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Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. Let's meet a rising star in New York and national politics, very involved in several of today's top issues and who represents what you might consider strange bedfellow constituents. He is Brandon Mancilla, age 30, director of the United Auto Workers Region 9A, which means basically New York City up to Albany, all of New England, and also Puerto Rico.

The strange bedfellows part well, the UAW these days still represents auto workers around the country, yes, but increasingly they represent culture workers, employees of museums, theaters, and universities. According to a stat in The Nation magazine, more than a quarter of the union's active members work in higher education these days. The several current issues part, Brandon himself grew up in Queens, born into what his bio page says was a working-class immigrant family from Guatemala. He's got a personal connection to the debate over immigration from and US Policy towards Central America.

He has a master's in history from Harvard and was president of the Graduate Students Union there. He's been speaking out recently against both the Trump administration for its threats and funding cuts and detention aimed at Columbia University and its students and against the university itself for some of its cooperation.

Also, UAW president, Shawn Fain, as we've mentioned on the show, has recently come out in support of the Trump tariffs, at least on imported cars, but tariffs generally, quite a turnaround from when Fain spoke at the Democratic Convention last summer, endorsed Kamala Harris and referred to Trump and JD Vance like this.

Shawn Fain: Two lap dogs for the billionaire class who only serve themselves.

Brian Lehrer: On top of all that, Mancilla and his UAW local have now endorsed a slate of candidates in New York City's Democratic primary for mayor. Do we have enough to talk about? Brandon, thanks very much for coming on. Welcome to WNYC.

Brandon Mancilla: Thanks for having me on. Brian, it's a great honor and a privilege to be here with you this morning.

Brian Lehrer: Before we get into issues per se, I'd like to let you introduce yourself a little bit to the listeners. Do I have it right that you grew up in Queens?

Brandon Mancilla: Yes, I grew up in Queens. My family's from Guatemala. My grandfather came here in the early 1980s, then followed by my grandma with my mother when she was a child and her sister, my aunt. My grandpa made a life for himself as challenging as it was at the time. He got a union job in Long Island. We bought a house in the late '90s in Jamaica, Queens. I grew up there.

My dad is a 32BJ member, he works in a high-rise luxury apartment building as a handyman. Very working-class, humble background, because of union, because having a union job, we had a little bit more money, some better healthcare, a little bit more retirement security. We were able to get by and make a life for ourselves, even though life for working people is always challenging.

I grew up in a very working-class environment and when I went to school I think I still brought those values with me. As you said in your intro, the labor movement has taken off on campuses across the country. That was my first entrance into the labor movement.

Brian Lehrer: What high school did you go to?

Brandon Mancilla: I actually was shipped away to boarding school for high school and being around a lot of prep kids, I think, definitely led to me understanding the deep inequality and the injustice that exists in which a privileged set of people get access to everything they want, and then those of us who don't have that access have to find a way to get by and life has become unbearable. Again, all these things combined, I think, into making it very clear to me that the labor movement is one of, if not the most important place for working people to try to get some of that power back.

Brian Lehrer: I guess people can start to understand just from what you've said already, why you're in the position that you are. You have this personal connection to higher ed and you got to know the prep school crowd in high school, but also your father works in a high-rise building with 32BJ. Your grandfather worked in a union job on Long Island in the packaging industry, I understand.

You want to tell us because people might be interested a little more about your family's immigration story, like who came from where and when? I see this was during the civil wars in Central America at the time, and of course, the US also being involved.

Brandon Mancilla: Absolutely. My grandpa was the first person in my immediate family to come to the US. It was in 1980, 1981. Right when the Guatemalan Civil War, which the US funded, the government, its military operations during that time, which was very brutal, especially towards poor people and the student movement, and also the indigenous movement at the time.

It was a very tumultuous time in Guatemala. Over 100,000 people killed during this period of the country's history. My family was very poor. There was this massive earthquake in the late '70s in Guatemala that also impoverished my family even further. They were struggling and just like people we hear about today. People come to the US not because they're looking to steal jobs from anyone. They just need to make a life, when their country has become so destabilized by a lot of forces outside of their control, whether that's civil war, or government authoritarianism, or our trade policies or deep inequalities.

That explains my family story. My Grandpa came in 1980, '81. He got amnestied in '84 alongside some of my other family members. He was undocumented. After that he was able to make a life. My father ended up coming, I believe, in the late '80s, and he met my mom and that's when they got married and shortly after had me. I was born in the US. Born in New York.

