to interest groups like unions that back them to have an anti-tariff message.
Go look at Sanders twitter: he hasn't made a single tweet on the subject. He literally posted about a pro-left Music Festival 30 minutes ago, and nothing on the single biggest news story in the last few days.
As a result, Democrats are stuck between a rock and a hard-place - the natural pushback against Trump is the tariffs, which almost everyone agrees is... bad, but they're unable to do so because it would anger backers who prize ideological purity on protectionism.
On a practical level, the statement is insane because by all projections, the tariffs will decimate Michigan and the auto-industry in the US particularly badly. It feels like throwing the baby out with the bathwater to celebrate the death of your industry just because it ends NAFTA.
The root of the problem, as I see it, is that this statement is "basically true": competing against "practical slavery" in China - not to mention the absolute flouting of environmental laws - is not good for American workers. 3 successive Democratic administration have done absolutely nothing about it (or if they did, like NAFTA, they made it worse). They could have done this the "right way" for 40 years and they chose to take big money donations instead and talk out the side of their mouths about "competitiveness" or throw crumbs like the CHIPS act on the ground... So now we're doing it "this way", which sucks but was inevitable.
Chinese manufacturing hasn’t been “practical slavery” for at least 2 decades now. They are moving up the same value chain that other manufacturers like Germany and Korea have where they’ve gone from cheap stuff to increasingly more sophisticated and high end manufacturing. Americans are engaged in massive amounts of cope here where they imagine the China of “there are starving children there” memes is incapable of just straight up beating us at something straight up without cheating. They did it through sound industrial policy of the kind we’ve been allergic to doing since Reagan and only started to rediscover under Biden. But instead of giving him an ounce of credit for it they decided to whine and complain about pronouns or some shit.
American auto manufacturing is a laggard because of poor business strategy from management and a short-sighted resistance to automation and labor saving improvements from the old trade unions. And it’s not even like reshoring auto manufacturers is going to help the UAW, it’s just going to move to places like NC where the shops aren’t unionized and the old trade unions guys have shown little interest in organizing them.
They will force Americans to buy American cars at higher prices because they will jack up the price to just under a comparable tariffed foreign made car and pocket all the profit is all that’s going to happen here.
The employees of Foxxcon might like to have a word with you.
That said, it does explain the increase of goods saying "Made in Vietnam" instead.
Edit: And Malaysia and Thailand. Survey from 10 random goods in my house acquired within last 10 years: 3 China, 2 Vietnam, 3 Malaysia, 2 India.
10 years prior it would have been like 8 China,1 Vietnam, 1 India.
The suicide rate there was below the average for the age group. I think we’re kidding ourselves if we think the rate of suicide and substance abuse in the US for people in that socioeconomic cohort aren’t equally terrible. But since they’re not in company dorms it’s not a company problem.
This is what I mean about Americans engaging in cope about the actual root of Chinese advantage in these areas.
To add some numbers, the rate of suicide in the U.S. per 100k is ~19 for 25-64 year olds, and 13.5 for 15-24 year olds.
China went from a high rate of ~23.2 in 1990-1995 to a present? 9.17.
At the height of the suicides in Foxconn (2010) there were 15 reported with 930k workers, giving ~1.61/100k, which may be skewed by information I'm missing, but probably not enough to make up for the 10x rate the US has.
Suicide has components of hopelessness, means, and isolation that you aren't going to usually get in a factory town. You can be miserable or mistreated and not suicidal. The "no-suicide pledge", nets, or "I <3 Foxconn" shirts and severity of the act made it the hot topic but the suicide rate was relatively low.
Yes, my point was less about the suicide rate itself, rather the conditions that brought it to light. Otherwise, by that metric......maybe it's just a sign of just how bad everything is in Amerika.
Like Amazon warehouse workers pissing in bottles. But worse.
The US encouraged offshoring to Vietnam for a while as an alternative to China. China used this too, by sending unfinished goods to Vietnam and skirt the tariffs. But Vietnam is now tariffed to hell and back too because they obviously had, and I'll reiterate, a US encouraged trade surplus over the US.
It should be noted that annually China installs 2.2x as many industrial robots as the US, Japan, and Germany do — combined. They also manufacture their own industrial robots and more cheaply than we can (spec for spec). Americans have this mental image of Chinese children working barefoot in sweatshops, but that is outdated: Chinese factories are slick operations.
China has also invested a lot in vocational training and producing tons of engineering and technical talent. China graduates 10x as many engineers (1.6m in 2022) as the US does (145k in 2021). As Tim Cook said, "in the US, you could have a meeting of tooling engineers, and I'm not sure you could fill the room. In China, you could fill multiple football fields."
