does biden understand that he is adding to inflation with all these strikes? wages go up, car prices increase to compensate and blah blah, its very simple. I hope he comes to terms with the realities of his actions when it comes to inflation.

Ford 'pausing' construction of Marshall EV battery plant

Ford Motor Co. on Monday halted construction of a $3.5 billion electric vehicle battery plant project in the Marshall area amid months of battles with local residents, Republicans in Congress over its planned use of Chinese technology and an auto industry strike in its second week.

"We're pausing work, and we're going to limit spending on construction at Marshall until we're confident about our ability to competitively run the plant," Ford spokesman T.R. Reid told The Detroit News on Monday. A "number of considerations" were at play in the company's business decision, he said, but wouldn't say whether the United Auto Workers' ongoing strike of Ford and its crosstown rivals was a factor.

“We haven’t made a final decision about the investment there," Reid said of the Marshall site. The pause in construction is effective Monday.

The decision was announced on the eve of President Joe Biden traveling to Michigan on Tuesday to rally striking UAW workers, who have walked off the job at Ford's Michigan Assembly Plant in Wayne. On Wednesday, former President Donald Trump is planning a town hall-style event in Macomb County to appeal to auto workers whose jobs he contends are at stake in the transition to EVs.

The Ford battery plant in Marshall was one of four cornerstone projects around which state lawmakers and Gov. Gretchen Whitmer in 2021 built the state's newest job-creating incentive program, the Strategic Outreach and Attraction Reserve (SOAR) fund. The taxpayer incentive program was created after Michigan lost out on a massive $11.4 billion investment Ford and a battery partner made in EVs and batteries at two different sites in Tennessee and Kentucky.

Whitmer's office, in a statement Monday, said the governor is committed to keeping Michigan a "home to world-class automakers whose iconic vehicles are built by the best auto workers in the world."

"Ford has been clear that this is a pause, and we hope negotiations between the Big 3 and UAW will be successful so that Michiganders can get back to work doing what they do best," said Bobby Leddy, a spokesman for Whitmer.

more: https://www.detroitnews.com/story/business/autos/ford/2023/09/25/ford-motor-company-electric-vehicle-battery-plant-marshall-pausing/70963467007/

Anonymous wrote:Accept UAW and move every damn plant to Mexico.

There is no way this industry can support these wages and demands.

Mary barra is an overpaid idiot, too.

Make China Great Again.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I support the uaw

But in return, I want tariffs dropped on foreign autos coming to the us as long as they pass nhsta testing

Give uaw what they want

Drop the 25% tax on light trucks and 27% tax on Chinese built cars

Is there bipartisan support for this?

No

Obvi not

+1

It’s funny to see how much Republicans hate workers. A few of them are kind of supporting the striking workers, but their “support” is more about weakening policies that address global warming. They don’t think workers deserve money and they still hate unions with every fiber of their soul. They talk out of both sides of their mouths that they want American manufacturing back, but not if they have to pay fair wages.

Normal to see how democrats hate enterprise and market driven economies. Unions are not fair wages. They're artificial wages that destroy whole industries.

Your policies don't address global warming. There's a smokestack at the end of that charging station.

Electricity generated from renewables surpassed coal in the U.S. last year.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/amp/science/electricity-generated-from-renewables-surpassed-coal-in-the-u-s-last-year

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I support the uaw

But in return, I want tariffs dropped on foreign autos coming to the us as long as they pass nhsta testing

Give uaw what they want

Drop the 25% tax on light trucks and 27% tax on Chinese built cars

Is there bipartisan support for this?

No

Obvi not

+1

It’s funny to see how much Republicans hate workers. A few of them are kind of supporting the striking workers, but their “support” is more about weakening policies that address global warming. They don’t think workers deserve money and they still hate unions with every fiber of their soul. They talk out of both sides of their mouths that they want American manufacturing back, but not if they have to pay fair wages.