Brian Lehrer: Another thing that your story reminded me of, as we think about Trump perhaps defying Congress, acts of Congress and the courts, or coming close to doing those things right now, is that in that era with respect to a country close to Guatemala, that Reagan was funding the Nicaraguan Contra rebels against the leftist government there, despite Congress defeating a bill to authorize that money. That was the Iran Contra scandal. There's precedent for that. Just thought I'd point that out.

Brandon Mancilla: Absolutely. If you dig into my family history, you'll find I have family actually all over Central America with different entryways into all of these stories and all of these histories and Nicaragua and El Salvador and in Guatemala, where my immediate family is from. The history of immigration is a history of not just the United States, but of Central America and Latin America. I think my family definitely reflects that.

Brian Lehrer: Jumping ahead to when you were in grad school at Harvard, I see you helped organize the grad students union there and became the union president. What do you say to some listeners who might think, "Gee, grad student workers are generally not exploited?" Many get free tuition at expensive private schools, plus a stipend if they're a TA, teaching assistant, or research assistant or something. What's the core issue?

Brandon Mancilla: Graduate school is a job and it's become a job, especially in the last, I would say, 30 to 40 years. What's happened essentially is that universities, whether they're public universities or extremely wealthy, well-endowed private universities, they have shifted work away from their tenured and tenure track professors towards "contingent labor." Folks who are graduate students, adjuncts, non-tenure track faculty on short-term contracts, you name it, and increasingly students.

I'm talking about not just teaching assistants, but also people who are just taking on full course load, teaching, teaching entire introductory classes that are also the highest enrolled classes at many universities. Think of your Intro to Psych class, think of your different calc classes in math. These classes are amongst the most important classes that graduate workers teach.

As what happens when you create this class of precarious exploited workers that the universities also depend on, they are going to look to make their lives better, their working conditions better. They're going to ask for dignity and justice on the job. What that looks like right now is a wave of unionization, especially in the last five or six years.

Graduate worker unions are not new. They've existed since at least the 1970s and '80s at places like Wisconsin Madison, at the UC system, at the University of Massachusetts. What's happened recently is that under the Obama NLRB, private university graduate workers or student workers at private universities got the right to organize. That's the wave that I was part of. I got to Harvard in 2017 right after we had just lost an election that then the Trump board actually declared that had to be rerun. That's how flagrant the violation that Harvard committed was.

When I got involved in the organizing committee, which was just a committee of fellow volunteer co-workers of mine at the university we had a challenge to become one of the first private graduate worker unions in the country. There, at this point, had only been one at NYU and I think we were going at the same time as the one at Columbia University. I think the problem is if you talk to any student worker, graduate worker, is that when we were starting to organize, it was pretty normal to hear about a graduate worker.

I'm talking about an adult here. I'm not talking about a high school college kid. I'm talking about someone in their 30s, who otherwise would be looking to make a life for themselves. Folks were making $20,000 a year. When I entered at Harvard, I was making $26,000 a year. This is how unions work. Right now the contracts that we have won have built pressure across the industry to be able to have folks now making $40,000, $45,000, $50,000.

Now these unions are putting demands on the table for higher wages. The thing is these universities, they can pay for it, especially in the private sector. In the public sector. It's a very clear political demand. I don't have to tell you that we're seeing an attempt to defund education right now across the country. I think our union movement is very clear on this.

It's not just about having higher salaries for professors or teaching assistants. Our demands are to fund public education because we believe it is a good and human right that all people should have access to in order to have a good education system in this country and a higher education system in this country. You're going to have to pay people fairly to do that very important work. Go ahead.

Brian Lehrer: If The Nation magazine had that stat that I mentioned in the intro, more than a quarter of the UAW's membership in the US are workers in higher ed now 100,000 out of about 383,000 total members. Are those your numbers, too?

Brandon Mancilla: Yes. Yes, that's accurate.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, we are meeting Brandon Mancilla, director of the United Auto Workers region 9A, which means basically New York City up to Albany, all of New England, and also Puerto Rico. As we were just citing, yes they still represent auto workers around the country, but increasingly they represent culture workers, employees of museums, theaters, universities. If you have a question for Brandon Mancilla, any of the members in any local shops or anyone else, we're going to get into negotiations that have begun with Columbia and some of the other issues at Columbia having to do with the Trump administration and ICE, among other things as we go. Also the UAW endorsing Trump's tariffs. If you want to enter this or ask Brandon Mancilla a question of any kind that's relevant, 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. Call or text.