And indeed, automaker business leadership and the UAW both share responsibility for the American auto industry's uncompetitiveness. Business leaders lacked vision and foresight to introduce products that non-US markets actually want; the UAW actively resists efforts to transition to EVs in (rightful) fear that EV manufacturing requires far fewer workers and makes it difficult for automakers to be nimble.
I mean, while I agree china has absolutely changed their industrial output and practices from the very literal death traps it used to be, a huge portion of their cost cutting is through currency manipulation mixed with a complete disregard for things like pollution, mixed with a lot less government ovrehead.
To a point, but they’re also beating the pants off us in terms of shifting their grid to renewable energy. The currency trickery is more advantaging themselves over other players like Vietnam or India or Mexico rather than taking from the US really.
I mean, yeah, they should. I'm not saying what they're doing isn't impressive, but they're not stuck with some of the infrastructure issues the US faces, and they have the ability to say "we're doing it, fuck you" to every single person in the chain.
Be they some rambling conservative or very valid person worried about nature impacts or whatever of the construction. They can literally just ignore any and all red tape with a mandate.
I mean, that's true but also 100% why the US can't compete with any of those nations for cheap production, and China is only still one of them in part because of the currency manipulation. Competitive advantage is strongly in their favor when the USD can go soooo much farther in their country than in the US.
This is actually one of the points in the book that Ezra Klein just released called Abundance, really interesting that it's coming up here too. /noise
I don’t disagree that they had some advantages going in, both in cost and not having legacy infrastructure to transition. But my real problem is that the coping we end up doing to explain away their competitive advantages lead us to draw boneheaded and counterproductive conclusions. If we tell ourselves a story about how China is beating us through currency manipulation and slave labor then the conclusion becomes much like what American elites are drawing, that we must permit destroying the environment and degrade worker’s rights and safety to compete. But that’s really not it. The legacy infrastructure thing is just a cost problem to transition from old to new. The difficulty building is the result of short-sighted interest groups, from unions to chambers of commerce to the fossil fuel industry to NIMBYs not because we value clean air and water.
The cope is dangerous because it lets us buy into just-so stories about why we’re losing that will absolutely not help us compete but WILL make life harder for working Americans.
I see it as very similar to Uber and Cabs. A lot of people who swear they wanted better rights for workers were pretty quick to chuck cab unions under the bus because uber was so much cheaper. God knows the cab unions were corrupt as shit and sitting on a monopoly, but they literally cannot compete with "we outsourced the labor, safety, and liability", even at their best.
I don't disagree that many people hand wave away some of the larger reasons china has caught up, but at the end of the day there are serious and very real problems to ethically competing, and they do need to be addressed so yes, we don't wind up with kids in factory nonsense.
I've been involved a lot with projects that require the US government, and it's one of many reasons I hate trump, because I mostly agree that there's a ton of backwards ancient thinking and pointless "we meant well, but now we'll waste millions of dollars on it" nonsense that needs to be ripped out if this country is going to remain competitive.
Obviously there's a million more fronts this needs to be handled on, like not just building more housing but also giving people better reasons to not just try to live in LA, but competitive advantage is a thing, and the modern society we've built relies on it.
This is the problem with organized labor. People are mostly on board as long as they’re arguing with their own management for better compensation or working conditions. But if they flip to trying to coordinate with the government to enshrine a right to exploit or scam the public/customers it flips fast. This is why the taxi driver’s orgs had so little sympathy, scamming was a standard business practice for them and everyone hated it.
A similar dynamic happens with a lot of the older trade unions. They focus on making sure there’s lots of perks for their current membership as it exists and do not care at all about the sector’s workforce as a whole. They don’t care about growing membership to get younger people. They are hostile to automating the shittiest or most dangerous jobs because it sacrifices existing jobs (and they don’t care about unionizing the non-union jobs it might replace them with). They don’t care about improving access or cost for customers to grow the industry. Individual union members do, and might, but the organizations as a whole can be extremely myopic.
This is the problem with the US having such a small amount of unions, the ones that do exist have very specific interests often at odds with the rest of the country. If we had broad based unions across many sectors of the economy there would be a base for pushback against harmful policies like these.
We saw the same self-destructive tendencies from the port workers strike when they attacked automation instead of demanding a larger share the wealth automation would bring.
That is kinda the point of union busting, though. The companies run worldwide with all the resources they could ever want and the unions are kept small and isolated so that they cant gain any real power.
It should be remembered that unions are not necessarily pro-worker or pro-society but pro-their-own-members. Sometimes their interests coincide with worker or societal interests but not by necessity or design.
It should not be forgotten that in the 2020 election cycle, many unions came out against Medicare for All because it threatened the health benefits they negotiated for their own members: the Democrats were stepping on union territory.
Except for the nurse unions who supported M4A. Bless them.