Normal to see how democrats hate enterprise and market driven economies. Unions are not fair wages. They're artificial wages that destroy whole industries.

Your policies don't address global warming. There's a smokestack at the end of that charging station.

Nope-- at my house there's no smoke stack at the end of the charging station-- there's a whole bunch of solar panels on my roof.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I support the uaw

But in return, I want tariffs dropped on foreign autos coming to the us as long as they pass nhsta testing

Give uaw what they want

Drop the 25% tax on light trucks and 27% tax on Chinese built cars

Is there bipartisan support for this?

No

Obvi not

+1

It’s funny to see how much Republicans hate workers. A few of them are kind of supporting the striking workers, but their “support” is more about weakening policies that address global warming. They don’t think workers deserve money and they still hate unions with every fiber of their soul. They talk out of both sides of their mouths that they want American manufacturing back, but not if they have to pay fair wages.

Normal to see how democrats hate enterprise and market driven economies. Unions are not fair wages. They're artificial wages that destroy whole industries.

Your policies don't address global warming. There's a smokestack at the end of that charging station.

Anonymous wrote:Accept UAW and move every damn plant to Mexico.

There is no way this industry can support these wages and demands.

Mary barra is an overpaid idiot, too.

Please refer to the Reich tweet above.

Accept UAW and move every damn plant to Mexico.

There is no way this industry can support these wages and demands.

Mary barra is an overpaid idiot, too.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I support the uaw

But in return, I want tariffs dropped on foreign autos coming to the us as long as they pass nhsta testing

Give uaw what they want

Drop the 25% tax on light trucks and 27% tax on Chinese built cars

Is there bipartisan support for this?

No

Obvi not

+1

It’s funny to see how much Republicans hate workers. A few of them are kind of supporting the striking workers, but their “support” is more about weakening policies that address global warming. They don’t think workers deserve money and they still hate unions with every fiber of their soul. They talk out of both sides of their mouths that they want American manufacturing back, but not if they have to pay fair wages.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I support the uaw

But in return, I want tariffs dropped on foreign autos coming to the us as long as they pass nhsta testing

Give uaw what they want

Drop the 25% tax on light trucks and 27% tax on Chinese built cars

Is there bipartisan support for this?

No

Obvi not

Anonymous wrote:I support the uaw

But in return, I want tariffs dropped on foreign autos coming to the us as long as they pass nhsta testing

Give uaw what they want

Drop the 25% tax on light trucks and 27% tax on Chinese built cars

Is there bipartisan support for this?

I support the uaw

But in return, I want tariffs dropped on foreign autos coming to the us as long as they pass nhsta testing

Give uaw what they want

Drop the 25% tax on light trucks and 27% tax on Chinese built cars

Anonymous wrote:Helpful background from Heather Cox Richardson daily newsletter today


Workers accepted major concessions in 2007, when it appeared that auto manufacturers would go under. They agreed to accept a two-tier pay system in which workers hired after 2007 would have lower pay and worse benefits than those hired before 2007. But then the industry recovered, and automakers’ profits skyrocketed: Ford, for example, made more than $10 billion in profits in 2022.

Automakers’ chief executive officers’ pay has soared—GM CEO Mary Barra made almost $29 million in 2022—but workers’ wages and benefits have not. Barra, for example, makes 362 times the median GM employee’s paycheck, while autoworkers’ pay has fallen behind inflation by 19%.

The new UAW president, Shawn Fain, ran on a promise to demand a rollback of the 2007 concessions in this summer’s contract negotiations. He wants a cap on temporary workers, pay increases of more than 40% to match the salary increases of the CEOs, a 32-hour workweek, cost of living adjustments, and an elimination of the tier system.

But his position is not just about autoworkers; it is about all U.S. workers. “Our fight is not just for ourselves but for every worker who is being undervalued, for every retiree who’s given their all and feels forgotten, and for every future worker who deserves a fair chance at a prosperous life,” Fain said. “[W]e are all fed up of living in a world that values profits over people. We’re all fed up with seeing the rich get richer while the rest of us continue to just scrape by. We’re all fed up with corporate greed. And together, we’re going to fight to change it.”