Just one more thing on the general notion of representing culture workers to the extent that the UAW does now, why the UAW? Because for listeners who might think your union was founded to represent workers on the factory floor and things like that, a lot of working-class, not college-educated Americans who these days are pretty different politically as well as culturally, in many cases from your members with master's degrees and PhDs. College, no college is arguably the number one demographic separating Republican and Democratic voters these days. Where's the common ground?

Brandon Mancilla: The common ground is that, I think, working people regardless of their industry or sector or whether they got college educated or not, has seen a decline in our standard of living. We've got wages that are not keeping up with inflation, health care costs, rent costs at record highs right now. We're all facing the same cost of living crisis.

At the same time, I think folks want to be able to take pride in the work that they do and have dignity on the job. Whether that's a supervisor on a industrial plant floor or whether that's someone supervising your lab work, if you're a research scientist at a university, you do feel like you have very little say at your workplace. Companies, universities, management, anywhere makes arbitrary decisions over your life all the time. Then you have to take the brunt of the cost when decisions are made at levels way above you about your future and your life.

I think we also see a crisis of retirement security. Pensions as we know them hardly exist except for some workers, and we have to protect those pensions. We have to also think about retirement security in a broader sense. I think that's absolutely the case everywhere. Within, I think the cultural sector and higher education, but not just higher education, everything that I just said absolutely applies. We also have to recognize that because of funding, because of austerity, because of just the corporate way that these institutions are run, they've become more and more like workplaces as we understand them to be blue-collar workplaces than anywhere else or just as anywhere else.

Folks feel like right now that regardless of their background, they are part of the working class. I've got a ton of first contracts right now that we're negotiating across the region and in the city, in higher education and museums, in the publishing industry. We're waiting right now for an election date for 900 faculty at the School of Visual Arts, actually. Everyone right now is interested in organizing. At the same time, we are part of the UAW.

There are workers in manufacturing plants across the country and definitely in the auto industry that are also once again, interested in organizing unions, if they haven't had one yet. We finally were able to win at Volkswagen in Tennessee, for example, after our historic strike in 2023 that inspired thousands of autoworkers across the country to organize. I don't think necessarily there's actually a divide between, white-collar workers are looking to organize now and they want to be in a union and blue-collar workers don't.

I think everyone is really interested. I just think recently we've seen the momentum in certain industries that we call white-collar.

Brian Lehrer: We'll talk about Colombia specifically in a minute, the UAW coming out in favor of tariffs, as we go. Also your role in the mayoral race. Let's take a phone call first on some of the things we've been talking about. Shivani in Queens, you're on WNYC with Brandon Mancilla, the regional head of the UAW. Hello.

Shivani: Hi, good morning. Thanks so much for having me. I'm a member of a very large public service union in New York City. I've been a member for the past 10 years and very recently I have been getting this mail from a out-of-state organization urging me to drop out of my union. It's pretty aggressive. It says things like, "You can save up to $900 a year if you drop out of your union. Here are all these quotes from these people who are so happy because they dropped out." I was just wondering if you've heard about these kinds of concerted efforts and what kinds of strategies you might have in place to address it.

Brian Lehrer: Brandon?

Brandon Mancilla: Absolutely. that to me sounds like standard mailing from something like the National Right to Work Foundation. The fact that it's called Right to Work to me is hilarious because it sounds like a good thing, but it's actually a right to work for less. It's an explicit anti-union campaign. I'll say two things on this. One, what that flyer is trying to tell you is that your dues aren't worth anything.

The important thing to remember here is that having union representation means having a seat at the table, means having power. It's being able to negotiate. It's not having at-will employment where a boss can just let you go for any reason or no reason at all. You only have that if you have a union in this country. It's really important that we preserve this.

I don't know what union you're a part of, but the other thing that I think the campaign that I'm a part of within the UAW to reform the union, an important thing to remember is that the union is its membership. The union is a worker-based organization and it's the members that make the calls. If you want to improve your union, if you want to fight for a stronger contract, if you want to build power at your workplace, that's within your hands and within your reach.

