President Joe Biden is set to tout his administration’s efforts to boost clean energy manufacturing and create union jobs in a speech Thursday in Philadelphia.
Earlier in the day, the White House announced the first offshore wind lease sale in the Gulf of Mexico, which it says will have enough clean energy potential to power nearly 1.3 million homes.
Biden will visit the Philly Shipyard for a steel-cutting ceremony to mark the construction of a new offshore wind vessel, the White House said.
The power generators will bring about an estimated $125 million in economic activity every year, and 1,000 workers across nine unions have been employed to build them, using steel plates made by the United Steelworkers in Indiana, it added.
The president’s focus on unions comes as the potential for additional strikes loom over his 2024 re-election campaign.
On Wednesday, Biden held a short meeting with Shawn Fain, president of the United Auto Workers union, a White House official said. UAW leadership had asked to brief White House senior staff on their analysis and positions in relation to negotiations with the Big Three automakers — General Motors, the Ford Motor Co. and Stellantis. Fain has said that the UAW is willing to strike against those companies.
UPS workers have also threatened to strike as Teamsters leaders, who represent UPS workers, negotiate a new labor contract. Meanwhile, the national board of the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, also known as SAG-AFTRA, voted unanimously to go on strike this month, after the Writers Guild of America had already went on strike.
Biden has frequently referred to himself as the most pro-union president in history.
Despite his administration’s efforts to promote the president’s “Bidenomics” agenda, his economic approval rating has risen only slightly, by 3% in April, to 37%, according to CNBC’s new All-America Economic Survey.
This summer, high level administration officials spread out over the country to tout Biden’s economic agenda as part of the Investing in America tour. The president delivered a speech on Bidenomics on July 6 in South Carolina highlighting the importance of infrastructure.
Bidenomics focuses on three points: making public investments, educating workers to grow the middle class, and promoting competition, according to the White House.
Across the aisle, the GOP has seized upon voters’ worries over the economy to attack Bidenomics. The White House took a swipe at Republicans in Congress in its fact sheet announcing the president’s visit to Philadelphia, saying that if Republicans “had their way, their states would have lost out on billions of dollars in investments, jobs, and opportunity.”
“Yet nearly every Republican Member of the House voted again to overturn the Inflation Reduction Act’s clean energy tax credits in April 2023 — doubling down on their opposition at a time when manufacturers were investing in their state,” the White House wrote.
Caroline Kenny and Peter Alexander contributed.
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