How Biden navigated the perilous auto strike and lived, politically, to tell about it

Less than an hour before Joe Biden announced he’d join striking auto-workers on the picket line, one of his top aides broke the news to the car company executives being targeted.

Gene Sperling, the White House adviser who Biden had tapped to monitor the talks between United Auto Workers and the “Big Three” auto businesses, tried to be diplomatic. This was core to who Biden was, he explained. It didn’t mean the president was standing against the companies, he added, according to a person familiar with the discussions who was granted anonymity to reveal private talks. The CEOs weren’t happy.

A few days later, Biden became the first president in history to walk the picket line. A month after that, the UAW finalized tentative agreements with the Big Three that included historic raises for workers alongside extended benefits and other concessions.

Union officials say it was the striking workers, not the president, who were ultimately responsible for those record contracts. But several also credit Biden’s embrace — capped by his decision to stand with the strikers — for providing political cover that helped secure a deal.

That embrace was not without risk.

The auto executives Sperling called that day are instrumental to Biden’s economic and clean energy agenda. General Motors CEO Mary Barra is widely considered one of his closest corporate allies. They were not just surprised that Biden went to the picket line, they were upset. Some people in the companies and other affected businesses saw it as an end to any pretense of evenhandedness and a betrayal of the White House’s reassurances to them that all it wanted was a fair deal.

“This is the first time in American history a president has taken a side, walking a picket line,” said Chris Spear, head of the American Trucking Associations. “It’s not only anti-business, it kicks 90 years of impartial mediation by a president to the curb.”

Biden’s decision to walk the picket line, he added, was “a new low as to what one will do to curry political endorsements.”

The backstory of the White House’s handling of the UAW strike, as recounted by a dozen White House aides, business representatives, union officials and elected officials close to the negotiations, provides one of the clearest illustrations to date of the bets that have come to define Biden’s economic platform. The president has embraced a domestic agenda in many ways more ambitious than his Democratic predecessors and he’s occasionally disregarding political mores in pursuit of it.

He’s also made a major attempt to stop his party’s slide among working-class voters with — in this case, historic — demonstrations of support to their cause. At the same time, he’s tried to keep the auto industry close despite their serious misgivings, with both the White House and car companies testifying that they maintain a good relationship today.

“The president sees the agreement as a boost for his middle-class jobs agenda and a strong refutation of those suggesting policies for an auto future made in America will backfire,” Sperling said in an interview. “Just go down the list. Instead of lower wages for auto workers, less jobs and less factory investment, you have 148,000 UAW auto workers getting a bigger raise in the next four-and-a-half years than they’ve gotten in the 22 years before this combined.”

The lead-up to the strike was uncertain for Biden’s relationship with the union. The president’s reelection campaign had been endorsed by most major labor shops.

But the UAW was the stubborn exception. Its president Shawn Fain had said his union would be withholding its endorsement from Biden for now and publicly lambased him over his administration’s subsidies for electric vehicles. It was a rare red mark on Biden’s labor record, one that the likely GOP nominee, Donald Trump, was trying leverage in key battleground states.

The White House, for its part, worked behind the scenes to try and establish better relations with the union.

In June, Matt Frantzen, president of the Illinois-based UAW Local 1268, was invited to meet with the president behind closed doors when he traveled to Chicago for fundraisers and a speech on the economy. Frantzen, who represents workers at a Stellantis-owned factory that was indefinitely idled in February, urged Biden to help bring the Belvidere assembly plant back online.

Biden told him that he would call the corporations and “see what needed to be done,” Frantzen said, and directed his top aides to focus on Belvidere. When the president talked to Stellantis’ North American COO Mark Stewart in September, he asked about the chances of restoring jobs there.

Ultimately, according to the union, the company agreed to bring back the shut-down plant as a result of the tentative agreement struck last week.

Biden also worked to develop a personal relationship with Fain.

In July, the president’s aides arranged for a meeting at the White House with the labor leader. They weren’t sure how Biden would respond. Just weeks before, Fain had lit up the president over a battery plant loan, arguing that it would create low-paying jobs and asking, “Why is Joe Biden’s administration facilitating this corporate greed with taxpayer money?”

But Biden told his staff that he wanted to talk to Fain himself. The two men ended up speaking one-on-one for about 30 minutes.

Then, over the summer, as their then-contract was nearing its end date, UAW officials asked Biden’s team if the president was planning to be more vocal, said two people familiar with the matter who were granted anonymity to discuss private discussions. The president’s aides told the UAW officials that, a month before the contract deadline was up, Biden would put out a supportive statement. In it, he went further than before, saying “the UAW deserves a contract that sustains the middle class.”

But the two sides weren’t always on the same page. On Labor Day, Biden predicted that the union wouldn’t go on strike, a statement that prompted Rep. Debbie Dingell (D-Mich.) to privately ask a top White House aide, “Are you out of your fucking minds?” As Biden’s team began working to contain the fallout, the president decided to call Fain himself and clear the air.