At the UAW, we had a lot of problems in our union, and we still do. We're still working through them. I, alongside some other leaders, decided to run for office at the national level and regional level to turn our union around. Since then, we went from a sleepy union that had a lot of scandals to a union that has been at the forefront trying to organize workers, win higher standards in our contracts, organize the south, and build actual power for working people. This is all, I think, only possible if you stay in your union and you encourage your coworkers to do so as well.

Brian Lehrer: Helpful, Shivani?

Shivani: Yes, no, I feel like I know the value of my unions very well. It's just that I feel like this type of mailing and this type of aggressive outreach started just very recently. I got three in a month.

Brandon Mancilla: It's ridiculous. We've seen that.

Brian Lehrer: Interesting just that you called to call it out. There's a public example, now a more publicized example of how that goes on. Thank you for your call. Shivani. 212-433-WNYC. Brandon, we're getting a number of really interesting texts, including questions. One listener writes, "The independent Brooklyn Friends School recently unionized with the UAW. How is expanding unions into K-12 education, where it's a strongly unionized workforce on the public side, going in private schools? Anything briefly on that?

Brandon Mancilla: Yes, well, just like in higher education, UAW is not the only union that organizes, obviously, in the K-12 educational sector. Unions like AFT and the NEA are also very active and a couple of others. I think we can see a lot more of it. I think that's definitely a priority for us to be able to organize any educational workers.

Brian Lehrer: By the way, another listener hearing Shivani's story just chimed in with a text. "I'm a member of DC 37 Local 375 and have also been receiving these mailers. Many in my local has." Do you represent workers at NYU?

Brandon Mancilla: Yes, we represent adjuncts at NYU, graduate workers at NYU. We've also organized, just recently, working on our first contract with contract faculty at NYU, also resident assistants. We've got a large organizing drive going for research scientists who are staff graduate workers and also postdocs.

Brian Lehrer: I ask because here's a text that says, "I'm a professor at NYU and we won the right to negotiate a union and are in the middle of bargaining right now. The NYU president just announced we will not receive our cost of living raises and there will be more cuts coming, asking departments to cut curriculum." Listener writes, "I was under the assumption that the university cannot make any changes to our contract during bargaining. Is this allowed during bargaining?" Can you advise that listener?

Brandon Mancilla: Yes. I know my staff and the committee working on this issue are definitely working to see the details of this, to see whether or not this is an unfair labor practice. Generally speaking, no, employers cannot change the status quo. I think we would have an argument for that. Again, the details of that are definitely something that the committee at NYU and my staff are working on.

Brian Lehrer: Another listener chimes, in another place where autoworkers and graduate student workers overlap, autoworkers and their unions have experience combating the company town model that graduate students also often experience. Imagine if your boss was also your landlord. People may be thinking about auto-making towns in Detroit and things like that. The listener writes, "That was me when I was a grad student at Columbia, the company town model where my boss was also my landlord."

I'm going to use that as an opportunity to segue into the Columbia-specific issues, which of course, there are many right now, and it's intense. We're going to take a break, then we're going to come back and continue, talk about Colombia, talk about the UAW endorsing the Trump tariffs. We'll see if the regional head here, Brandon Mancilla, agrees with his UAW president, Shawn Fain on that and more as we go, and more of you. 212-433-WNYC 433-9692.

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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC as we continue with Brandon Mancilla, director of the United Auto Workers region 9A, which means basically New York City up to Albany, all of New England and also Puerto Rico. We've been talking about the strange bedfellows membership these days as the UAW still represents auto workers around the country, but increasingly they represent culture workers, employees of museums, theaters, universities. Let's talk about Colombia.

I saw you posted on X, "Recent news out of Colombia or a test of freedom of speech and democracy by allowing ICE to threaten and detain international students, including permanent residents, Columbia has betrayed the values that universities are supposed to protect." You're criticizing both the Trump administration and the university, which you might see Trump victimizing. Want to expand on your position?

Brandon Mancilla: What's happened at Columbia to me is clear. It's the Trump administration trying to leverage federal funding, whether it's NIH or any other grants, in order to have universities do its dirty work for them. Universities like Columbia and all of them, honestly, across the country have a choice to make right now, which is to either go along and try to find a sweet deal with Trump that saves some money for them while also carrying out or allowing the worst detentions and violations of civil rights, or they could decide to actually stand up for themselves, honestly.

