➡ UAW President Sean Fane supports Trump’s tariffs as they benefit American workers and automakers, and increase manufacturing in the U.S. Despite endorsing Biden and Harris, Fane acknowledges that Trump’s policies have helped the UAW and American manufacturing. However, he also expresses concerns about the need for good paying union jobs, the elimination of contracts for federal workers, and attacks on unions and free speech. Fane is advocating for the unionization of future jobs and plants in the U.S.
➡ The text discusses the dynamics of the job market, emphasizing that demand and supply dictate wages and incentives. It highlights the role of unions and their struggle to establish themselves in southern states, where companies prefer to build plants due to lower entry barriers and less union-related issues. The text also mentions the impact of tariffs on shifting production back to the U.S. from countries like Mexico, Brazil, and China. Lastly, it points out the hypocrisy of those who benefit from these tariffs but refuse to give credit where it’s due.
➡ The North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), initiated by Bill Clinton, led to the loss of many manufacturing plants in the U.S. as jobs were outsourced to other countries. Although President Trump renegotiated NAFTA into the USMCA, it still has loopholes and wasn’t tough enough to prevent further job losses. Tariffs are a tool to motivate companies to bring back jobs to the U.S., but they are not the ultimate solution. The trade system needs to be fixed to prevent further damage to the U.S. working class and communities.

The UAW president, like Sean Fane, our favorite, Mr. Fane. Mr. Fane. Sean Fane was on Meet the Press the other day, and I have not watched this video, but he was talking about Trump’s tariffs. Now, I have a way that I feel about Trump’s tariffs, and I believe that it benefits UAW and American workers and American automakers, and that it will significantly increase the manufacturing presence in the United States of America, which allows for them to swell their memberships, whether it’s, you know, traditional automakers still hiring UAW members, or them going and being able to go and unionize other plans.

Maybe. And Sean Fane actually supported the Biden administration, and he supported Kamala Harris, the president of the United States of America, even though Trump is the one that’s bolstering American manufacturing for them to be, because you got to remember UAW members don’t just unionize major automakers. They unionize suppliers, they unionize other industries. The UAW participates in a unionization which swells their ranks and includes the amount of money that he’s getting paid in his salary, right? I think that he wanted to be a part of Biden’s cabinet, but Sean Fane, again, actually appeared on Meet the Press, and I wanted to get into this whole interview and see what he had to say, all right? So this is Sean Fane, for example, ladies and gentlemen, speaking about Trump’s tariffs and what he sees happening from the president of the United States of America and whether it benefits UAW members.

Time. Let’s start very simply on the question of tariffs on autos and auto parts. Those of you that may not have known and just discovered me recently, Sean Fane is the president of the UAW, which also unionizes Ford, Stellanis, and General Motors, and several other automaker plants and suppliers and stuff. And he was the person that led the strike against major automakers in order to get the historic contracts for UAW members, which then led to a bunch of layoffs also. And he embraced and endorsed Biden and Kamala Harris, the president of the United States of America, for those of you that may not be familiar with Sean Fane.

Mentally and quite simply, why do you believe those are helpful for your membership? Thanks for having me. Look, all you have to do is look at the history of the United States, especially in auto manufacturing in the last 30 years, with the inception of NAFTA and unfair trade laws. We’ve seen over 90,000 manufacturing facilities leave the United States. We’ve seen in the big three alone in the last 20 plus years, 65 plants have closed. And so, look, tariffs aren’t the total solution. Tariffs are a tool in the toolbox to get these companies to do the right thing and the intent behind it is to bring jobs back here and invest in the American workers.

Don’t stutter, Sean. We like the fact that you’re actually embracing Trump’s tariffs. Did you hear that? He basically broke down what I break down to you guys every single day. And he’s explaining to you that American manufacturing, which has basically decimated the American worker and the amount of people that are a part of the UAW and that are in these plants, have just left the United States of America over the past few decades. And nobody, nobody has done anything outside of Trump in order to stem the flow. And he’s telling you that, see, he don’t want to give Trump all of his credit.

So you’re going to say, well, tariffs ain’t the end all be all, but it does force the American people and American companies to do the right thing by the American worker, the ones that make your cars, the people that are in these plants, the people that we need to have manufacturing back in the United States of America. So basically, basically, what he’s saying is that he supports Trump’s tariffs because it benefits the auto industry. It benefits the steel industry. Yes. When we were steel workers, when I was a steel worker, right up the street at the UAW in Dearborn, Michigan, when I was over there, we were a part of the UAW.

