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The United Auto Workers strike has sparked fears of major economic turmoil, but the experts I spoke with think a recession is unlikely. Still, even if the economic effects of the strike aren’t felt nationwide, they are very real for workers, their families, and their communities.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

America’s new battlefront The end of Scantron tests Trump’s menacing Rosh Hashanah message to American Jews It’s the best time in history to have a migraine.

The Real Stakes

For more than a year, a drumbeat of warnings about an imminent recession has haunted even those who casually follow the news. Though a recession hasn’t materialized, many Americans still have a bleak outlook on the economy. So it’s little wonder that news of an imminent United Auto Workers strike last week stoked fears of further economic disruption. On Friday, the UAW decided to proceed with a “limited and targeted” stoppage at three locations: a Stellantis plant in Ohio, a General Motors factory in Missouri, and a Ford plant in Michigan. The strike is relatively small in size so far: About 13,000 of the UAW’s 150,000 workers at Stellantis, GM, and Ford are participating (though the union has threatened to add more). Ahead of the strike, a widely cited analysis—assuming that a strike would shut down all three of America’s major carmakers—predicted that its effects would ricochet across the economy, swiftly causing billions of dollars in damage.

But now that the strike has begun, in a targeted format at just three of the country’s dozens of plants, the economists and labor-relations experts I spoke with said that, barring major escalations in scope and duration, the strike is not likely to have a wide impact on national, or even state, economies. Peter Berg, the director of the School of Human Resources & Labor Relations at Michigan State University, told me that the likelihood of this strike tipping the economy into a recession, or meaningfully boosting inflation, is small, unless the strike stretches out for several more months.

Just because an event may not reshape the economy doesn’t mean its effects won’t be acutely felt: Eligible striking workers are making less while on strike, receiving stipends of $500 a week from a strike fund instead of their salary. Having less spending money may cause real pain for striking workers and their families, and may cause local businesses in striking communities to suffer too. Gabriel Ehrlich, an economic forecaster at the University of Michigan, emphasized this when we spoke, even as he explained that the strike would not likely affect the trajectory of Michigan’s economy (though not the only state targeted in the strikes, it is the historic seat of the American car industry), much less the national one. And, he added, if striking workers get a strong contract that includes pay raises, their spending power could even go up soon. In a “worst-case scenario,” he said, a dragged-out strike against all three companies at once could affect job-loss numbers and cause disruption to the national economy. But in the meantime, select workers (and the targeted carmakers and other companies, such as parts manufacturers, that do business with them) are likely to feel the effect of the strikes more acutely than the general public.

Harry Katz, a collective-bargaining professor at the School of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell, told me that he sees potential for compromise between the two sides, and thinks the talks are unlikely to stretch on for several months. Some of the issues in play in the UAW’s current negotiation with carmakers include higher pay—the union has asked for nearly 40 percent raises over four years, rejecting the carmakers’ offer of a roughly 20 percent bump—and job preservation in the era of electric vehicles. “I don’t think that this is a fight to the death,” Katz said. The UAW and the auto manufacturers were in talks this past weekend, and the union’s president said yesterday that if the talks don’t progress by noon on Friday, it may expand the number of workers participating in the strike. UAW did not immediately respond to my request for comment.

Carmaking looms large in the American psyche: Americans tend to think of the auto industry as powerful. But the industry is much smaller than it once was, and much less unionized. In the heyday of American car manufacturing after the Second World War, Katz noted, 95 percent of workers in the independent auto-parts sector were in unions. Now that figure is closer to 5 percent. As the size and heft of the auto industry have declined, so, too, has the power of a strike to affect America’s economy.

One week ago, the public did not know whether, or how many, UAW workers would go on strike. Now we don’t know where the strike will be in a week’s time, or the week after that. The stakes will continue to rise, not only for workers and the carmakers, but for President Joe Biden too. Biden has thrown his support behind the striking workers, though his electric-vehicle ambitions are a source of tension in the negotiations, and the UAW has not endorsed him. “Biden still is aligned with the labor movement, and I don’t think it helps him if there was a really big, long strike,” Katz explained. “I think that’s a more potent effect than the effect on the economy.”

Related:

The real issue in the UAW strike Biden’s labor-climate dilemma

Today’s News

India has expelled a Canadian diplomat after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau accused the Indian government of being connected to the assassination of the Sikh leader Hardeep Singh Nijjar and expelled an Indian diplomat. A court in Moscow refused to hear the Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich’s appeal against his continued pretrial detention. President Joe Biden and President Volodymyr Zelensky both spoke at the annual United Nations General Assembly about continued Russian aggression.