Let's forget students and the community, but just themselves and their own funding. Unfortunately, what we're seeing with Columbia is that they're caving. They still have a chance to turn this around. I think that they could definitely take legal action. I think it's ridiculous that $400 million in federal funding is being paired with carrying out detentions and trying to make cuts across the board on essential services that the university is carrying out.

Right now what we're seeing is very much a lack of will from these universities to do anything about this. I think this all reached a boiling point last week when immediately after the announcement of the $400 million in cuts, we saw the expulsion of our local union president of the Student Worker Local 2710 get-- he got expelled, Grant Miner, which means that as a graduate worker, that also means you've effectively been fired as well. This was the day before bargaining was going to start with Columbia.

The student workers of Columbia are very much you know, worried right now about the fact that they're targeting their leader and also trying to set this tone for bargaining. They're organizing a fight back right now, the postdoc researchers that we represent at Columbia, to see NIH threats right now means that their livelihoods are on the line. Cuts to the NIH go from anywhere from the NIH itself to the billions of dollars in grants that go towards life-saving research to try to come up with treatments and therapies for cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer's, you name the disease. NIH-funded scientists are on the front lines. Thousands of those, tens of thousands of those NIH scientists or NIH-funded scientists across the country are UAW members.

Part of our organizing effort within higher education has been including all of these research scientists whether they're graduate workers or postdocs or staff research scientists, professional scientists, many of those are UAW members. This is the direct attack on our union as well. I think we're going to keep making the call to Colombia to, number one, fight back. Actually stand up for your funding. You've got legitimate grounds to make an argument in the courts, if necessary, about this funding, and if not, that, universities like Columbia, they're rich universities of an endowment.

We are in the rainy season right now. That's what that rainy fund is for. There should be no reason that there should be layoffs or cuts.

At the very least, right now, Columbia should be standing up for the civil rights of its students and campus community. Whether you agree with it or not, campus protests are legitimate. They are not illegal. Free speech is something we should be caring about in this country. Just like in every other moment, the labor movement and student groups are going to be at the front lines of defending those civil liberties.

Brian Lehrer: I think Columbia's position on the expulsion of Grant Miner was that it was for his role in occupying Hamilton Hall last school year during the protests. They're not expelling all the protesters, they're expelling ones who went that far after they were warned and that kind of thing. I see you posted on X for campus unions, "It's essential that we recognize that the new administration naming of "illegal protests" as the reasons for federal cuts could open the door to the repression of our legal protected, concerted activity. This is how anti-union authoritarianism starts."

There's a lot in that little tweet. but you're really trying to tie the interest of protesters to at least potentially the interest of unions against an authoritarian government writ large, right?

Brandon Mancilla: Well, absolutely. If I just may return to the Grant thing for a second, that would be nice if we actually had that proof. Grant, alongside the rest of the students that were charged, were charged with the exact same charges and they were all guilty of all the charges. There was no individualized proof or evidence for anything that Grant or any of the other protesters were charged with. That's what we take issue with as well, is that if folks like Grant did actually violate campus policy, where is the evidence for that? Because they all got the exact same document.

That's definitely something that's really troubling and really just should be worrying for anyone, again, whether or not you agreed with the protests and the message of the protests or not, you should be concerned about these kinds of sweeping measures being taken.

The reason I tweeted that, to try to think of the big picture, is that we talked about Latin America at the beginning of the segment. In Chile, do you know what the first target was during the dictatorship of Pinochet, after they overthrew Allende? It was universities. Universities have always been seen as a prime target number one, you want to institute a dictatorial or authoritarian control in your country. That's what you go for because a university is a place where inherently you're talking freely about ideas, you allow people with marginal ideas to have a seat at the table and in the classrooms just like anyone else does. That's really important if we're going to have a democracy. I think there's no coincidence. I think that the Trump administration has made education as a whole its first target.

Brian Lehrer: Listener with a call related to this. Michael in Manhattan, you're on WNYC. Hello, Michael.

Michael: Yes. It's a disgrace. I'm a graduate of Columbia College. I have a question for your guest in a minute, but I'm a graduate. It's a disgrace. They've turned into a hunter, the board of directors. Columbia doesn't negotiate in good faith anymore. What they're doing, they're attacking professors, kicking them out of the university. Obviously, we know about the expulsion. It's dystopian suppression and oppression of critical thinking and diversity.