As Biden and his staff were trying to keep Fain in the fold, they were doing the same with the car companies and other affected businesses. Throughout the labor strife, Biden spoke multiple times with auto executives, including a few days after Labor Day. Biden’s message to them then was to continue the negotiations, said a White House official: “Ignore the noise. Don’t worry about what you think of anyone’s social media strategy. Stay at the table. Keep making progress.”

The back-channeling seemed to work. Ann Wilson, senior vice president for government affairs at the Motor & Equipment Manufacturers Association, praised the White House for its frequent outreach. “The president has made no secret of his position on workers and on the unions, but I think what has been particularly helpful has been the conversations,” she said.

But others in the business community were turned off by what they thought was a union-friendly approach from a president who — while a self-declared fan of unions — was expected to be impartial in any standoff. Steven Rattner, the financier-turned-car czar under President Barack Obama, said it represented the president “taking an aggressive side.”

“I didn’t think it was appropriate then, and I don’t think it was appropriate now,” he said.

On Sept. 15, UAW workers walked out of three assembly plants, formally starting the strike. That day, the president gave a speech in which he echoed a line from Fain, saying “record corporate profits mean record contracts for the UAW.”

That pronouncement surprised car company executives, people familiar with the matter said, as they expected more impartiality.

But the UAW was miffed too, after Biden announced during his speech that he was dispatching his top aides to Detroit. They feared that the White House’s emissaries would create the perception among their members that they were controlling the talks.

They had some reason to worry. Biden’s team was privately nervous about a long, painful strike. In a worst-case scenario, some even feared that it might even drag out past Thanksgiving.

Biden eventually pulled back from immediately sending his aides to Detroit.

But just days into the strike being launched, political pressure was mounting on Biden himself to actually show up at the line as a demonstration of solidarity. Democrats in Michigan and elsewhere were publicly pushing him to join workers there, and UAW leaders wanted him to more aggressively show his support.

On Sept. 20, while he was in between meetings in New York for a United Nations General Assembly session, the president suggested to his aides that he wanted to go to the picket line. He made the final call two days later, one day after meeting with Ukranian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. The White House texted Fain the news.

“The president told all of us in no uncertain terms that he was there in 2009 when auto workers sacrificed so much to save the Big Three and that he planned to be clear as a bell that he was standing with the UAW workers,” said Sperling.

The actual trip to Van Buren Township, Michigan was a political tightrope act. Biden spoke for about a minute-and-a-half and told workers “you’ve earned a hell of a lot more than you’re getting paid now.” Some union officials, looking back, saw it not just as an embrace but a consequential episode in getting the deals across the finish line.

“It does make it national and it does bring attention,” said LaShawn English, a Michigan-based UAW region director. “I thought it was great because that’s the first time that we ever had a president who wasn’t here asking for our support during an election and actually showed up for the membership.”

But several moments during the trip also created headaches for the president and his team.

A person involved in negotiations on the auto company side said the businesses were particularly appalled when the president, asked by an accompanying reporter, said he backed the union bargaining for a 40 percent pay raise. They also were disturbed that Biden looked on as Fain, on the picket line, invoked a phrase by Franklin Roosevelt that some in the businesses saw as comparing them to Nazi Germany.

“It’s a different kind of arsenal of democracy, and it’s a different kind of war we’re fighting,” Fain said, using Roosevelt’s “arsenal of democracy” language at a plant known for its manufacturing during World War II. “Today, the enemy isn’t some foreign country miles away. It’s right here in our own — in our own area. It’s corporate greed.”

The White House later told the companies it didn’t know Fain would make the comment, according to the person on the auto side, who was granted anonymity to speak freely about private discussions.

“We respect that the administration has a vested interest in these negotiations,” another person on the company side said. “It doesn’t change our commitment to continuing to work with them on other policy matters.”

After Biden’s visit to the line, the White House continued to keep close tabs on the talks. Sperling spent most of his work day dedicated to the negotiations. Biden himself was briefed daily on them, even after war broke out in Israel. Biden’s chief-of-staff Jeff Zients and National Economic Council director Lael Brainard also talked with company executives and stressed they wanted to continue working together.

After UAW cut deals with Ford and Stellantis last month, White House aides were jubilant.

Within the West Wing, there was a sense that Biden’s approach had paid off and that the agreements would cement his legacy as a staunchly pro-labor president who is simultaneously committed to a green future with electric vehicles.

There was, however, one surprise left. The UAW announced that it was expanding its strike against GM — which momentarily caught the White House off guard. But then, Fain finalized a tentative agreement with the last of the Big Three companies on Monday.

Afterward, Biden spoke with him over the phone and congratulated him. The president also wished Fain a happy birthday.

Lisa Kashinsky contributed to this report.