We were a part of local 600. We had the same local representation as the Ford plant over there that was making F-150s. The same representation. So he’s basically giving Trump credit for helping to save American manufacturing and the UAW, even though he endorsed Biden for president of the United States of America, but he don’t just want to come out and say it. This is what we call word salad, ladies and gentlemen. The American working class, people have been left behind for decades, and they’re sick of it. It’s a massive struggle.

People are struggling just to get to survive right now, to get by. And so there’s two parts to the tariffs though. The tariffs are a motivator. We have to fix the broken trade laws. And the other thing to me is, you know, these can’t just be just, you know, as with the Biden administration, they did the stuff for battery work and EV work. We had to come in and say, no, these can’t just be union jobs or jobs. They got to be good paying union jobs that set standards. So the big part of this that gets left out a lot of times is if they’re going to bring jobs back here, you know, they need to be life sustaining jobs where people can make a good wage, a living wage, have adequate health care and have a retirement security and not have to work seven days a week or multiple jobs just to scrape to get by paycheck to paycheck.

Long story short, he’s making a pitch to unionize these places and these jobs that are coming to the United States of America. That’s what he’s doing. He’s making a pitch to unionize the future jobs and the future plants that are being built inside of the UAW. Trump is good for Sean Fane. Trump did not sell out the American people like Sean Fane sold out the UAW. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Ain’t that crazy how things change? Ain’t it crazy how the very thing that they are against is the thing that they benefit from? Do you have assurances from the Trump administration as you dialogue with it about those things you just laid out, not just jobs, but a substantial wage, health care and the like? I mean, that is the conversation we’re having naturally.

I mean, you know, that’s the part of this. I mean, look, I’ll be honest with you. Every time we speak, we talk about bringing jobs back, about bringing the manufacturing base. So you actually talked to the Trump administration, even though you asked your union members to roll with Kamala Harris and Biden, you actually still talk to the Trump administration about bringing jobs back to the United States of America and what’s best for your union. So Trump is still working with you because he’s the president of everybody, even though you went against him.

Back in this country, you know, but, you know, it doesn’t do any good if they’re going to locate him in places and they’re not going to have the opportunity to have a union, you know, and so naturally we have concerns. We have great concerns after what happened last night, you know, with the stroke of a marker. You know, Trump eliminated bargaining or eliminated contracts for 700,000 federal workers. You know, we have concerns with what’s going on with our higher education sector that we represent. We have members who are being detained, you know, their right to free speech being violated.

We have workers at the National Institute of Health that provide vital research and that is for the betterment of the people. So, you know, we have big concerns with that. So naturally, yes, every time we talk about trade, talk about tariffs, it’s an integral part of that. These have to be good paying union jobs. I’ll get back to the tariffs and autos in a second, but since you brought up this executive order, it regards an effort by the Trump administration through the president to stop or certainly dramatically slow collective bargaining for federal workers.

Randy Ervin, who’s currently the president of the National Federation of the Federal Employees, calls it the biggest assault on collective bargaining he has ever seen. Do you agree with those sentiments? Exactly. I mean, spot on. Look, I remember when I was 12 years old, when Reagan busted the PAC coworkers, you know, that was a massive issue back then. There were traffic controllers. Yes, yes. And you know, that, you know, labor should have done more then. Look, this is a hundred times worse than PAC, however, dreamed of being. When you’re talking, you know, 700,000 people, their contracts just being taken away.

And so, you know, as I said, you know, free speech is under attack. Unions are under attack. You look at the changes to the NLRB, you look at the situation with Department of Labor, Department of Education, you know, Veterans Affairs. I mean, why are all these things under attack? Medicare, Social Security. It’s because, you know, billionaires want more tax cuts for themselves. And it’s been proven time and again, that’s not what works for America. That’s not good for the American people. The working class people in America, they want their fair share. They’re not asking to be rich.

They just want a decent standard of living. And again, that goes back to what we call our four. He is using the same speech, the same rhetoric that he was using on the campaign trail for Biden and Kamala Harris. And it’s not working. The market is going to dictate what people get paid. The market is going to dictate and it works on both sides. It works on both sides. When you have a need for something, and there’s a demand, but you don’t have enough positions to fill it, or you don’t have enough people to fill those positions, guess what? You up the pay, you up the incentives, you up the ability to continue to pay for people, because you have to fill a need, you have to fill a void.

