North American Auto Unions Clash Over Trump’s Tariffs

Mar. 17, 2025

By supporting Trump’s tariffs rather than organizing an internationalist response, the United Auto Workers is treading a dangerous path.

Despite the Trump administration pausing full implementation of its tariffs, uncertainty hangs over the entire North American economy. For now, businesses, unions and workers are breathing sighs of relief. But the reprieve won’t last. 

There is perhaps no other industry facing harm as deep as the continentally-integrated auto sector. Yet auto workers’ unions in Canada and the United States have taken opposing positions on the tariffs. In fact, there appears to be a troubling lack of communication and coordination among auto workers’ unions in North America.

While Canada’s Unifor is strongly opposed to Trump’s trade war and has called for resistance “by whatever means necessary,” the United Auto Workers (UAW) in the U.S. has come out in support and hopes to “shape the auto tariffs [...] to benefit the working class.” UAW president Shawn Fain, widely celebrated as a progressive reformer, has appeared widely on American television and social media offering the union’s qualified backing of the Trump tariff plan. 

In a statement released earlier this month, the UAW framed its support for tariffs as part of the union’s broader opposition to free trade, particularly the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), renegotiated during Trump’s first presidency as the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA, or “CUSMA” in Canada). 

“For 40 years, we’ve seen the devastating effects of so-called ‘free trade’ on the working class. Corporations have been driving a non-stop race to the bottom by killing good blue-collar jobs in America to go exploit some poor worker in another country by paying poverty wages. Tariffs are a powerful tool in the toolbox for undoing the injustice of anti-worker trade deals. We are glad to see an American president take aggressive action on ending the free trade disaster that has dropped like a bomb on the working class,” the UAW wrote. 

It’s difficult to disagree with the American union’s characterization of neoliberal free trade. But by lending support to Trump’s tariffs rather than organizing an internationalist response with unions and workers from Canada as well as Mexico, the UAW is treading a dangerous path. By supporting the tariffs, the American auto union risks amplifying the right populist logic that U.S. workers can only benefit at the expense of workers elsewhere, including those in Canada. 

The Folly of Tariff Support

For a number of reasons, union support for Trump’s tariffs is wrongheaded. 

First, there is the question of their immediate economic impacts. Because of the highly integrated North American auto supply chain, the cost inflation and job losses resulting from Trump’s tariffs could have cascading impacts. Moreover, retaliatory tariffs from the Canadian government, for which Unifor is loudly calling should the Trump plan go ahead, will only exacerbate this dynamic. The economic pain of the tariffs will fall first and foremost on workers, including American auto workers. 

Ostensibly, Trump’s tariffs are meant to drive auto investment back to the U.S. by making it more costly to import vehicles produced elsewhere. However, both Trump and the UAW may find themselves ultimately disappointed with their preferred policy’s results, particularly in the short-term. For example, the U.S. presently enjoys a considerable auto trade surplus with Canada. In other words, Canadians purchase more vehicles from the U.S. than we produce here. When the tariffs raise the cost of vehicles, Canadian demand will fall and cause plant shutdowns and job losses in both countries. 

One can sympathize with the UAW’s concerns about low-cost competition and still recognize the folly of Trump’s tariffs. In fact, directing tariffs at Canadian auto workers is precisely the wrong approach if the union’s primary issue is competition from jurisdictions with low labour standards and weak protections. Canadian jurisdictions are comparatively more labour-friendly and Canadian auto union contracts are better than those in the U.S. (though, of course the exchange rate still makes producing in Canada advantageous).

The primary competitive pressure facing unionized auto workers in the U.S. comes not from Canadians but from non-union automakers in the American South. Whereas the auto industry was once concentrated among the “Big Three” in the more highly unionized Midwestern states and Southern Ontario, today roughly 30 per cent of U.S. auto jobs are in the American South. Over decades, foreign manufacturers, such as Volkswagen, Mercedes, Toyota and Kia, have moved production into the South for the express purposes of selling in the American market and accessing unorganized labour in union-hostile, right-to-work states. 

The shift to the South has contributed to a gutting of UAW membership. In the 1970s, the union represented 1.5 million members — the vast majority of American auto workers. Today, the UAW has been reduced to roughly 380,000 members, many of whom are now in sectors other than auto. Free trade and global integration certainly played a role in this de-unionization (on this Unifor and its predecessor, the Canadian Auto Workers, agree), but so too has the migration of foreign and domestic capital within the U.S. itself, along with the inability of American labour to make inroads into the foreign transplants.

Thankfully, the UAW has committed to investing $40 million to organize non-union auto workers across the South and beyond. In a major breakthrough, workers at Volkswagen in Tennessee certified a new bargaining unit last April, but not long after, the union lost a vote at a Mercedes plant in Alabama. 

There’s a long way to go to turn the American auto industry union, and that project won’t be helped in the slightest by tariffs. 

