It's the Brian Lara Show on WNYC. Good morning everyone. The United Auto Worker's strike

is becoming a real issue in the 2024 presidential race now. A little bit of recent history to start

out and set this up. Remember the financial crisis of 2008, which hit the US auto industry so

hard. Mitt Romney, who of course everybody's talking about now for other reasons, would run

against President Obama in 2012, right? He wrote a New York Times op-ed in 2008 with the headline,

Let Detroit Go Bankrupt. The first line read, if General Motors Ford and Chrysler get the bailout

that their chief executives asked for yesterday, you can kiss the American automotive industry

goodbye. Mitt Romney in 2008. But a bailout was approved by Congress, as most of you know,

and by that 2012 campaign against Romney, Obama's vice president, Guy named Joe Biden, was able to

say this on the campaign trail. Now as part of that crisis in Detroit,

auto workers, especially those hired after 2007, took pay and benefit cuts. The city of Detroit,

by the way, did go bankrupt anyway in 2013. Romney's headline, Let Detroit Go Bankrupt, was about

the companies. The city did go bankrupt, even though its flagship companies got bailed out,

but that's another show. But today, the strike against the big three US automakers is premised on

the union's argument that the companies are making record profits, and so the workers should get

things like a percentage raise, similar to what the CEOs are getting, plus a return to company

back pensions, not just 401Ks and more. So here's what Joe Biden says today.

Auto companies have seen record profits, including the last few years because of the extraordinary

skill and sacrifices the UAW workers. Those record profits have not been shared fairly in my view

with those workers. Everyone acknowledges though that the transition to electric vehicles in response

to climate change is a challenge to the big three's bottom line. So Republicans are lining up against

climate policy as their main response to the strike and remaining mostly silent on the labor

...