I remember at one point in the early 2000s when there was a massive demand, a historic demand for software engineers. Software engineers was largely unaffected when it came to the 2008 crisis, the housing crisis, the market crash, the recession, the real recession. It’s one of the reasons why I chose that as a curriculum to get into, because I knew that I would have job protection going into STEM once I completed, and I actually got my degree, even though I was self-taught. And so the market demand for it continued to skyrocket, even though there was less demand, because as long as you was able to just do a laborer’s job, and you didn’t make any money, it didn’t really matter.

You see what I’m saying? So if we could replace you easily, whereas if there’s a huge demand for it, that’s when they incentivize people to go and buy, get things, or do things, or pay more, or whatever. And that’s called a capitalized market. That is a free market. That is a true form of capitalism. You can’t put a cap on it as far as how much they can make, and you can’t reduce it past the amount that people are willing to pay. And so what Sean Fain is mad about is, is that southern states, southern states, southern states are competing more harder for jobs, like Mississippi, like Alabama, like North Carolina.

Southern states are competing much more effectively for these new plants, these Hyundai plants, these Mercedes plants, these plants where people are building things inside of the United States of America. They are not necessarily going over to New York. They’re not going to Los Angeles. They’re not always going to Michigan, right? When they do, they are looking for a workforce that is already built up. However, they tend to go to the barrier to entry is lower. They can create more jobs and they don’t have as much problems with the union. And so he wants to be able to unionize some of these plants, and they’re not letting him unionize these plants because they’re saying that we don’t want you to prohibit these companies from being able to build these plants and these jobs here in these southern states.

You have to compete. You got to compete. And he just thinks that it just comes with it. Hey, Trump, you should mandate that people should use union labor. No, you don’t. No, you don’t. You got to compete. You got to convince the people that it makes sense for them to join a union. You can’t just mandate it just because you are who you are. And you didn’t even endorse Trump for president of the United States of America. Why should he do any favors for you? Four core issues. You know, living wages, adequate health care, retirement security, and having some quality of life other than just everything revolving around work.

Do not buy new windows if you live in Michigan. Americans living in… Okay, hold on. Let’s do this. I don’t know how that keep happening. We go… Exactly. I mean, spot on. Look, I remember when I was 12 years old when Reagan busted the PACO workers party here. We expect no matter what party someone comes from to stand up for what we believe in. So just because we find common ground on tariffs or on trade doesn’t mean that everything else goes out the window. It’s despicable what happened last night. It’s you know, their jobs are being threatened and it’s unacceptable.

So no, there is no trade off here. So we continue to do it. We switch over to the account with the YouTube premium on it. You do. We have integrity. When we can work with a politician on an issue and we get traction, we’re going to work with them. But where we can’t, we’re going to be just as vocal. Understood. Let’s get back to the tariffs and the auto industry. Peter Navarro, a top advisor to the president on trade, says currently automobile manufacturing plants are at about 60% capacity. He argues that there’s lots of untapped capacity, meaning jobs could be created relatively easy and you wouldn’t need to spend two or three or maybe five years building new factories.

Yeah, but the problem is that they don’t want to go over there and work with the union. They don’t want to do… Listen, the union has basically made themselves a black eye. They have made themselves… They’ve created a bad reputation for themselves, all right? They are hostile. They don’t want to work with people. Listen, these companies, these new companies, these new manufacturers, these people that want to build plants inside the United States of America, they see how they treated four Chrysler and GM. They see how they treated these places and that they was willing to shut down a plant and completely ruin everything and throw them in a day and that GM had to basically take out lines of credit at four motor company, even though they make 70% of their vehicles here, had to take out lines of credit to be able to survive that strike.

They see how you treated them. Why would they want to employ a workforce that is basically being held hostage by somebody like you that have liberal views that don’t want to work with the company to make sure that they are still profitable so that you guys get huge profit sharing checks. They don’t want that. They don’t want it anymore. Unions have a black eye on themselves. Is that your understanding? Is that your belief? It’s spot on. Look, we have a situation right now in Warren, Michigan where 2,000 workers were laid off this past year.

They built the Ram truck there for years under Stellanis and Stellanis made a decision to shift that production to Mexico. They could shift that work back in very short order and be producing Ram trucks right back there and put those people back to work. I was just at Volkswagen this week, talking with workers down there that are trying to get their first contract and the company announced a reduction of a shift. Meanwhile, Volkswagen is the biggest violator of all. 75% of their production for the North American market is made in Mexico.

