President Biden will appear with the president of the United Automobile Workers union at a conference in Washington on Wednesday as he tries to secure the group’s influential endorsement.
Mr. Biden, who appeared on a picket line with striking union workers in the fall, is expected to provide a keynote speech at the conference, and will “address attendees on the top issues facing working-class Americans,” according to a media advisory for the event.
The group’s president, Shawn Fain, has been a vocal critic of former President Donald J. Trump and criticized some Republican policies as divisive and harmful when he spoke at the conference on Monday. He said that the party takes stances against transgender and gay people “so they don’t have to talk about who you work for, where the profits go and who benefits.” He also criticized Republican attack lines over immigration into the United States.
“Right now, we have millions of people being told that the biggest threat to their livelihood is migrants coming over the border,” Mr. Fain said. “The threat we face at the border isn’t from the migrants. It’s from the billionaires and the politicians getting working people to point the finger at one another.”
Still, Mr. Fain has not said whether the U.A.W. will officially endorse Mr. Biden. Representatives for the union and the Biden campaign had no comment on Wednesday about whether the endorsement would come. Mr. Biden, who calls himself the “most pro-union president in history” and was the first sitting president to visit a picket line, has appeared at several U.A.W. events to prove his bona fides with the group’s leadership and rank and file.
“I’ve been involved in the U.A.W. longer than you’ve been alive,” Mr. Biden, then 80, told the boisterous crowd at an event in Illinois in November, after the union reached an agreement with Ford, General Motors and Stellantis on a contract that included pay increases and reopened a plant in Belvidere, Ill.
At that event, he castigated Mr. Trump for insisting that electric vehicles would lead to the loss of thousands of manufacturing jobs.
“Well, like almost everything else he said, he’s wrong,” Mr. Biden said at the time. “And you have proved him wrong. Instead of lower wages, you won record gains. Instead of fewer jobs, you won a commitment for thousands of more jobs.”
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