Worker Unions Endorsed Biden, Members Got Screwed

Daniel Greenfield November 18, 2021 @ Sultan Knish Blog

When Joe Biden ran for office, he told the members of the United Steelworkers that he would keep President Trump's steel tariffs on Europe in place. The tariffs, which protect the jobs of American steelworkers, were one of the few Trump policies that Biden kept after taking office.

Even most government insiders thought the tariffs would stay in place because they created American jobs in key battleground states like Ohio and Pennsylvania. Abandoning them would risk not just the White House, but Democrat House and Senate losses in 2022 and 2024.

United Steelworkers endorsed Biden and he promised them that he would keep the tariffs in place right until he jetted off to Europe in Air Force One, with its presidential suite and gym, and then toured Rome in an 85-vehicle motorcade to discuss the "environmental crisis".

Biden’s foreign policy priorities haven’t been focused on American security or jobs. After turning over Afghanistan to Al Qaeda for September 11, he decided to do to American steel jobs what he had done to Afghanistan by cutting a deal to partially lift President Trump’s steel tariffs.

The Biden administration’s environmentalist and tax hike priorities required making some concessions to the Europeans in exchange for agreeing to a minimum corporate tax of 15% (which Biden believes will make it easier to hike America’s corporate tax rates) and massive reductions in functional energy like coal and oil in exchange for non-functional green energy.

The steelworkers of Ohio and Pennsylvania, already on the hit list of Biden’s Big Green donors, were the sacrifice that “Middle Class Joe” made so his San Francisco donors can get even richer trading in carbon credits while salivating at the prospect of turning the entire American economy into a corrupt scheme for taxing and trading the imaginary “carbon” commodity.

To save the planet. Before flying off to their seaside coastal mansions.

United Steelworkers is now stuck trying to sell the latest Biden betrayal to its members as a very good thing by repeating the White House talking points of an alliance with Europe against Chinese steel. That promise, like the tariff promise, will turn out to be just as much of a sham.

Steelworkers could have taken a cue from the miners who have been lied to by Democrats.

The United Mine Workers of America had actually endorsed John Kerry, who went on to wage an environmentalist war on coal, because he had promised to protect coal jobs.

Kerry, now Biden's Climate Czar, tried to recently gaslight coal miners by falsely claiming that, "Workers have been fed a false narrative, no surprise, over the last few years they’ve been fed the notion that somehow dealing with climate is coming at their expense, no it’s not."

Then he suggested that coal miners get jobs installing solar panels.

“Secretary Kerry trying to equate the job of an electrician in a coal mine who makes $110,000 to a solar tech, who might make $35,000 to $40,000, is not a good analogy for our state," Senator Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia pointed out.

Kerry’s current priority is trying to convince the Biden administration to surrender everything to China in exchange for asking the Commies to use less coal. Which they’re buying from us.

China is now the second largest market for American coal. Biden and Kerry are bribing the Chinese to stop buying our coal. Has any other government hated its own country this much?

The United Mine Workers of America didn’t even bother with a presidential endorsement. After Hillary Clinton announced that she would kill coal miner jobs, the UMWA threw in the towel. In the last election, most UMWA members voted Trump. The same was true of the steelworkers.

Biden not only lied to the steelworkers, and waged war on coal miners, he lied and betrayed those American miners who were hoping that there would be some future for mining jobs.

During the campaign, miners were "privately" told by the Biden campaign that his administration would encourage domestic mining of rare earth metals.

The Biden pitch was that his environmental strategy would require lots of rare earth metals for solar panels and electric cars, and that would actually boost rare earth mining in America.

It was a familiar twist on the scam that was sold to the steelworkers.

Big Green lobbies have repeatedly sold the same lie that "investing" in their energy scams would create jobs. The only place it ever creates jobs is in China and among the venture capitalists of San Francisco. Not to mention the EPA bureaucrats tasked with dragging out environmental reviews for years so nothing gets built who then turn around and get six figure jobs as environmental consultants to "help" businesses get things built.

There's no room for American workers in this dirty green racket.

After the worthless "private" assurances, once in office the Biden administration announced that it would be relying on foreign rare earth metals. Middle Class Joe’s betrayal of miners and the country had devastating consequences as China used the Taliban to secure Afghanistan’s rare earth mines even as a chip shortage wreaked havoc on the global supply chain.

Biden’s betrayal of miners also increased the prices of cars, laptops, and smartphones. Printer prices shot up 20%. And yet very few Biden voters understand that their own politician decisions are why they have to pay more for consumer electronics.

But the one thing you can count on from Democrat unions is that they will put the party first and their members last. And no matter how much their Democrat bosses humiliate them and spit in their faces, they’ll line up to ask for more while selling out their members one more time.

Democrats used to spout their love for the working class, now they have nothing but contempt for them. The dying breed of politicians who still know how to talk to working unions like Biden are nothing but puppets dancing for the amusement of their New York and SF donor bosses.

Biden betrayed steelworkers and miners. He’ll betray all workers and unions the same way. Even municipal unions, usually the pets of the Dems because of their role in taking the money from the contracts negotiated with their politicians and funneling it right back to them, were forced to swallow vaccine mandates and the firing of their members. And even the most combative radical unions like SEIU, usually willing to shut down everything, swallowed, and told their members to shut up and thank the union for its representation.

Over the spring, the United Mine Workers of America held a press conference cheering on Biden's plan to kill coal jobs and asking for money to "retrain" its members for new jobs.

Like shining Biden's shoes with green shoe polish.

“It’s not fair to take somebody’s job away from them and push them into another career,” a union member complained. “I love my job. I wouldn’t trade it for anything in this world. And I hope coal is continued to be mined for years after I’m gone.”

UMWA members are mad as hell about it. If only they had a union to represent them.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

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