Evening Read

Jemal Countess / Getty

Russell Brand Wasn’t an Anomaly

By Sophie Gilbert

In the summer of 1999, when I was 16 years old, I remember walking to a train station in West London from a babysitting job when a 40-something man in a Range Rover pulled up, told me he was on television, and then announced to his young son (also in the car) that I was “Daddy’s new girlfriend.” I don’t know who the man was; I didn’t get in the car, not because I was afraid but because I’d just bought Californication for my minidisc player and wanted to listen to the album on the way home. But what he did wasn’t abnormal for the time. This was two years before the 35-year-old TV presenter and radio host Chris Evans (not the actor) married the 18-year-old pop star Billie Piper in Las Vegas, after a months-long relationship that started when he gave the teenager—so young, she hadn’t yet learned to drive—a Ferrari filled with roses. A year later, in 2002, the BBC Radio 1 host Chris Moyles offered, live on air, to take the singer Charlotte Church’s virginity on her 16th birthday, claiming that he could “lead her through the forest of sexuality” now that she was legal.

I’ve often wondered how Millennial women in Britain survived the aughts: not just the incessant fat shaming and the ritualized alcohol abuse, but also the cheerful, open predation that was everywhere in popular culture then.

Read the full article.

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Read. In Loved and Missed, Susie Boyt presents the story of a woman raising a child, and the surprising reality of just how pleasurable it all is.

Listen. “I Want to Take You Higher” by Sly and the Family Stone, a great American band that suggested new possibilities in music and life—until it fell apart.

Play our daily crossword.

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

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This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

The United States of America is facing a threat from a sometimes violent cult while a nuclear armed power wages war on the border of our closest allies. And yet, many Americans sleepwalk as if they are living in normal times instead of in an ongoing crisis.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

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The Fragility of Freedom

Americans have become accustomed to so much in public life that they would have once found shocking. But many of these events are not only shameful; they are a warning, a kind of static energy filling the air just before a lightning strike. America is in a state of emergency, yet few of its citizens seem to realize it.

For example, a single senator, Tommy Tuberville of Alabama, has been holding up hundreds of military promotions for months, endangering the national security of the United States. The acting chief of naval operations says it will take years for the Navy to recover from the damage. (Welcome news, no doubt, in Beijing.) Few people outside of America’s senior military leadership seem particularly concerned.

Meanwhile, the House of Representatives is going to open an impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden. Why? Well, why not? Speaker Kevin McCarthy promised the extremists in his party that if they made him speaker, he would do what he was told. And so he has; the People’s House is now effectively being run by members such as Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene, fringe figures who in better times might never have been elected, and in a sensible House would have been relegated to the backbenches so far away from the rostrum that their seats would be in a different time zone. (And let us not even speak of Lauren Boebert.)

Elsewhere, the governor of Florida and his vaccine-skeptic surgeon general are telling people under 65 not to get boosted against COVID. He apparently thinks that anti-science extremism will help him wrest the Republican presidential nomination away from Donald Trump, and so he is resorting to a deeply cynical ploy that could cost lives.

And then there is Trump himself, the wellspring of all this chaos. In a country that understood the fragility of its own freedoms, we would see him for what he is: the leader of a dangerous cult who has admitted to his attempts to subvert American democracy.

Last week, Special Counsel Jack Smith filed a request for a gag order on Trump to stop him from making more public attacks on prosecutors, witnesses, and potential jurors. As they say on social media, let that sink in:

A federal prosecutor has asked a judge to stop the former president of the United States from threatening lawyers and witnesses in his case, and intimidating potential jurors.

As I wrote recently, this is not a normal election. (We haven’t had one of those in almost a decade now.) The GOP is not a normal political organization; the party withdrew into itself years ago and has now emerged from its rotting chrysalis as a nihilistic, seditionist movement in thrall to Trump. And Trump is not a normal candidate in any way: He regularly expresses his intention to continue his attacks on the American system and has made so many threats in so many different directions that we’ve lost track of them. Yet millions of Americans simply accept such behavior as Trump being Trump, much as they did in 2016.

Trump has shown his willingness to endanger anyone who gets in his way—as Smith’s recent motion shows—and so we might at least expect the media to report on Trump not merely as a candidate but as if they were following the developments around a dangerous conspiracy or the ongoing trial of the leader of a major crime syndicate.

