UAW strike, Trump's civil trial in limbo, climate protests: 5 Things podcast

On today's episode of the 5 Things podcast: Detroit Free Press and USA TODAY Automotive Reporter Jamie LaReau has the latest on the United Auto Workers strike. Hurricane Lee will likely be downgraded to a tropical storm as it approaches New England. Former President Donald Trump's New York civil trial is in limbo. USA TODAY National Correspondent Elizabeth Weise breaks down this weekend's climate protests. City officials warn space is running out with a new increase of asylum-seekers in El Paso. Still, migrants are desperately heading north.

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Hit play on the player below to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript beneath that. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.

Taylor Wilson:

Good morning, I'm Taylor Wilson, and this is 5 Things You Need To Know Saturday the 16th of September, 2023. Today, the latest from a massive auto worker strike plus Hurricane Lee approaches New England, and we look at why Trump's base is sticking with him amid a series of indictments.

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Taylor Wilson:

President Joe Biden yesterday urged Detroit's big three automakers to share record profits with workers. The comments come after United Auto Workers walked off the job this week in a contract dispute with car manufacturers. I spoke with Detroit Free Press and USA Today automotive reporter Jamie LaReau for the latest. Jamie, thanks for hopping on 5 Things.

Jamie LaReau:

Yeah, thank you for having me.

Taylor Wilson:

So the United Auto Workers have launched this major strike. What are the demands of the workers?

Jamie LaReau:

They have quite a long list, but the highlights are essentially they want a 40% hourly wage increase over the next 4.5 years or life of the contract. They would also like a 90-day progression to top pay, right now in the current contract is eight years. So That's a huge drop that they would like there. They want to end tier wages and they want to reinstate pensions. They also want a 32-hour work week, but to be paid for 40 hours. They want an increase to retiree pay and they want more paid time off. And then also what's been very important to them is to get reinstated what's called COLA, which stands for Cost Of Living Adjustment. They lost that back in 2009 when they made a lot of concessions to help GM and Chrysler as they were going into bankruptcy, and part of that was COLA and so they would like to get that back. That's very important for them with inflation particularly.

Taylor Wilson:

And Jamie what's the pushback from automakers on this?

Jamie LaReau:

I don't know if I would say it's necessarily pushback because they have been trying to meet them at least halfway. If you hear Jim Farley from Ford, he has been very vocal and GM too has put out statements saying that some of these demands, if you do the math, is going to be unrealistic for the companies to remain healthy and reinvest in their products if they meet the actual demands that they're asking for, 40% pay increase, for example, they want an adjustment to the profit sharing formula. Those kinds of things would be detrimental to the financial wellbeing of the companies.

The big thing with Ford and GM particularly is that they're spending billions of dollars to do a transition to electric vehicles. All the profits that they've been making, they have been reinvesting into the transition to EVs, development of autonomous vehicles, hiring more IT people and engineers, as well as making sure that the company's profitable and they pay profit sharing checks. So they're trying to balance giving a raise and showing their hourly employees that they are valued and their manufacturing teams do matter, but also keeping the balance sheet healthy for the companies as they make these monumental transitions.

Taylor Wilson:

And union leaders have said they will target additional plants to take out on strike if upcoming negotiations continue to fail. What's the strategy here, Jamie?

Jamie LaReau:

Well, I think They're trying to ratchet up the pressure. The initial plants that went out, they make products that are popular and good sellers, but they're not something that's going to bring down the companies. And as they go along, they would probably be then hitting more targeted and strategic plants that would cause more damage. So giving the automakers a taste of, you've still got time to give us what we want before we really get to where it's going to count. I think that's kind of the strategy and I also think it's also benefiting the union because if you're not taking everybody out on strike, you're not paying all these people out of the strike fund, which would drain the fund pretty quickly when you've got 150,000 workers across 3 car companies. Right now there's about 13,000 people across those 3 plants that are on strike.

Taylor Wilson:

Yeah, you're right that this strike is historic. What makes this such a pivotal moment in labor history?

Jamie LaReau:

Well, it's sort of never been done before. So you're in unchartered waters if you will, you don't know what plants they're going to take out next. They've never struck all three automakers at the same time. So all of that is new, it's unprecedented, the whole way the negotiations went. I mean the UAW was negotiating separately, but simultaneously with all three car makers right up to the end of the contract. And then all the past negotiations, they've always kind of done that up until maybe the last week or so. Then they pick one automaker and they zero in on that company as the target to get a deal with that will be the pattern for the other two.

In this case, they didn't pick a target. This case, you guys pick the target. Whoever comes to us with the best deal, we're going to take that. So it's almost like making the companies outdo each other and negotiate against each other. If GM offers this, well then Ford's got to match it and that kind of thing. So that's a whole new process as well. We'll see if maybe that works out better for the UAW. We'll see how it works out for the automakers if it becomes the norm in the future.

Taylor Wilson:

Jamie LaReau covers the auto industry for the Detroit Free Press and USA Today. Thank you Jamie.

Jamie LaReau:

Thank you for having me.

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Taylor Wilson:

Hurricane Lee is moving toward the US East Coast. Millions of residents across eastern New England and maritime Canada were under tropical storm warnings last night as the current category one hurricane swirls in the Atlantic. Lee is expected to make landfall at some point today in Nova Scotia while eastern Maine could also see serious effects. Maine Governor Janet Mills has declared a state of emergency and President Joe Biden has made a disaster declaration in Maine. There are widespread worries about power outages there in the nation's most heavily forested state. The ground is already saturated and trees are weakened from heavy summer rain. You can follow along with all the latest from Lee on usatoday.com.