They can shift product there overnight. There’s excess capacity. People forget this lesson in World War II. The way that we formed the arsenal of democracy that won the war was they took the excess capacity of all the automotive manufacturing plants in the country and produced tanks and planes and bombs and engines and all those things. It’s no different right now. We have excess capacity. They could bring work back in very short order. Yes, in a situation where they need to build a new plant, yeah, that’s going to take a couple of years.

There is plenty of opportunity for these companies to do the right thing and bring work back here overnight, just as quick as they shipped it out of here. And Sean, for people who are listening, because Trump is mandating that they do it with the 25% tariffs that people are saying that we shouldn’t put in place. And you, y’all are hypocritical. Sean Fain is one of the biggest culprits of what’s hypocritical about the United States of America and liberals and Democrats that they endorse because the very thing that they’re benefiting off of Trump’s tariffs is the thing that they want to take credit for.

And they want to say, hey, why are you all shifting production over to Mexico? Why y’all shifting production over to Brazil? Why are you shifting production over to China? Why are you shifting production up to Canada with Unifor? Unifor is the union up in Canada. Why are y’all shifting production over there? And then Trump said, we’re going to bring production back and you’re going to have to figure out whether or not the people actually want to unionize because that is the law. And he’s going to embrace the thing that Trump benefits them for, but not give him credit for.

Listen to you. How do tariffs make that happen? What is the relationship between a 20 or 25% tariff and getting that capacity back up to where you’d like it to see? You’d like to see it? Well, because like everything, the companies abused the process. I mean, they’re in the pursuit of driving a race to the bottom. I mean, the tariffs are, there was a major promise when NAFTA, and we’ll go back to when NAFTA happened in 1992, the big debate, and Ross Perot talked about the giant sucking sound that our manufacturing base was going to disappear.

He was spot on. And we saw what happened in the ensuing 30 years. We see 90,000 plants leave. Like I said, we’ve seen 65 plants. Guess who spearheaded the loss of all of these plants? Bill Clinton. Yep. North America Free Trade Agreement, which is what Trump then negotiated, and now he’s renegotiating it again. Bill Clinton. When y’all said that we were going to prosper, what he basically did was sell off our manufacturing to other countries, and now we have to pay for it. Shout out to Bill. Shout out to Bill Clinton. We would still be making something in the United States of America if we didn’t just open up the borders for everybody to take advantage of us.

In the big free clothes. Look, right now, as we speak in Wisconsin, we have a deer plant threatening to be closed, and they’re being threatened to go to Mexico. We have a heavy truck plant at Freightler, Volvo, and Mack Truck in Pennsylvania, being threatened to be taken to Mexico. There is plenty of opportunity, and that’s the reality that we’ve seen here in America. So, tariffs are a tool in the toolbox. They’re not the end-all solution. We have to fix the broken trade system, but the way tariffs work, I mean, it’s a motivator because there’s going to be a penalty for everything that companies ship in here.

And I’ve had companies tell us point blank that they’re going to have to bring product back here if those tariffs are implemented. You mentioned NAFTA. Of course, NAFTA has been replaced by USMCA, and I will remember, you might remember this, Sean, January 2020, President Trump in the Rose Garden said the following. USMCA is the largest, fairest, most balanced modern trade agreement ever achieved. It will add another 1.2% to our GDP, create countless new American jobs. Again, I’m quoting, it will make our blue collar boom. Is USMCA a part of this problem negotiated by President Trump? Well, yes.

I mean, USMCA, I mean, obviously there were changes made. There were some improvements, but it didn’t go far enough. There were still a lot of loopholes in it. It didn’t go far enough. It wasn’t tough enough. Now, notice how they never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever hold Biden accountable for anything that he did or didn’t do, while he was in office. Everything that Trump has done for American worker and UAW workers and all of this stuff, every single thing is a problem. As a result of the renegotiated NAFTA, we still saw an increase in the deficit we have, especially with Mexico.

But at the end of the day, it’s up renegotiation next year, so nothing stops them from getting to work. And we’re right here. We’re here every day. We’ve been very open with them about we want to work with them. We want to find ways to fix the USMCA and fix the atrocities of NAFTA that the working class in this country have suffered and the communities in this country have suffered for decades. Don’t worry about it, big dog. Don’t even worry about it. We’re going to go ahead and get that popping. Make sure I hit a like for the algorithm.

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