Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. You've been hearing in today's news the general summaries and highlight segments from last night's Republican debate with the presidential hopefuls minus a certain 91 felony indictments guy. All good that general coverage is important, but we're going to do something different and more specific with the policy focus we try to emphasize here.

With Donald Trump meeting with auto workers last night instead of attending the debate, non-union auto workers apparently, and with President Biden walking a UAW picket line this week, and the first few questions at the debate last night about the strike and income inequality, we will focus this segment on the question, who's really supporting the auto workers on their demands and blue-collar economics in general?

To set this up, I'll play a few clips, then we'll talk to Jeff Stein, White House economics reporter for The Washington Post, and we'll take your calls. I only pulled one response from the debate on the topic because all seven candidates there basically said their own versions of the same thing. Here's the exchange we'll play as a representative. Near the beginning of the debate, Fox News moderator Stuart Varney asked Mike Pence this legit question.

Stuart Varney: Together, the CEOs of General Motors, Ford, and Stellantis make 336 times the number of rank-and-file workers. That's just part of a wider income inequality trend in the country. The richest 1% now controls one-fifth of all income. Vice President Pence, last week you said you side with American workers but you also support how these companies operate. Which is it?

Brian Lehrer: That was the question about income inequality at the auto companies and in the US generally and which side Pence is on. This was the heart of Pence's response.

Vice President Pence: I got to tell you while the union bosses are talking about class warfare and talking about the disparity in wages, I have to tell you, I really believe what's driving that, it's Bidenomics has failed. Wages are not keeping up with inflation. Auto workers and all American workers are feeling it, and families are struggling in this economy. Joe Biden's Green New Deal agenda is good for Beijing and bad for Detroit.

We ought to repeal the Green New Deal, get rid of the mandates and subsidies that are driving American gasoline automotive manufacturing into the graveyard. Beyond that also, as President of the United States, I'll be standing with workers all across America, and I'll be standing for the right to work of every American to join a union or not join a union as they decide.

Brian Lehrer: There you go. Responding to a question about income inequality, Pence only used the word bosses in connection with the word union. Did you pick that up? He said the union bosses. He didn't talk about the boss bosses. Pence wrote it off as class warfare, used that term, and centered the right not to join a union as the applause line there at the end in his response. He argued that President Biden's electric vehicle goals, what he called the Green New Deal, it's not the Green New Deal, but he does have electric vehicle goals, are the real things auto workers should resent plus inflation, not America's concentration of wealth, which he didn't address at all, even though that was the question.

Again, that was representative of all the candidates on stage, I think it's fair to say. We'll ask Jeff Stein if he saw it that way and also of Trump, who we'll get to. The contrast that matters here is with President Biden who did something this week that no president has done before. He walked a picket line with striking workers. He said this as he addressed the auto workers there through a bullhorn that would have answered Stuart Varney's question in a very different way.

President Biden: You made a lot of sacrifices. You gave up a lot. The companies were in trouble, but now, they're doing incredibly well. Guess what? You should be doing incredibly well too. It's a simple proposition. It's just about being fair. [applause] Folks, stick with it because you deserve the significant raise you need and other benefits.

Brian Lehrer: Joe Biden in Michigan this week. Whoever gets the Republican nomination to be the presidential candidate of the Republican Party and presuming that Joe Biden is the candidate of the Democratic Party or really just about whatever Democrat or whatever Republican runs next year, that's going to be the contrast. With us now, Jeff Stein, White House economics reporter for The Washington Post. Jeff, thanks for coming on for this. Welcome back to WNYC.

Jeff Stein: It's always such a pleasure to be on, Brian. Thanks so much.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, our phones are open. If by chance we have any striking auto workers in the audience today, you'll get first priority on the phones. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. Also, anyone who considers yourself a blue-collar worker, however you define that, especially if you think you'll be in that kind of profession for most of your life, it's not just your temporary day job while you're waiting to get that breakthrough acting role not so much for you, but if you're a blue-collar worker, and that's your life's work more or less, which of these issues do you prioritize?

