Mike Rogers (MI) wants Michigan's autoworkers to send him to the U.S. Senate. When he was in Congress, many of them say, he barely let them in the door.

Michigan Advance spoke with active and retired members of the United Auto Workers who lobbied Rogers during his 14 years in the U.S. House, from 2001 to 2015. His district in Mid-Michigan included General Motors' Lansing Grand River Assembly plant, home to hundreds of UAW members. Their memories line up: tense meetings, a congressman who didn't like being questioned, and, eventually, conversations in the hallway with staff instead of with him.

"Confrontational"

The Advance found something that backs those memories up — in Rogers's own files.

Rogers donated his congressional papers to Oakland University after he left the House. In that collection is a letter he wrote on June 18, 2003, to then-UAW President Ron Gettelfinger. In it, Rogers complained that some of the union's Michigan leaders had been "confrontational" in meetings in his Washington office, which he called "highly disruptive to constructive dialogue." He asked that future UAW visits be kept to four to six people.

Art Reyes II, a former president of UAW Local 651 in Flint, says he led a UAW meeting with Rogers in February 2003. He told the Advance that Rogers opened by saying he understood the union's problems because his brother worked in the plant. Reyes asked why, then, Rogers "supported an agenda that ran counter to his brother's interests."

"He did not like that," Reyes said.

Reyes said the workers were always respectful, and that the real problem was that they came prepared. "I think that he was insulted that we dare ask him questions, that we were prepared with follow-up questions, and it was disruptive only in that the meeting did not follow the agenda that he had set in his mind."

The hallway

Several years into Rogers's time in the House, union members say, the meetings often weren't with Rogers at all. They happened outside his office, with staff.

• Mike Huerta, now on the UAW's international staff, said he spent more time with the trash can outside Rogers's office than with the congressman. "All he wants to talk to is somebody who can feed his campaign coffers," Huerta said.
• Julie Hartshorn, a UAW member, remembers standing in that hallway too. "As a member of Congress, you should be willing to talk to people that you know you might not [agree with]," she said. "That's how you still represent those people."
• Mike Green, who started at GM at 17, worked there 39 years and led UAW Local 652 in Lansing, said other members of Congress made time. "We were more received from everybody else other than him. It was like he never had time."
• Dean Poggiali, who led UAW Local 724 in Lansing for 18 years, said the hallway meetings were with staffers "who really didn't have a lot of knowledge" of the issues the workers came to raise.

Ducking the people you represent is a habit. In this Senate race, Rogers has refused a televised debate too.

He sided with GM against the strike

In September 2007, UAW members walked off the job at General Motors in a two-day nationwide strike. Rogers came out against it.

The Detroit News reported at the time that Rogers said he was "very disappointed." "There were numerous other options to the union that did not involve hurting the paychecks of Michigan families," he said, adding: "This strike will not turn one outbound moving van around."

That's a congressman telling the workers in his own district's plant that standing up for themselves was the problem.

Michigan Advance notes that Rogers said he supported the UAW during its 2023 strike — once he was running statewide again.

The record behind it

The tense meetings weren't about manners. They were about votes.

The AFL-CIO, the country's largest federation of unions, scored Rogers's House voting record at 11%, according to the Advance. Reyes pointed to Rogers's support for NAFTA, the 1994 trade deal that hit Flint and Lansing's factory towns especially hard. The UAW has said before that the record it knows Rogers by is the one in Congress, "where he supported bad trade deals that cost Michigan autoworkers good union jobs" — a point it made when Rogers started telling voters he once built Chrysler Sebrings on an assembly line, a car that didn't exist until he was a state senator.

Today the UAW, the AFL-CIO, the AFT and Michigan Teamsters Joint Council 43 have all endorsed his opponent. Rogers has the Detroit Regional Chamber and the Southeast Michigan Chamber of Commerce.

Asked about the letter and the meetings, Rogers's campaign didn't address either. Spokeswoman Alyssa Brouillet attacked his opponent's positions on Medicare for All and electric vehicles instead.

What the record shows

As a congressman, Mike Rogers (MI) wrote the UAW's president in 2003 complaining that Michigan autoworkers lobbying him were "confrontational" and asking that their delegations be cut to four to six people. Union members say they were later met by staff in his hallway instead of by him, he publicly opposed the 2007 UAW strike against GM, and the AFL-CIO scored his House record at 11%.

Source

UAW members recall tense encounters with Mike Rogers during his time in Congress — Michigan Advance