Fain has withheld an endorsement for President Biden out of concern that the transition to electric vehicles, which are easier to build than gas-powered vehicles, will hurt union jobs, and out of anger that the administration has offered incentives to non-union plants. That criticism created an opening for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump to announce he would visit Detroit next week to show autoworkers that he has “always had their back,” in hopes of winning back the support of Rust Belt states.

But for all his talk of being pro-worker, Trump recently attacked Fain, saying “The autoworkers are being sold down the river by their leadership, and their leadership should endorse Trump.” Autoworkers note that Trump and the justices he put on the Supreme Court have been anti-union, and that he packed the National Labor Relations Board, which oversees labor laws and union elections, with officials who reduced the power of workers to organize. Before he left office, Trump tried to burrow ten anti-labor activists into the Federal Service Impasses Panel, the panel in charge of resolving disputes between unions and federal agencies when they cannot resolve issues in negotiations.

Fain recently said: “Every fiber of our union is being poured into fighting the billionaire class and an economy that enriches people like Donald Trump at the expense of workers.”

President Biden prides himself on his pro-union credentials, and as soon as he took office, he fired Trump’s burrowed employees, prompting the head of the union representing 700,000 federal employees to thank Biden for his attempt to “restore basic fairness for federal workers.” He said, “The outgoing panel, appointed by the previous administration and stacked with transparently biased union-busters, was notorious for ignoring the law to gut workplace rights and further an extreme political agenda.”

Today, in the absence of a deal, the UAW expanded the strike to dozens more plants, and in a Facebook live stream, Fain invited “everyone who supports our cause to join us on the picket line from our friends and families all the way up to the president of the United States.” Biden has generally expressed support for the UAW, saying that the automakers should share their record profits with their workers, but Fain rebuffed the president’s offer to send Labor Secretary Julie Su and White House senior advisor Gene Sperling to help with negotiations.

Senators Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and John Fetterman (D-PA) have both visited Michigan to meet with UAW workers, but it was nonetheless a surprise when the White House announced that the president will travel on Tuesday to Michigan, where he will, as he posted on X, “join the picket line and stand in solidarity with the men and women of UAW as they fight for a fair share of the value they helped create. It’s time for a win-win agreement that keeps American auto manufacturing thriving with well-paid UAW jobs."

Helpful background from Heather Cox Richardson daily newsletter today


Workers accepted major concessions in 2007, when it appeared that auto manufacturers would go under. They agreed to accept a two-tier pay system in which workers hired after 2007 would have lower pay and worse benefits than those hired before 2007. But then the industry recovered, and automakers’ profits skyrocketed: Ford, for example, made more than $10 billion in profits in 2022.

Automakers’ chief executive officers’ pay has soared—GM CEO Mary Barra made almost $29 million in 2022—but workers’ wages and benefits have not. Barra, for example, makes 362 times the median GM employee’s paycheck, while autoworkers’ pay has fallen behind inflation by 19%.

The new UAW president, Shawn Fain, ran on a promise to demand a rollback of the 2007 concessions in this summer’s contract negotiations. He wants a cap on temporary workers, pay increases of more than 40% to match the salary increases of the CEOs, a 32-hour workweek, cost of living adjustments, and an elimination of the tier system.

But his position is not just about autoworkers; it is about all U.S. workers. “Our fight is not just for ourselves but for every worker who is being undervalued, for every retiree who’s given their all and feels forgotten, and for every future worker who deserves a fair chance at a prosperous life,” Fain said. “[W]e are all fed up of living in a world that values profits over people. We’re all fed up with seeing the rich get richer while the rest of us continue to just scrape by. We’re all fed up with corporate greed. And together, we’re going to fight to change it.”

The President will be standing in solidarity with the UAW striking employees in fighting management!