The income distribution in this country, as a matter of ownership class, hoarding, as Biden and the UAW leadership seem to be emphasizing, or the cost of transitioning to a green economy and taxes and regulation on business as the Republicans are emphasizing? Who in politics do you think has your back economically if you are an auto worker or anyone else who identifies as blue-collar? 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. You can also text that number or tweet @BrianLehrer.

Jeff, first, do you agree with my premise that the Republicans at the debate last night basically all had the same take on the economics of the auto workers' strike as in that Mike Pence clip or would you like to point out any meaningful distinctions?

Jeff Stein: No, I think you're right. You characterize it accurately that the bulk of the party is in the same place. I think the one perhaps interesting wrinkle, which actually, I guess wasn't at the debate but occurred before it was when Tim Scott made the suggestion that he would have fired the striking auto workers. I don't know if you saw, but this has earned him a complaint at the NLRB with the idea that this was an implicit threat, a violation of federal labor law, implicit to his own campaign staff.

I think that was the most extreme version we've seen of the general sentiment that maybe-- they changed a little bit in how they characterized it, but the general thrust is that the problem is not so much the automakers, the owners of the companies, but that the transition to electric vehicles is occurring outside the country and insofar as we accelerate that we are inevitably dooming the workers to a bad fate, regardless of what ownership and management does.

Of course, there's lots of problems with this argument. The main one, I think, would be that as someone who covered the process of passing the Inflation Reduction Act quite closely, the bill was written really quite strongly to precisely encourage the production of EVs and EV batteries in the US, rather I guess in North America more specifically. There's this weird thing going on where this debate is happening in a very different context from the actual legislation that was written and passed and that is in law.

Brian Lehrer: That's so important. I'm not sure that it's breaking through very much that even the premise of saying all these EV battery jobs are going to China and things like that, may not actually even be a fact to debate which party people prefer on. We're going to get back to that in just a second when we play a Trump clip to that effect, but since you raised the Tim Scott exception where he had said earlier that Ronald Reagan set the precedent by firing all the striking air traffic controllers back in 1981, and that's what should be done here, he was asked that question.

That was the first question at the debate last night. In fact, I thought it was a good question. I thought in a number of cases last night the moderators asked very good questions but then failed to follow up when the candidates evaded the question. In that case, which was the very first question, do you still say you would fire the auto workers? Scott evaded it by saying, "Well, the President of the United States doesn't have the authority to fire auto workers in a private company," which is true, but really what he was implying with his original comment was the company should just fire all the auto workers.

If they had followed up by saying, "Well, yes, sure, a politician, the government can't fire the workers in a private company like Reagan could fire the air traffic controllers because they were federal employees, if you were the head of General Motors and Stellantis and Ford, do you still recommend that they fire the auto workers?" They didn't make him actually answer that question, so we don't know if Tim Scott is backing off that original position. Correct?

Jeff Stein: Yes. It would be quite fun. Maybe we'll get it at some point to see a Brian Lehrer moderated Republican presidential debate. I think the-

Brian Lehrer: Yes, that'll happen.

Jeff Stein: -thing we're seeing happen here in a macro sense has in the last eight years really oriented and shifted the base of the Republican party's voters. While it is still the case that the average Republican voter is higher income than the average Democratic voter, you are seeing Republicans across the country increasingly reliant on some share of blue-collar votes. That is a trend that is happening. Yet that reality is colliding with the orthodoxy and the beliefs, the ideology of the Republican presidential candidates who have in many cases been in the party for years that predate this change.

You see Mike Pence and Tim Scott, who are really products of the more traditional, purely business-oriented upper-income Republicans try to awkwardly wrestle with this new reality of the constituents that they're trying to appeal to while still having these ingrained responses of distrusting labor, criticizing "union bosses," having the instinct to fire a large scale of workers sticking up for themselves. You see them trying to deflect and modulate their answers to understanding this new political reality that the Republican party is increasingly in.