Columbia needs to be cleaned out. How long are we going to tolerate this? I wanted to ask your guest, why aren't the unions mobilizing more in the streets, getting together outwardly to prevent these attacks? If you have thousands of workers, hundreds of thousands of workers out in the streets, then these attacks can be repelled a bit.

Brian Lehrer: Michael, thank you. Brandon.

Brandon Mancilla: Completely agree. I think right now the three local unions that we have at Columbia are actively organizing rallies and demonstrations. Two of the three unions are currently in bargaining, like I said, Grant's union, but also the, the staff union at Columbia is also negotiating a new contract. You're going to see a lot of labor action at Columbia, but not just at Columbia. Again, because I think because we've organized so many educational workers across the city, everyone understands that this is their fight, too. Regardless of whether or not you are on one of the Department of Education's list or not.

If you're in higher education right now and you care about all of these issues and you care about your union and your own job, right now is the time to get active. We're going to be seeing a national day of action across the country of folks standing up for free speech, standing up against the cuts to funding to critical research on April 8th. I think there will be another one on April 17th. In New York specifically, you're going to be seeing a lot of action from our unions.

Brian Lehrer: One thing that might make that difficult is the subject of our next caller's question. Gregory in West New York, you're on WNYC. Hi, Gregory.

Gregory: Hi, how are you? Thank you for taking my call. My question and concern is many of the UAW union members tend to be very socially conservative. They vote for Republican candidates specifically for Trump. In the end, it hurts the union itself. While there are many union members that are progressive and they have a lot of information to share, what efforts are there to provide a wide network of information so these other union members don't vote against their own interests?

Brian Lehrer: Thank you, Gregory. Brandon.

Brandon Mancilla: To me, this has nothing to do with progressive conservative left, right. This is about democracy. This is about job security. This is about your civil rights. I think that should matter to anyone, no matter what your political party or ideas are. I don't think it's true that the majority of UAW members or even union members around the country voted for Trump. I think if anything, the labor movement, its membership showed about 55% to 60% voted Democrat, voted for Kamala Harris in the last election, just like a lot of working people across the country--

Brian Lehrer: That's still pretty divided though, right? A lot of those who voted for Harris were public sector union members. That's a very big part of the union movement in the country these days. I think there were surveys that showed most Teamsters members voted for Trump. I don't know about those of your UAW members who actually are auto workers at this point, but go ahead.

Brandon Mancilla: No, it was around 55% is the polling that we're showing, which means, of course, that Trump made a lot of inroads. I'll tell you right now, the reason why the labor movement is important is because when you're in the labor movement and your jobs are at stake, that's for most union members. That is the most important thing. It's solidarity with their fellow union members.

As an example, as with these NIH cuts, for example, we've had regions across the country that are majority autoworker host phone banks. Not Region 9A and not the west coast region that has mostly higher education workers. I'm talking about the southern region. I'm talking about some of our Midwestern regions. They've hosted phone banks against the NIH cuts with autoworkers. People understand the stakes of this, this issue.

Similarly, when the standup strike happened we had our workers from the cultural institutions and from higher education drive to the picket line and Tappan, New York. In Region 9A, we still represent big three workers who work at parts distributors. Also, when we've had picket lines at Mercedes Benz of Manhattan, an auto dealership, we have a local that organizes and represents dozens of auto dealerships in the city. We have workers from all around the city, in all kinds of sectors and industries and backgrounds come to those picket lines and come to those protests.

I think, again, like, if there's going to be any future in our country for working people to come together despite their differences, it's going to be through a labor movement that doesn't try to hide from these differences, but is very clear about what matters to working people. Because we're speaking to their issues. I think that's what we're trying to build.

Brian Lehrer: It brings us to our next issue, President Trump's tariffs. I see the UAW and union president, Shawn Fain, have come out for them in a general way. Reading from the official statement I saw from the union, "Tariffs are a powerful tool in the toolbox for undoing the injustice of anti-worker trade deals. We are glad to see an American president take aggressive action on ending the free trade disaster that has dropped like a bomb on the working class." Are you on board with that?

Brandon Mancilla: Absolutely. I'll tell you why. What we don't support is a crazy strategy around tariffs that just doesn't have any-- it makes no sense. It's just blank it on anything. I think we're fooling ourselves. As people who care about working-class issues and turning this country around for working people, if we don't see tariffs as one of the tools in the toolbox. When we talk about tariffs, we're talking about our trade deals. We're talking about the fact that over the last 20 years alone, we've seen 60 plant closures in the United States in the auto sector. That's just the auto sector. That's not all the other manufacturing sectors and industries that we also represent and aren't represented by us.

