US presidential debates rarely feature much in the way of substantive policy debate, and last night’s showdown between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris was no different. Commentators praised Vice President Harris’s style, exemplified in her walking over to Trump’s end of the stage to introduce herself and ensure he shook her hand, “taking the fight directly to him,” as CNN’s Jake Tapper put it. There’s no doubt that the Democrats made a wise decision swapping Harris in for a declining President Joe Biden, a man who, as Trump absurdly put it, “doesn’t even know he’s alive.”

Yet it’s hard to avoid noticing that neither candidate is particularly forthcoming about policy details. At several points during the debate, Harris said she would explain her plans, only to then move on. Trump, meanwhile, merely claimed to have “concepts of a plan”; of Project 2025, the conservative Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for turning the United States into a union-free theocracy, the former president claimed not to have read it. (No surprise, either, that neither candidate mentioned Ayşenur Ezgi Eygi, the twenty-six-year-old American who the Israel Defense Forces killed last week in the West Bank.)

Despite the paucity of substance, there was a back and forth on jobs around ninety minutes into the debate. In response to a question about climate change, Harris claimed that the Biden administration has created some 800,000 manufacturing jobs, in contrast to a decline in manufacturing work under Trump.

“I’m also proud to have the endorsement of the United Auto Workers and Shawn Fain, who also knows that part of building a clean-energy economy includes investing in American-made products, American automobiles,” Harris continued.

Trump responded by asserting that Chinese companies are building up operations in Mexico so as to undercut US automakers’ costs, flooding the domestic market with their products, which will “kill the United Auto Workers and any auto worker, whether it’s in Detroit or South Carolina or any other place.” He promised to introduce new tariffs to prevent such decimation.

That line of argument has become a staple of the Trump campaign: the former president is a vehement hawk on China, and the UAW’s vehement opposition to Trump has made him even more fixated on reversing the Biden administration’s subsidization of the auto industry’s transition to electric vehicles (EVs). Fain in particular seems to infuriate Trump, representing as he does a working-class tribune that no amount of spin can undermine.

There’s truth in the idea that US automakers can’t compete with Mexico’s low labor costs, and this poses a threat to US autoworkers. But that is because Mexican workers remain largely without independent unions, ones that fight to raise their standards rather than collaborate with the boss. The UAW under Fain’s leadership seems aware of that; details remain scarce, but the union’s new leadership has pledged to increase cross-border coordination, assistance, and solidarity with independent unions of Mexican autoworkers. Trump, of course, has no interest in any of those details.

Not that a Harris administration is going to bolster proletarian internationalism either. The Biden administration’s answer to the tension Trump is highlighting in the EV transition has been to pressure Mexico to move away from incentivizing Chinese investment in auto, as well as implementing its own 100 percent tariff on EVs from China and mulling means of blocking Chinese imports via Mexico.

That said, Harris was right on the facts in the exchange that followed. She is correct that manufacturing jobs declined under Trump and have risen under Biden: much of that is about the economic decline that accompanied the onset of the pandemic, and the recovery that has followed more recently, though Trump’s callous mishandling of the pandemic surely worsened the economic contraction. The vice president also said, effectively cribbing from Fain’s stump speeches, that auto plants closed under Trump, and the then president did nothing to help affected autoworkers. That’s correct: see Lordstown.

It’s a good sign that both candidates, with an eye to critical working-class votes in Michigan, felt the need to bring up auto work. After all, the UAW can use that to fuel its still-ongoing, still-uphill battle to organize the entire sector, which remains, despite all of this attention and all the promises from elected officials, half nonunion.

Trump has made his supposed concern for autoworkers a frequent refrain throughout the campaign, and last night was no different. But the record is clear: Trump has never helped autoworkers. The former president wants more manufacturing jobs, but he has not a word to say about the quality of those jobs; his opposition to them being union goes without saying.

As for Harris, she’s certainly more pro-labor than Trump — that’s why the UAW endorsed her. But she won’t resolve the EV dilemma either: that will require worker-to-worker organizing, both within the United States and across borders.