{"id":42506,"date":"2025-07-10T13:07:51","date_gmt":"2025-07-10T20:07:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/?p=42506"},"modified":"2025-07-10T13:07:52","modified_gmt":"2025-07-10T20:07:52","slug":"uaw-president-denounces-trump-gop-budget-law-as-total-betrayal-of-american-working-class","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/2025\/07\/10\/uaw-president-denounces-trump-gop-budget-law-as-total-betrayal-of-american-working-class\/","title":{"rendered":"UAW President Denounces Trump-GOP Budget Law as ‘Total Betrayal’ of American Working Class"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"United<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

United Auto Workers president Shawn Fain addresses picketing UAW members at a General Motors Service Parts Operations plant in Belleville, Michigan on September 26, 2023.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

 (Photo: Jim Watson\/AFP via Getty Images)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“This bill isn’t governance,” said United Auto Workers president Shawn Fain. “This is a class war waged from Capitol Hill.”<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

JAKE JOHNSON<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jul 09, 2025 (CommonDreams.org)<\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

After Republicans pushed their unpopular reconciliation package through Congress last week, U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson hailed the legislation as a step toward “a future where working Americans can feel relief.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But Shawn Fain, the president of the United Auto Workers (UAW), argued in an op-ed<\/a> Tuesday for The Detroit News<\/em> that such “hollow promises” are an attempt to obscure “a brutal agenda: stripping working-class people of security, dignity, and power while lining the pockets of billionaires” with trillions of dollars in tax breaks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“The budget reconciliation bill that the Republicans just passed isn’t just bad policy\u2014it’s a full-blown attack on America’s working class,” wrote Fain. “For the UAW and the millions of workers we represent, four core issues define what it means to live and work with dignity: a livable wage, affordable healthcare, retirement security, and time to enjoy life beyond the job. On every one of those fronts, this bill delivers nothing but setbacks.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fain pointed specifically to the GOP law’s more than $1 trillion in cuts to Medicaid. Those cuts, combined with Republicans’ refusal to extend Affordable Care Act subsidies that are set to lapse at the end of the year, are expected to strip health coverage from around 17 million Americans over the next decade, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The UAW president also points to the Republican law’s lesser-known attack on Medicare recipients. The legislation, which President Donald Trump<\/a> signed into law late last week, would restrict enrollment<\/a> in Medicare Savings Programs\u2014potentially causing more than a million low-income seniors<\/a> to lose access\u2014and force more than $500 billion<\/a> in automatic cuts to Medicare.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“These aren’t numbers on a spreadsheet,” Fain wrote. “These are real people losing access to lifesaving care.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“By passing this legislation, the government is telling working-class families they’re on their own while billionaires get even more tax breaks.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While the Trump White House and congressional Republicans have tried to cast the budget law’s tax provisions as worker-friendly\u2014in some cases<\/a> by outright lying<\/a> about what’s in the legislation\u2014Fain noted that the law’s limited deductions for tips and overtime will only benefit a small sliver of Americans, and only until 2028.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“On the other hand, many of the tax benefits in this bill for the wealthy are indefinite and have no expiration date,” Fain wrote. “This is the same bait-and-switch the Trump administration used to sell its 2017 billionaire tax giveaway to the American people: small, temporary tax breaks for working people, with massive, long-term benefits for the wealthy and corporate America.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“This bill isn’t governance. This is a class war waged from Capitol Hill,” Fain continued. “It shifts the balance of power even further toward the billionaire class and hollows out the rights and dignity of labor. By passing this legislation, the government is telling working-class families they’re on their own while billionaires get even more tax breaks.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“It’s a total betrayal,” he added.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fain is among many prominent labor leaders who spoke out forcefully against the Republican budget measure and warned about its potentially catastrophic impact on millions of workers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

National Nurses United, the nation’s largest nurses union, called<\/a> the day of the bill’s final passage one of “the darkest days in the history of U.S. healthcare.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“People will suffer and die because of the cuts in this legislation to fund tax cuts for billionaires\u2014certainly in the short term and potentially for decades to come if nothing is done,” the union said. “Lawmakers have effectively signed the death warrants for millions.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Liz Shuler, president of the AFL-CIO, said<\/a> that “every member of Congress who voted for this devastating bill picked the pockets of working people to hand billionaires a $5 trillion gift.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“But if the politicians who rammed through this shameful bill think they can sneak away without anyone knowing the damage they’ve done and the chaos they’ve created,” said Shuler, “they don’t know anything about the labor movement.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

JAKE JOHNSON<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jake Johnson is a senior editor and staff writer for Common Dreams.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Full Bio ><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

United Auto Workers president Shawn Fain addresses picketing UAW members at a General Motors Service Parts Operations plant in Belleville, Michigan on September 26, 2023.  (Photo: Jim Watson\/AFP via Getty Images) “This bill isn’t governance,” said United Auto Workers president Shawn Fain. “This is a class war waged from Capitol… Continue reading → <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42506"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=42506"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42506\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":42507,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42506\/revisions\/42507"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42506"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=42506"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=42506"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}