We can talk more about how Trump in his way is doing this, but this political spin, I would call it, is really at odds with not only their history, but their policy positions which remain quite entrenched and infirmed in Reaganite dogma around supporting big businesses and breaking purged unions.

Brian Lehrer: Let's take a phone call. Here's Seth in Jersey City. You're on WNYC. Hi, Seth. Thank you for calling in.

Seth: Hi, Brian. Thanks for taking my call. I am definitely on the side of these striking workers and it seems Biden and these striking workers-- I think that Pence's answer last night, the debate was so clearly the talking point of what the bosses would want to say to workers and taking the side of the bosses as opposed to the workers. Just another thing that I wanted to add about blue-collar work in America in 2023 is that I feel that many unionized workers' wages have risen.

I wouldn't say necessarily as much as they need to, but many have risen to amounts that they can really make a living off of while non-unionized workers have not, and oftentimes when unionized workers have conversations with non-union members, and non-union members realize how much money that some of us make, they'll think that it's exorbitant or it seems like a lot, but in reality, it's not that we're making too much money. It's that unionized workers are not making enough.

People have come to just expect that working-class jobs are low-paid, and they really just shouldn't be the case. We shouldn't have 1% of Americans receiving one-fifth of the income. The money really does need to be shared from the people who are reaping all these profits and really get passed down to the workers.

Brian Lehrer: It sounds like you're talking to some degree from personal experience as a unionized blue-collar worker. Would that be the case?

Seth: Yes, definitely.

Brian Lehrer: Seth, thank you very much. That does bring us to the Trump clip that we pulled for this. Trump skipped the debate as most of you know and held an alternative event at a non-union plant in Michigan at the same time, but in his remarks to that crowd, he made basically the same points as we heard in the Mike Pence clip. Listen.

Donald Trump: By most estimates under Biden's electric vehicle mandate, 40% of all US auto jobs will disappear. Think of this, in one or two years. One or two years, that's what you have to be talking about. Not, "You're going to get X dollars an hour." It doesn't matter what the hell you're getting an hour. Do me a favor, just get your union guys, your leaders to endorse me, and I'll take care of the rest.

Brian Lehrer: Again, like Pence, he's trying to separate the union members from their leadership. Our guest is Jeff Stein, Washington Post White House economics correspondent, and our phones remain open. 212-433-WNYC. For unionized blue-collar workers, non-unionized blue-collar workers, or anyone else, 212-433-9692. You can also text a comment or question to that number or tweet @BrianLehrer.

Jeff, can you fact-check Trump's claim there that under most estimates, under Biden's electric vehicle policy, which by the way isn't a mandate, which they keep calling it, it's a goal with incentives, but let's say the goal of new cars being 50% EVs by 2030 comes to pass, is Trump citing something real there about 40% of US auto worker jobs disappearing in that scenario?

Jeff Stein: I have no idea what Trump is referring to there, but it's a good idea to try to track down where that number comes from. I think Trump is on to something. I don't want to give him too much credit, but I think he is right when he's identifying the threat that EVs pose to Detroit. Maybe this will get to the last listener's call a little bit, but what we are seeing now in a way that I think is quite alarming for auto workers in the Midwest is that as the US begins to spend more and more on EVs, the automakers are seeing a really huge opportunity to relocate their plants and factories away from places where they have these legacy contracts that are more expensive with what have been traditionally the powerhouse center of American labor.

You're seeing especially in conjunction with the joint enterprises with South Korea and Japan and other countries, a lot of these new factories for EVs are being relocated, not necessarily to China, but to the American Southeast in particular, this battery belt that we've heard so much about. South Carolina, Florida, Georgia, we're seeing lots of concentrated investment in those states, in part because those states are right-to-work states that have very low union density, and so from the automaker's perspective, we're going to have to build a new factory.

