DETROIT—By a 97%-3% margin, United Auto Workers members at the Detroit 3 car companies—GM, Ford and Stellantis, formerly FiatChrysler—authorized their board to call a strike against all three when their contracts expire on September 14.
And from all indications, the two sides are far apart, with the car companies reporting record profits while also closing U.S. plants. Meanwhile, the union’s 150,000 members at the firms push to gain pay, recoup lost pensions and cost-of-living increases and end the hated two-tier wage system.
“As a union, we have to lead the fight for economic justice—not just for ourselves but for the entire working class,” new UAW President Shawn Fain told an early-August rally of members in Warren, Mich.
There’s a lot of economic justice for UAW members to gain.
Starting wages are now below their 2007 levels in nominal dollars, even before the losses imposed by inflation. Pensions were replaced by 401(k)s and new hires since the crash get far less in health benefits, if any at all. Cost-of-living increases disappeared after the 2008 financier-caused economic crash.
The union also wants the right to strike over plant closures—a point brought home by the recent shutting of the profitable Stellantis Jeep plant in Belvidere, Ill., and that firm’s later offer of $50,000 buyouts to more than 30,000 rank-and-file workers company-wide. Belvidere was the first plant whose workers suffered under the two-tier system, which split the workforce and the town—and gutted others’ living standards there, too.
The 2008 crash drove GM and FiatChrysler into bankruptcy and, among other impacts, not only cut wages but also unloaded car company health care systems on the UAW in return for cash and stock. It also led to federal intervention which imposed the cuts on workers as a condition for loans to carmakers.
Fain, the new UAW board and the workers bluntly demand the auto makers share more of their cornucopia of cash and profits. Reports say the union seeks a 40% wage hike. UAW members have begun practice picketing. Some 500 from Local 862 in Louisville, Ky., did so on August 24-25.
And the union’s strike fund is flush, reports say, with enough on hand to sustain the workers for months should company obstinacy force them to walk.
Before contract talks began with the Detroit 3, Fain, who ran on a more aggressive platform in UAW’s first-ever one autoworker-one vote election, broke with tradition by shaking hands and talking contract with his members at various car company plants, while refusing to shake hands with the auto firm CEOs at their opening sessions.
Members are “clearly fed up with living paycheck-to-paycheck while the corporate elite and billionaire class continue to make out like bandits,” Fain said in a prepared statement. “The Big Three have been breaking the bank while we have been breaking our backs.
“Our members’ expectations are high because Big Three profits are so high. The Big Three made a combined $21 billion in profits in just the first six months of this year. That’s on top of the quarter-trillion dollars in North American profits they made over the last decade. While Big Three executives and shareholders got rich, UAW members got left behind.
“Our message to the Big Three is simple: Record profits mean record contracts.”
The UAW is also pushing a 32-hour workweek and the right to have workers choose their vacation time. “We have to work longer and harder just to maintain the same standard of living that we had before,” Fain said in a Facebook video on August 1.
“That means more time at work, and less time living life. That means missing Little League games and family reunions. It means less time outdoors, less time traveling, less time pursuing our passions and our hobbies.”
Future employment in the auto industry is also a big topic, due to the shift to electric vehicles. The UAW backed the Biden administration’s push for converting auto and truck manufacturing from internal combustion engines—which emit greenhouse gases that lead to global warming—to EVs.
But despite Democratic President Joe Biden’s promise that “green” EV jobs are to be union jobs, the first EV battery plants, with $9.2 billion of U.S. investment from last year’s Inflation Reduction Act, went to plants in anti-union Tennessee and Kentucky, not pro-union Michigan.
Those awards led UAW to stay away from the AFL-CIO-wide endorsement of the Biden-Harris ticket for re-election in 2024, although analysts expect an eventual UAW nod for the duo.
The UAW also demands EV plant workers be on the same pay scale as regular auto plant workers, not a lower scale for “parts” workers. And the automakers have already said that EV manufacturing will need fewer workers than construction of traditional cars and trucks demands.
The UAW contracts with the Detroit 3 are important because the car companies, their parts suppliers and their raw material providers—such as steelmakers—account for a significant share of the U.S. economy. That’s prompted Biden to come down on the side of UAW on pay issues.
“I’ve been talking to the UAW,” Biden told a press gaggle at Lake Tahoe, Calif., on August 25. “Obviously, I’m concerned. I think that there should be a circumstance where the jobs that are being displaced and replaced with new jobs” at the EV plants, “they should go to the–the first choice should go to–the UAW members that have had the job and the salary should be commensurate.”
Meanwhile, UAW-D intends to keep the pressure for militancy on. Its organizing committee has set three goals for the talks with the Detroit 3, while supporting the union’s demands. Those goals are to recruit more auto workers into that reform caucus, building its power through ongoing organizing within locals and to “develop, through a shared organizing space, a collective UAWD political consciousness relating to members’ material conditions, to build support for a striking, militant UAW.”
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