Instead, we have Kristen Welker inaugurating the reboot of Meet the Press by leaning forward with focused sincerity and asking Trump, “Tell me—Mr. President, tell me what you see when you look at your mug shot?”
That wasn’t even the worst of it. Like Kaitlan Collins in her disastrous town hall with Trump on CNN this past spring, Welker lost control of the interview, because she, too, insisted on treating Trump like an ordinary political candidate instead of the seditious menace he’s become.

Many of my colleagues in the media have already dissected Welker’s failure, and I won’t pile on, because I agree with my friend Jonathan Last at The Bulwark, who wrote this morning, “I’m being hard on Kristen Welker, but this isn’t really about Kristen Welker. It’s about the mainstream broadcast media. All of them. In 2016 broadcast media was totally inadequate to the job of covering an aspiring authoritarian … Today—even after witnessing an insurrection—they still don’t seem to understand the situation and their complicity in it.”

Democrats and their liberal allies claim to be in full mobilization mode to stop Trump and defang his threat to the constitutional order. But are they? How much more hand-wringing will they do over Biden’s age, over whether he’s doing enough for climate change or to forgive student loans? Do we really need Biden to visit the UAW picket lines (as some have suggested)? How many more times will Trump’s opponents in the pro-democracy coalition internalize the right’s criticisms—about inflation, about spending, about gasoline—and respond to them as if Republicans care one whit about policy?

Yes, gas is expensive. So is food. These are real issues, and people deserve to hear how their government will assist them. The solution to these problems, however, is not to normalize an authoritarian and thus pretend that one party, dysfunctional as it can be, is the same as a reactionary, anti-constitutional, and sometimes violent movement.

We don’t have to live in panic. Americans need not walk around all day with their hair on fire, talking about nothing else but the gathering dangers. In times of crisis, whether World War II or 9/11, we married and divorced, we carped about prices, we partied, we took vacations. (Heck, I’m off to Las Vegas myself shortly.) We did all the things normal people do in the course of a normal life.

But we don’t have to live this way, either, with voters and institutions—and especially the media—pretending that all is well while charlatans, aspiring theocrats, and would-be authoritarians set fire to American democracy.

Related:

CNN went full Jerry Springer. American democracy perseveres—for now.

Today’s News

Five Americans who were imprisoned in Iran were freed today as part of a prisoner-swap deal between Washington and Tehran. Hunter Biden has sued the Internal Revenue Service, alleging that agency investigators violated his privacy rights in testimony and public comments. The IRS has declined to comment on the suit, and the agents have said that they made their disclosures legally. China flew 103 warplanes near Taiwan in a 24-hour period, a notable escalation of a near-daily practice.

Evening Read

Sally Anscombe / Gallery Stock

A Driver of Inequality That Not Enough People Are Talking About

By Melissa Kearney

Earlier this year, I was at a conference on fighting poverty, and a member of the audience asked a question that made the experts visibly uncomfortable.

“What about family structure?” he asked. “Single-parent families are more likely to be poor than two-parent ones. Does family structure play a role in poverty?”

The scholar to whom the question was directed looked annoyed and struggled to formulate an answer. The panelists shifted in their seats. The moderator stepped in, quickly pointing out that poverty makes it harder for people to form stable marriages. She promptly called on someone else.

Read the full article.

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Listen. Max Richter’s recomposition of Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons, which our staff writer Annie Lowrey loves.

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P.S.

I mentioned that I’m going off to Vegas for the rest of the week. In my pursuit of the perfect American cultural experience, I am going to see Barry Manilow. (Yes, I will write about it when I get back.)

Last night, however, I came across Spenser: For Hire, the television adaptation of Robert B. Parker’s series of novels about a tough but cultured Boston private eye. The series, starring Robert Urich and Avery Brooks, was fine, especially within the limits of network programming in the mid-1980s. But my recommendation is to read the books—and read them in order. They are a lovely time capsule (especially of Boston) from the early ’70s through the ’80s.

The books are funny yet dark; I won’t tell you that they’re great literature, but they do raise issues about honor, manhood, friendship, loyalty, and love, all while unraveling some excellent private-eye plots. In later years, Parker lost a step (he died in 2010), and I am not a fan of the series’ continuations by other authors, but if you start with God Save the Child (written in 1974 and one of the best books in the series, especially if you remember the ’70s) and make your way through to A Catskill Eagle (1985), I think you’ll enjoy the ride.

— Tom

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

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