We're getting incentives to do it from the US government, let's get out of these legacy contracts and do it where the labor is cheaper. That is a real threat, but to say that that's the same thing as all auto-producing jobs being all auto-manufacturing jobs being wiped out is obviously not true. Also, as I was saying, these jobs are staying in the US albeit not in the Midwest. I think a lot of people would say, including the Biden administration, that the answer to this is not to just continue to shift labor around where it's cheaper in the US but to pass laws that incentivize union density.

It's not a new thing, but it really is staggering to the degree to which American labor and American union workers have to compete with non-union workers in their own country. I was in Sweden for my honeymoon, the statistics there are that 85% of workers are unionized. It's true for-- more than half of workers across most of Western Europe, we're at 10%, 11%, 12% depending on which numbers you use. That is, I think, a real thing that's happening that workers in Detroit are vulnerable, but I think a lot of people would say it's because it's due to a race to the bottom due to lax union policy.

Brian Lehrer: I saw you slip in where you went on your honeymoon there. In this reference, I hope your wife likes it. By the way, in response to the Mike Pence clip, somebody texted, "Pence is the Uriah Heep of politicians." For those of you who only know Uriah Heep as a rock band and you never read David Copperfield, just google Uriah Heep and you'll get it. Jeff, what's the union saying about what you were just addressing as they ask for shorter work weeks, higher pay, and a return to traditional pensions? Are they asking for less conversion to electric vehicles in any way or a certain type of conversion?

Jeff Stein: That's a great question. UAW President Shawn Fain has been very clear that they understand the green transition is happening and that they support it and they want to be a part of it, but they have been quite critical at times of the White House for, in particular, this part of the Inflation Reduction Act that Biden passed that included tens of billions of dollars in loans for the automakers. These loans have been going out with really essentially no strings attached to labor standards. That might be a little strong, but very little by way of mandating that the loans go to companies that hire union workers.

Shawn Fain and others have been saying this is ridiculous, the unions helped elect Biden, and now you're going to turn around and give the automakers billions of dollars and not even make sure that they use that money to hire union workers. I think to be fair to the White House, if you remember, they did not have full control over this legislation. They had to fight tooth and nail with Joe Manchin to approve anything that they could get through Congress.

I don't think the White House-- and I can't confirm this for sure, but my reporting suggests that the White House really wanted to make sure that these loans had strict union requirements but that the law made it impossible. It's a tough position, I think, for the White House to be in where they sympathize with the idea that there should be tougher labor standards in these agreements but ultimately don't have much leeway.

I think it's also a tough place for the UAW where they understand that this transition is happening and that the administration has good reasons to encourage it but are rightfully suspicious that automakers will use it as an excuse to change to a non-union workforce.

Brian Lehrer: Michael in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC. Hi, Michael. Thanks for calling in.

Michael: Hey. Hi. Sorry, I'm losing my voice a bit. I called in-- your previous caller, a union worker, had talked about how non-union workers seemed to resent what union members are getting. I remember reading a book a few years ago by-- I think he was a Times writer, a guy named Stanley Greenhouse. He described the dynamic in Wisconsin when Governor Walker, I think his name was, was going after the municipal employee unions, the public worker unions.

He said, "It used to be in America, people saw somebody with a good union job and said, 'I want to get one of those jobs.' Now, we see working-class people standing around saying, 'That guy has a good union job. He's getting too much. Let's take it away from him.'" That is a bizarre change both, I guess, created by and exploited by the party that's actually in the service of people who just don't want to pay workers or pay taxes or be regulated. Yet, Pence saying to applause saying, "I'm going to fight for workers and their right to work," we all know what that means.

It means not the right to work. It means the right to make minimum wage. Blue-collar people outside of the union strongholds will applaud that. As I said to your screener, we're our own worst enemies, man. How did we do this to ourselves?

