Republican presidential hopeful Tim Scott told an Iowa voter Monday after a question about the United Auto Workers strike that he admired Ronald Reagan’s example. “’You strike, you’re fired.’ Simple concept to me,” Scott said, referring to Reagan’s firing of federally employed air traffic controllers in 1981. Firing workers taking part in a lawful strike is illegal, and a spokesman for the South Carolina senator later walked back his remarks, claiming that Scott was talking about federal workers when he made the comment.
Scott also criticized the decision by Biden and other Democrats to fund defined-benefit pension plans that had been negotiated between unions and companies but hadn’t been adequately funded.
The UAW workers could theoretically be replaced, but with unemployment at historic lows, it is unclear where they would find those workers. The union claims that their wage demands are no more than the increase in pay received by company CEOs over the past four years and are owed pay increases after taking pay and benefit cuts when the automakers were in economic trouble caused by widespread fraud in the United States banking and financial services sector.