Amplifying Nationalist Reaction

Perhaps more importantly, by backing Trump’s nationalist and reactionary trade protectionism, even in a qualified way, the UAW risks lending political support to the administration’s broader war on workers and unions. For example, the new Republican administration unilaterally terminated the union contract of workers at the Transportation Safety Administration (TSA) recently. It’s now in the process of completely dismantling the federal Department of Education, axing half of its staff and preparing for a national-wide attack on teachers and other educational workers. It has also kneecapped the National Labor Relations Board, which will chill new union certifications and make it very difficult to protect workers from employer reprisals. 

In a statement from February, the UAW made explicit its opposition to Trump’s wider attack on collective bargaining rights, but such opposition could end up eclipsed by lending support to the president’s trade policy. Moreover, beyond issues related to trade, this is an administration committed to a full frontal attack on immigrants and other minorities, positions that no credible union should countenance. 

There’s no separating the Trump administration’s nationalist reaction from its anti-worker and anti-union agenda. Even if Trump’s trade policy has some appreciable effect on the number of American manufacturing jobs, we can guarantee his administration will do nothing to make such jobs union. 

At the same time, the UAW’s backing of Trump’s tariffs could also reflect the union’s assessment of members’ political orientations. Polling on the eve of the election showed support for Trump among union members overall at 43 per cent. While union workers still break Democrat by a slim majority, and the UAW campaigned hard against Trump during the last election, the current U.S. president nevertheless clearly has a troubling appeal among blue-collar workers. 

Responding to and countering the appeal of nationalism and right-populism among union members is an urgent task. Positive moves in this direction could be undone by appearing to side with Trump on trade. 

Labour in a Changing Trade Landscape

There is also disagreement within the house of labour over the tariffs.

On March 4, the AFL-CIO, the largest union federation in the U.S., released a more measured statement that explicitly addressed the proposed tariffs’ impacts on Canadian workers: “While we support the targeted use of tariffs to protect workers from unfair competition, the Trump administration’s blanket tariffs run the risk of causing unnecessary economic pain for America’s workers without addressing workers’ core economic priorities. The tariffs on Canada are particularly damaging as they ignore our close economic and security relationship, while undermining industries that engage in cross-border trade that supports good union jobs on both sides of the border,” its release said. 

However, by far the biggest disagreement over how to respond to Trump’s tariffs seems to be between the UAW and Unifor, owing to how the two unions imagine the policy differently impacting workers in the U.S. and Canada. 

Yet, this is not the first time that auto workers’ unions have had to reevaluate their orientations to free trade in the past few years. As governments have re-embraced industrial policy, unions in export-dependent sectors, such as Canadian auto, have had to contend with new domestic production rules in the U.S. During the Biden administration, when American policymakers were finalizing the specifics of the Inflation Reduction Act, Unifor mobilized to ensure that “buy American” electric vehicle consumer credits did not exclude Canadian-made vehicles and parts, for example. 

As the consensus around free trade has shifted, unions have had a difficult time clarifying their orientations, being both critical of free trade’s impacts on workers when production moves offshore, but also having to contend with the ways workers have been integrated into global capitalism and made dependent on producing for export.

For Canadian unions like Unifor, this can be an especially difficult needle to thread. While the union is understandably fighting back against Trump’s protectionist trade policy, Unifor has also been subjected to criticism in the past for its nationalistic portrayal of Mexican competition. 

What’s Ahead? 

In the weeks and months ahead, we should expect these issues to become more heated, if or when Trump again tables the tariffs. 

The appearance of calm in the U.S. labour market may be disguising the chaos amassing under the surface. Data for February suggests the American labour market remains stable, for now. The U.S. economy added a modest 151,000 jobs, while the unemployment rate held steady at 4.1 per cent and the number of long-term unemployed remained unchanged. The number of new workers filing for unemployment benefits also fell, further indicating that the American labour market remains relatively sturdy. 

But with tariffs looming, companies are boosting imports ahead of expected price increases. This is likely providing an artificial jolt to the economy that will dissipate if and when the tariffs take effect. In addition, with Elon Musk and his so-called Department of Government Efficiency wreaking havoc on the federal public sector and government spending, a contraction in federal spending and employment will further drag down growth. Furthermore, the uncertainty generated by Trump’s sporadic trade policies will discourage further interest rate normalization from the Federal Reserve out of fears that tariff-induced price increases will reignite inflation. 

Things are far less rosy than they appear. We need international labour solidarity now more than ever. Yet, at present, there seems to be little. Notably, there seems to be no consideration at all of engaging with unions representing Mexican auto workers. 

The depressing irony is that Trumpian nationalism is reinforcing corrosive competition between workers across borders in much the same way as free trade. Workers and their unions are being encouraged to think of trade policy as primarily a question of competition for investment and jobs. 

Whereas free trade unleashed a race to the bottom in terms of wages and labour standards, as the UAW correctly argues, tariffs and protectionism promise to return investment and jobs by punishing workers elsewhere. 

Coordinating a labour response that leaves no worker behind, no matter where they work or where they were born, is no doubt a daunting task. But it’s the only viable path forward.

[Top: Photo via UAW on Twitter.]