Brian Lehrer: Michael, thank you. Thank you very much for that call. Thank you. Yes, he was referring to Steven Greenhouse, who is or was a New York Times labor reporter, and he's written books on the topic, and of course, he was referring to Governor Scott Walker at the time in Wisconsin. To the point of that call and unionized and non-unionized workers' attitudes, Jeff, why did Trump pick a non-union plant as his venue last night if he was trying to convince union members to support him rather than presumably Biden next year after their strike?

Jeff Stein: I think because none of the union plants would've had him. It is this hard thing I think for the media because there is a real thing happening with Trump and blue-collar workers that is different than other Republican candidates that he did in 2016 in particular, really cut into Democrats' margins with union voters. You have to recognize that that trend happened. Yet at the same time, this idea that Trump is this avatar of blue-collar union workers is so overstated, I think it's fair to say, in the media.

That grain of truth has been so internalized by the media that often we don't even point out what you're just saying, which is that this was a non-union plant. I saw, not to criticize my colleagues, but there was a lot of coverage that allided-- I'm sure they just didn't realize that this was, as you're saying, a non-union plant invited by management as opposed to Biden attending the picket line himself. The difference is quite clear.

I think it's also worth pointing out though that Trump was the first person to say, "I'm going to come to Detroit." Biden had a scramble and announced his visit to the picket line after Trump had already said that he would be in Detroit. At the time Trump said that, it did seem like a smart move politically to show support for auto workers generally, but then the fact that it turned out to be at a non-union plant at the invitation of management while Biden went to the picket line himself it's maybe less flattering of a comparison than Trump initially hoped for.

Brian Lehrer: Yes. Well, the basic demographics of UAW members are, from what I've read, not as white and male as they used to be, but still mostly white and male. The union leadership leans more Democrat as we've been discussing. Do you know how that particular rank and file voted in 2016 or 2020 for president?

Jeff Stein: That's a good question. I'm not sure the UAW's numbers. I know though that Michigan has a much more diverse set of UAW workers. There are some states, Indiana, they have a heavy presence, Ohio, it's my understanding it's a much wider more conservative set of UAW union members. I don't know the exact numbers of UAW workers who voted for Trump.

Brian Lehrer: By the way, after that caller mentioned Steven Greenhouse, I just looked up his Twitter and he was tweeting during the debate last night and made one of, I guess, the same points that I made a little while ago but bigger. Steven Greenhouse tweeted, "The first three GOP presidential candidates who have spoken all used the phrase union bosses. They eagerly use corporate America's anti-union rhetoric. Most union leaders are democratically elected, many unions, not all are increasingly bottom-up. How are these leaders bosses?" That's from Steven Greenhouse on Twitter since he got name-checked. Go ahead.

Jeff Stein: Yes. The irony there, of course, is that this is a response to Shawn Fain. Republicans are angry at Shawn Fain. I don't know how much your listeners are aware of this history, but before Shawn Fain was elected UAW president, the UAW had a series of people who could much more accurately be described as union bosses in the pejorative sense. They were corrupt, there were kickback schemes. They also took huge losses for the workers. In particular, there's a ton of worker anger right now over the two-tiered system.

I don't know if you've discussed that on the show, but it's basically the last generation of union leadership negotiated contracts that basically screwed the next generation of workers to say, "We'll protect our own, but the workers who come in after us will take huge hits." That's actually a really fundamental challenge in the current negotiations where Shawn Fain is saying, "We need an end to this. We need pay for the new workers as well."

That stance that Shawn Fain, who Republicans deride as a union boss, is taking is so much more in line with empowering all the workers at the plant than the union bosses who proceeded him who in doing what the corporations wanted, have downed labor power, an interesting reversal of the intention of the term if that makes sense.

Brian Lehrer: Right. Those were extreme circumstances back in 2008, 2009 when some of the auto companies were practically going under and they had to figure out all kinds of ways to save them. I hear what you're saying about the generational divide that the union leaders allowed at that time in the union rank and file and Shawn Fain now, now that they're profitable again, at the auto companies trying to revise that.

