Yesterday, in Michigan, President Biden wore a United Auto Workers cap, gave some encouragement, and took some slightly awkward photos in a visit to workers on their second week of a strike.
Being president is about a lot more than photo ops, of course, something Donald Trump — who was bored by the particulars, content to delegate most actual decision-making to a cadre of hard-core far-right ideologues and seemed happy only when pretending to honk truck horns and tossing paper towels at hurricane survivors — never quite understood. Being president is about the bully pulpit and the pen, the nuts and bolts of policy and knowing what it takes to maneuver a gargantuan federal bureaucracy at least generally in the direction you want it to go.
That said, photo ops have their value, in that they are precisely a statement of values. Being seen out and about with a group of people, supporting their cause — particularly for a president, for whom arranging such a visit is no easy task — is a marker that their plight is important to you, and to your administration. This was not just any photo op, but a historic one, with the union-friendly octogenarian becoming the first sitting president in history to join striking workers on a picket line.
Prior executives had stayed away not out of any practical considerations, but ostensibly because they did not want to be seen as taking sides in these types of labor disputes. Yet presidents have always intervened in the labor issues of the day, often siding, tacitly or explicitly, against organized labor. In what is now considered one of the most pivotal turning points in the late-20th-century collapse of the union movement, Ronald Reagan fired more 11,000 striking air traffic controllers just two days after the start of their unsanctioned 1981 strike, barring them from federal service to boot.
Decades of the defanging of the National Labor Relations Board and the turn away from antitrust and workplace regulation and enforcement have cleaved productivity from wages and left many workers in increasingly precarious circumstances and unprotected from retaliation against organizing, even as corporate profits soared. Economic downturns have ended with massive bailouts for teetering banks and corporations but comparatively little to rescue workers treading water. And so on and so forth.
A shift has only come recently, and initially somewhat accidentally, with the pandemic bringing about increased protections. Now, Biden is putting his money where his mouth is, presiding over one of the most active NLRBs in several generations, appointing pro-labor jurists and crafting bipartisan industrial and social services policy to benefit workers.
The walk down the picket line was just good politicking and a visual representation of the policies the president is already pursuing, smartly, ahead of what will probably be a tough reelection against a wannabe dictator who’s positioned himself as the ally of the working man. Trump is also slated to address UAW picketers today, but he’ll be doing so from the position of an executive who worked mainly to enrich himself and his friends and advance discredited economic policies that did nothing to hurt them.
So, what’s most notable about Biden isn’t that he went to the picket line, but that he still stands behind those workers once the cameras are off.
New York Daily News Editorial Board
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