Biden touts unions at nonunion factory in Bay City

When President Joe Biden visited the SK Siltron chip factory in Bay City on Tuesday, he touted the value of unions. He said they built the middle-class.

But the plant where he gave the remarks is not a union shop.

“The middle class built America, and unions built the middle class,” Biden said. “That’s a fact.”

Biden continued, according to the White House transcript:

Folks, where is it written that America will not lead the world in manufacturing again? Where’s that written?

Now the United States is a top destination for companies across the globe looking to make investments in manufacturing again. They see what I see, what you see: We have world-class, high-skilled, highly committed workers. Union workers.

Union workers are the most highly trained, highly skilled workers in the entire world. That’s not a joke; that’s a fact. That’s a fact.

They’re building these factories. They’re working in them as well. This wasn’t built. This was here.

SK Silton’s chips will indeed be made in Michigan. Biden is right about that.

But they won’t be made by union workers. Biden was wrong about that.

“The employees at the site are not represented by a union,” Joe Guy Collier, spokesman for SK Siltron, told Michigan Capitol Confidential in response to a query.

“The construction at the site is being done primarily by union workers, but the actual SK Siltron CSS employees that will make the product are not union.”

Across Michigan, union membership in Michigan is down 142,505 from 2012, when the right-to-work law was signed.

Today about 399,772 Michigan residents are union members, compared to 542,277 in 2012, according to a Mackinac Center review of federal LM-2 forms and reports from the Michigan Civil Service Commission.