All right. We'll continue in a minute with Jeff Stein, White House economics reporter for The Washington Post. We'll take more of your calls. We'll also get his take on the looming government shutdown, which he's writing about in the context of only a fraction of the federal debt is what they're going to shut down the government over, not the real big things that are actually driving that debt. Jeff will explain. We'll take more of your calls. We'll continue in a minute. Brian Lehrer on WNYC.

[music]

Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. All right. How many of you got fed up with the Republican debate and turned it off last night after you heard this?

Vivek Ramaswamy: We're sitting here in the Reagan Library.

Tim Scott: Yes. I wish you [crosstalk] in America.

Vivek Ramaswamy: In the honor of Ronald Reagan's Library, if I may-- Tim, from one admirer of Ronald Reagan to another [crosstalk].

Tim Scott: All I'm asking you, I'm asking you-

Vivek Ramaswamy: From one admirer of Reagan to another, we cannot say [crosstalk].

Tim Scott: -did you not do [crosstalk]?

?Speaker: This isn't productive.

Tim Scott: I want to hear [crosstalk].

?Speaker: Let's have a policy debate. What's going on?

[crosstalk]

Vivek Ramaswamy: Let's have a policy debate.

Brian Lehrer: Just for the fun of it there. They kind of crosstalked. You would've heard multiple times last night if you watched the debate. That was Vivek Ramaswamy and Tim Scott there for the most part in that instance, joined by a few others at the end. They totally knew they were just doing stereo, those two. Maybe they thought some Republican voters watching were keeping score on who was the biggest alpha dog, who had shot down the others, who knows?

Poor Doug Burgum, Doug, who actually did have to fight his way in to get a decent share of speaking time last night. We continue to talk mostly about the UAW issue as it was addressed during the debate by Trump at his alternative event and by President Biden this week. We're going to get to the government shutdown, and I think Philip in Connecticut is going to make the segue for us. Philip, you're on WNYC. Hi there.

Phillip: Hello, Brian. Thank you for having me on your show. My contrast with Tim Scott's quote about having all of the auto workers fired, I think it's funny that he raises Ronald Reagan, who was also the president of the SAG, who also had a strike under his tenure for better pay for workers, but in contrast to Republicans who are shutting down the government essentially a strike on the American people and the workers. I would wonder if the moderator of the event last night would've asked him, would he fire the people who are about to strike and shut down the US government as fair play for what is happening to his recommendation for the audit workers.

Brian Lehrer: Boom, sting. Phillip, thank you very much. Jeff, that does give us a perfect segue into this looming government shutdown, which you've also been covering. You have an article called What's Driving a Possible Shutdown: A Fraction of the Federal Budget. Want to take us into that piece? You wrote that most of what's driving federal borrowing to record levels isn't even up for discussion this week.

Jeff Stein: Yes, that's correct. We're in a weird place where I think for a lot of people would say for good reasons, Republicans have finally abandoned this fixation they had under Paul Ryan to cut Medicare and Social Security. Republicans also obviously don't want to touch the defense budget. They want increases to the military spending, and they'd also oppose cuts to veteran's benefits and the Department of Homeland Security Immigration Enforcement. You add those up and you're already talking about something like 85% to 90% of the federal budget, what the US federal government spends annually.

What we're left with is Republicans trying to meaningfully reduce the deficit, which is set to be somewhere close to $2 trillion this year by really sharply targeting this narrow, maybe 10% of the budget that budget nerds refer to as non-defense discretionary spending as the DC jargon term for it. What that consists of is maybe not as widespread as Medicare, not as widespread as Social Security, but it's really important for a number of reasons. This includes funding for health and science research, the NIH cancer studies. It includes crucial poverty programs. We're talking about WIC and various healthcare programs.