We need to see a trade policy not in the name of combating fentanyl or immigration or trying to take over Canada, but a trade policy that is going to finally address the fact that these companies offshore jobs because instead of paying a decent wage at GM in the United States, they can move that plant and that product to Mexico to pay a worker $5 an hour, for the same exact job. Guess what? They're still going to import that vehicle and sell it for $50,000, $70,000, $90,000 in the United States.

Just because they're super exploiting the Mexican worker, right, at $5 an hour for the same job, not $30 an hour in the United States, it doesn't mean that vehicle is any cheaper. We need to address that. We need to address that because workers in communities across the country have been decimated over the last 30 years. Entire communities and towns completely shuttered by the fact that the plant, the GM plant in their community was the big job producer in this city. It was where people were able to get a dignified job, get a pension, be able to build businesses around the plant. That's all gone.

The schools get shut down and working-class communities have nowhere to turn but minimum-wage or sub-minimum-wage jobs and drugs. It's a real crisis that none of the political parties have wanted to address for the last 30 years. No, I don't think just tariffs themselves are the solution. It brings up the bigger question that we have to renegotiate NAFTA.

Brian Lehrer: It means you're willing to kind of roll the dice or place your bet on higher wages, outrunning the higher prices for those same workers that a trade war with multiple countries might produce, right?

Brandon Mancilla: I think where we're headed right now is a complete reshuffling of everything. If anything Trump's been serious about, it's chaos. I think there's a bad outcome to all of that and we don't want to see unnecessary trade wars. The truth is that the status quo right now for working people doesn't work. If your response to tariffs and our trade policy is everything is working great, because prices are low, guess what? Prices aren't low and also things aren't working for working-class people. We need to change that.

We, as the UAW are willing to step in right now and say, "Whichever administration, whichever politicians are actually serious about talking about trade for the first time in a while, we're here to work with you."

Brian Lehrer: Last thing and we're going to run out of time in a minute or two. Your UAW local has endorsed a slate of three candidates in the ranked-choice voting Democratic primary for mayor. Very briefly, who and why?

Brandon Mancilla: We've endorsed Brad Lander, Zohran Mamdani, and Jessica Ramos. These are three candidates that we've had a great relationship with. They're at every single one of our picket lines. They move our bills, whether it's in the state or at the city level. Brad Lander uses the comptroller's office really creatively to help out our campaigns and make sure that companies are doing the right thing since we have so much money from our pension plan invested in so many companies that we represent.

We've also launched the dream. Don't rank Eric or Andrew for mayor because we don't want to go backwards. We know what the last three years have been with Eric Adams, and we've also known what it was like to have Andrew Cuomo as governor. He hardballed unions than anyone. I think that's not something we want to return to. We think we can do better. Because we have a ranked-choice system, Zohran, Jessica, and Brad, right now, it's unranked in our endorsement. If you have those three at the top of your ballot, those are three people that take working people's issues really seriously and don't just give lip service to them.

Brian Lehrer: Which if enough people do that neither Andrew or Eric, as you call them, are going to get in. Just one quick 30-second follow-up on Cuomo. He's getting some other labor support. I see the Teamsters local that represents school security and public housing security guards, among others. Also the utility workers union. Why the divide?

Brandon Mancilla: That happens every union has the right to make its own endorsement. I think people probably think that being familiar with Cuomo is better than whatever's coming next. I think that's why we launched Dream. We want people to dream bigger, which is why we're putting forward a slate of candidates that we believe are going to be a lot better for working people and for unions.

Brian Lehrer: We're going to leave it here for today. Look forward to you coming on with us from time to time. I called you a rising star in New York and national politics in the intro, and from everything you're involved in, it seems like you are.

My guest has been Brandon Mancilla, age 30, in case you're interested. Director of the United Auto Workers Region 9A, which means basically New York City, up to Albany, all of New England, and also Puerto Rico. That includes auto workers in the region, autoworkers themselves, but increasingly all these culture workers, employees of museums, theaters, universities in our area as we've been discussing. Thanks very much for coming on the show, and we look forward to talking to you again.

Brandon Mancilla: Thanks so much, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. More in a minute.

 

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