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A New York appeals judge has signaled a possible delay in former President Donald Trump's civil trial set for October 2nd. Appellate Justice David Friedman said late Thursday that an appeals court panel should hear Trump's complaints about the judge. The ruling means the start of the trial would be pushed back if the pretrial appeals process is not completed in time. Attorneys for Trump and members of his family filed a last ditch legal complaint on Thursday, asking the appeals court to step in against Justice Arthur F. Engoron. They claim he failed to follow rulings that narrowed allegations at the heart of the lawsuit filed last year by New York State Attorney General Letitia James. A year ago, she sued Trump and members of his family, accusing them of getting rich through financial fraud. If successful, the case could essentially shut down the Trump organization.

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Climate protests are planned across the country and the world this weekend into next week. I caught up with USA Today national correspondent Elizabeth Weise about what activists hope to achieve. Beth, welcome back to the show.

Elizabeth Weise:

Always happy to be here.

Taylor Wilson:

Some massive climate protests are coming this weekend. What can we expect here?

Elizabeth Weise:

So they're global, but in the United States, we've got protests ... Actually there were a bunch of people got arrested in DC and New York. There are protests Saturday and Sunday in as you might expect, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, but also Texas, Chicago, New York, Washington, Boston. They're calling it Global Days of Action. This is kind of an outgrowth of you'll remember Greta Thunberg started her climate strike back in 2018 and that grew into a big climate strike in September because she started in September because she was striking against school. She was in high school at the time and so that was when school started. And in 2019 that grew into a really massive global series of protests that all happened in September around the same weekend. And then COVID kind of tamped those down and it's looking like this is going to be kind of the first big series of protests since COVID. There were some last year, but there's a lot scheduled for this weekend.

Taylor Wilson:

And what do climate change protest organizers want functionally in the US and abroad?

Elizabeth Weise:

They're trying to be really specific. One of the people I spoke with who is organizing it said people don't want to march against something, they want to march for something. And so in the US, they're asking for two things, they're asking the Biden administration to phase out fossil fuels and to declare a climate emergency. Globally, it's really focused on getting governments to phase out fossil fuels as quickly as possible.

Taylor Wilson:

And how do protests on climate compare nowadays with years past?

Elizabeth Weise:

There was one protest in Berlin yesterday that it looks like had about 25,000 people, which is a pretty big protest. These are big. I mean, it's not the march on Washington. These are not enormous, but they are big. And it looks like they're getting bigger. Protests is always something that younger people tend to take part in and there's a lot of energy in the youth climate movement because as they say, this is the world they will have to live in and they would really like it to be habitable.

Taylor Wilson:

Beth, how do these protests go in line with what we heard from the United Nations last week that the world is heading in the wrong direction when it comes to climate change?

Elizabeth Weise:

Yeah, I got to say that UN Secretary General, he does not pull punches on climate change. He kind of gave a litany of all the droughts, heat waves, storms, wildfires that we've had, said it's been going from bad to worse and there's nothing natural about this new scale of disaster. As he put it, "These are the price of humanity's fossil fuel addiction." The whole effort here is to lower the amount of carbon dioxide that we're putting into the atmosphere which is causing the Earth to heat up. And so if you put less in, it'll slowly start to dissipate and the Earth can start to cool down. But it's a long process so needs to happen now.

And as the UN has been very clear on, we have a window of about five years to really start to significantly lower the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere or we're likely to blow past the 1.5 Celsius raise globally and perhaps get as high as 2.0 or 2.5. And as people keep telling me, every 10th of a degree matters because it matters in floods, it matters in heat waves, it matters in intensity of storms. And so that's what people are going to be marching about.

Taylor Wilson:

Elizabeth Weise, thanks as always.

Elizabeth Weise:

Happy to be here.

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Taylor Wilson:

The Bridge of the Americas, a border crossing in El Paso, Texas was temporarily closed yesterday to cargo traffic. The reason, to assist customs and border protection officials with processing asylum seekers according to a CBP news release. And city officials say space in the city is running out with a new increase of asylum seekers there. El Paso Mayor Oscar Leeser said yesterday that the city provided shelter for some 700 asylum seekers on Thursday, but numbers are expected to keep growing, straining both the city's sheltering operations and those at non-governmental organizations in the area.

Meanwhile, migrants continue to move in huge numbers through Central America and many come even further from South America, particularly Venezuela and Ecuador in recent months. According to New York Times reporter Julie Turkewitz, 250,000 people last year crossed the Darien Jungle connecting Colombia with Panama and the beginning of Central America. She says that number this year has already reached 360,000. For a better sense of what this journey is like for so many desperate people hoping to find a better life, I want to point you to a tweet thread she put out from the Darien Jungle in Northern Colombia this week. There's a link in today's show notes.

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And before we go, a reminder, 5 Things is now on YouTube. A limited number of our specials and Sunday episodes are now available as vodcasts. We have a link in today's show notes. And thanks for listening to 5 Things. Dana Taylor is in for the Sunday episode tomorrow and I'll see you Monday with more of 5 Things from USA Today.