We're talking about housing subsidies for the poor, nutrition assistance for pregnant mothers. The list goes on and on, but it's hundreds and hundreds of federal programs. It's concentrated on this one bucket that's not the kind of thing that reaches 80% of old people or 100% of old people the way Social Security does. They've boxed themselves into trying to reduce the deficit without touching the main drivers of spending, and it makes things very, very difficult.

Brian Lehrer: I thought Chris Christie was interesting in the debate on this last night. He cited big debt run-ups under Trump as well as Biden and made it less about Democrats and more about all of Washington. Is he right about Trump's deficits?

Jeff Stein: Christie is certainly correct that Trump ran up huge deficits in debt. Trump approved $8 trillion or so in new debt higher, I think, than any president before. Of course, it's a little hard because Trump was president during COVID when we had the biggest economic emergency in decades. I think Democrats would agree that the $3 trillion or $4 trillion that Trump approved to fight COVID with stimulus checks and other measures were worthwhile. Of course, they would disagree with $2 trillion or so that they added to the debt through the Republican tax cuts.

I always struggle with this a little bit because while it is the case that Republicans have pushed huge tax cuts that added to the debt and also approved tons of spending during COVID, Republicans were, I think, pretty genuinely opposed to the $2 trillion stimulus bill that Biden passed in the first few months of his term. When they say that they would've spent less, I think there's maybe something that's not totally unfair about that claim.

Brian Lehrer: Listener tweets, "Regarding unions when the private sector no longer can access the benefits of the public union sector, that is pensions, forever health benefits, the private sector claims the public union sector gets paid too much and receives too many benefits, which the private sector must pay for." Tweets listener, Phoebe, making a similar point to one of our earlier callers. I don't know. I'm curious how much you think that political dynamic is in play. It goes back to the Scott Walker or Wisconsin thing from a decade ago that the previous caller cited.

This division of workers in the private sector who are compared to decades ago, very non-unionized and don't get the benefits that public sector workers who are still much more unionized do get. I'm curious if you see, as a White House reporter, Biden trying to address that directly or either party trying to exploit or highlight that in their 2024 politics.

Jeff Stein: I would actually disagree with that, with the general premise. I think it is the case as you're alluding to the Scott Walker-Wisconsin dynamic in 2012. I remember those stories, but the key thing I think here is that unions are much, much, much more popular than they were then. We're seeing even as Biden is unpopular, even as Democrats are unpopular, even as there's some criticisms of the Biden economic policy that seem to be widely shared, the approval rating for unions is at a 80-year or something that high according to Gallup.

We're seeing actually quite a bit of solidarity, I think it's fair to say, from non-union workers towards the efforts at Starbucks, the efforts at Amazon, and really all over the country. I think it's a hopeful moment for labor because that story, at least in the polling, doesn't really seem to be the case. I think this is why.

Brian Lehrer: Yes. Great point.

Jeff Stein: Yes, I know. I appreciate that. I think this is why Trump, despite a policy record that was incredibly hostile for organized labor, at almost every juncture, Trump sided with corporate America over labor unions; on the National Labor Relations Board, on judicial appointments, on legislative priorities. Despite all that, Trump, I think, recognizes he has enough political instinct to see that just being unions are bad is not something you can do anymore because 75% or 80% of the country now says that they support unions.

Brian Lehrer: I know you got to go, we got to go too. Is there going to be a government shutdown? Do you make predictions?

Jeff Stein: [chuckles] I wouldn't bet on anything I say. I thought there was going to be a debt ceiling crisis. That was not the case. I really think there's going to be a shutdown. I just don't see any way out of it. I've been wrong before and we'll be wrong again.

Brian Lehrer: That shutdown, if it comes, will be this Sunday. That's when the new fiscal year starts for the federal government, October 1st. Obviously, we're going to cover it tomorrow, last-minute negotiations Monday to see what happened over the weekend and what the status is at that point, and on from there if necessary. Jeff Stein, White House economics reporter for The Washington Post, thanks so much. Really appreciate it.

Jeff Stein: I love being on. Thanks, Brian. Anytime.

 

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