Biden’s State of the Union and the real record of UAW President Shawn Fain

Virtually every word out of Biden’s mouth about autoworkers, jobs and the UAW during the State of the Union was a lie.

He referred to an idled Stellantis Jeep factory in Belvidere, Illinois, and claimed: “The UAW worked like hell to keep the plant open and get those jobs back. And together, we succeeded! Instead of auto factories shutting down auto factories are reopening and a new state-of-the art battery factory is being built to power those cars.”

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Invoking the mixture of economic nationalism and demagogy that ran throughout his entire speech, he added that “instead of watching auto jobs of the future go overseas 4,000 union jobs with higher wages are building a future, in Belvidere, right here in America!”

These claims have nothing to do with the reality workers are experiencing.

The giant auto corporations are accelerating a jobs bloodbath globally. Just Monday, Stellantis fired an estimated 1,000 temps in Detroit and Toledo by robocall. These terminations are part of up to 2,300 mass firings Stellantis is carrying out after the UAW bureaucracy forced through a sellout contract last fall.

Ford and GM have also been cutting hundreds of jobs, and Stellantis is laying off workers at its plants in Italy and France.

As for Belvidere, there are perhaps 200 or less workers currently working at a parts warehouse, at a complex that once employed more than 4,000. In fact, the UAW announced in February that Stellantis was laying off 160 workers from the Belvidere parts center.

Hundreds or thousands of laid-off Belvidere workers were forced to make impossible decisions, to either move across the country or accept buyouts and give up their recall rights. Many will never get their jobs back.

Stellantis has not even broken ground yet on its new assembly and battery plants in Belvidere, which are not slated to open till 2027 and 2028 respectively. It is entirely possible that few or none of these jobs will ever materialize and the promises of Stellantis, the UAW apparatus, and the big business politicians will prove to be hollow, as has happened time and again over the past 45 years.

In an effort to burnish his “pro-worker” credentials, Biden invited his favorite bureaucratic lackey, UAW President Shawn Fain, to the State of the Union.

Biden referred to him as “a great friend, and a great labor leader.” Fain stood up and absurdly tried to strike a militant pose, raising his fist while basking in the praise.

Moments after, Biden remarked, in an honest moment, that Wall Street, “They’re not bad guys.” A few minutes later, again speaking to his listeners among the financial aristocracy, he said, “Look, I’m a capitalist. If you want to make a million bucks—great!”

What explains this apparent contradiction?

Biden, long known as “the senator for DuPont” corporation, has relied on the pro-corporate UAW and other union bureaucracies in order to suppress the class struggle and give US imperialism a free hand to wage war abroad.

Fain may be a “great friend” of Biden’s. But he is not a “labor leader” in any meaningful sense of that phrase, contrary to the claims of the pseudo-left DSA (which itself now occupies top positions in the UAW bureaucracy). The UAW’s 2023 “stand up strike” was a fraud, keeping the vast majority of workers on the job, and the contracts it pushed on workers were sellouts.

Fain is a highly paid functionary of the corrupt UAW apparatus, a man who has spent his entire career enforcing the demands of the corporations onto workers.

Lastly, UAW President Fain’s slavish toadying before Biden at the State of the Union should further put to rest his claims to support a ceasefire in Gaza, or to be in any way an opponent of war.

Biden’s State of the Union speech was a full-throated defense of the central preoccupations of his administration: war against Russia, as well as preparations for war against China.

Fain and the UAW leadership have endorsed “Genocide Joe,” who is fully complicit in Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, which has resulted in more than 35,000 deaths. Moreover, Fain and the UAW apparatus have refused to call strikes among their members involved in production of military equipment for Israel at Allison Transmission, Caterpillar and elsewhere.

The Socialist Equality Party is intervening in the US elections in order to advance an internationalist, socialist program among workers.

We are fighting to mobilize the international working class in a political movement against both reactionary capitalist parties.

We are aiding workers in setting up democratic organizations under their control, as part of the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees.

And we are building a revolutionary leadership in the working class, which is the sole social force which can put a stop to imperialist war.