Vice President Kamala Harris called the dichotomy between building electric vehicles and supporting union labor “a very old, false choice” during an exclusive interview with the PBS NewsHour.
“It’s almost as if the administration’s two goals are colliding. On the one hand, fight climate change. On the other hand, build out the middle class by supporting unions,” NewsHour co-anchor Geoff Bennett asked during the Tuesday interview at Morehouse College in Atlanta. “Yet, we know that when it comes to actually building electric vehicles, it requires less labor and many of those jobs are non-union jobs.”
Harris responded, “I would suggest to you that that perspective that some people have is grounded in a very old, false choice. You can do both, and that is our perspective. We can do both.”
The vice president’s comments come shortly after President Joe Biden visited striking union autoworkers outside of a General Motors parts distribution center in Van Buren Township, Michigan. Sporting a United Auto Workers union ballcap, the president used a bullhorn to tell those on the picket line, “You gave up a lot when the companies were in trouble. Now, they’re doing incredibly well. And guess what? You should be doing incredibly well, too.”
Presidential historian Michael Beschloss is calling Biden’s visit to the picket line historic. “Except for Biden now, no other modern sitting President in history, wearing union hat, has spoken with this kind of enthusiastic support to striking union members,” Beschloss wrote on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.
Harris told Bennett during the interview that, for the Biden administration, the president’s visit underscores “the importance of understanding the value of work, and that it should be compensated commensurate with its value, and what we must do to invest in our economy, invest in innovation and take on one of the biggest crises the world has ever known, which is the climate crisis.”
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