WASHINGTON—Back in the days when Stellantis was Chrysler, there was a sense of camaraderie on the shop floor, veteran Auto Workers say. Not anymore. Not under Stellantis. All they perceive now is corporate greed, satisfying investors, and filling honchos’ pockets with workers’ dollars.
Which has sent Stellantis workers, who toil for what was FiatChrysler, out onto the streets from coast to coast, protesting the firm’s plan to renege on the contract it signed last year with the UAW, by refusing to re-open and re-staff the closed Chrysler plant in Belvidere, Ill.
Workers at two Stellantis plants, Local 186 members at a Stellantis parts hub in Denver and another local in Los Angeles, already heeded UAW’s solidarity call and passed strike authorization votes. The new Stellantis contract lets UAW strike over such causes.
After all, as one worker in the D.C. march on October 10 put it, if Stellantis violates this contract provision, which was a key demand of last year’s UAW Stand Up strike, and gets away with it, what will the firm violate next? Wages? Benefits? Closing other plants, such as the Dodge Durango factory in Michigan?
Thus the latest in a series of demonstrations against the Belvidere closure occurred in D.C., at the end of a conference Stellantis called for workers from around the U.S. to discuss production improvement plans. When workers finished that, they marched outside.
This management is money-mad, the workers emphasized. “The difference between then and now is cooperation,” worker Austin Young of the Trenton, Mich., plant told People’s World in a brief interview. “We had a good working relationship with mutual respect.”
“I worked for Chrysler, for DaimlerChrysler, for Service Capital LLC, and back to Chrysler,” said longtime worker John Weyer, who also led the demonstrators’ chants. “It was a traditional relationship, but we felt like we were a family: Give a little, take a little. But when Service Capital took over it was bad” and has worsened under Stellantis.
“Now people are asking ‘When is the ax going to come down?’”
“The number-one thing” the workers want “is good-paying jobs for good-working people,” said Weyer, now a top official in UAW’s Stellantis Department. If they don’t get that, “We are prepared” to strike after an authorization vote.
“We are here because Stellantis made us a promise in the negotiations. There are a number of things we could’ve put forward” in the bargaining. “But number-one was reopening Belvidere to keep the economy strong and the people in their jobs.”
Left unsaid: Last year, Stellantis closed Belvidere—the first plant among the Detroit automakers whose workers suffered from the now-dead two-tier wage system—a few weeks before UAW’s Stand Up strikes began. That closure really angered UAW’s Stellantis workers and made reopening a top priority.
“I’ve been with Chrysler 26 years,” Belvidere worker Tom Shank told People’s World after the group of more than 75 workers marched in D.C. Under post-Chrysler regimes, culminating with Stellantis, “I’ve seen a 5,000-person workforce cut to shreds. There’s no reason they can’t reopen it [Belvidere]. There’ll be a mid-pickup market—if they want to invest in it.”
One prominent non-worker came in solidarity anyway: Baltimore-area resident Frank Rhodes, Chrysler founder Walter Chrysler’s great-grandson. Weyer gave him the mic to speak.
“His main tenets were two, the engineering and the employees,” Rhodes said of his ancestor. “He walked the assembly lines talking to the workers. Do any of your” supervisors “do that?” The group roared, “No!”
Weyer and Rhodes also had sharp words for other actions by Stellantis bosses, saying they not only ship millions of dollars to overseas investors but, as Rhodes put it, “Stellantis is slowly taking parts of this company and shipping it away.”
Recent media reports say Stellantis eventually wants to move four-fifths of its production out of the U.S. “I don’t know of any other governments in the world that would let their products go so easily.” Rhodes added Stellantis brass wants to export its profits, most of them earned in the U.S., to France. “We fought to free France in World War II…Now they’re taking our pride,” he told People’s World.
Lawmakers out of town
Workers who journeyed to D.C. didn’t have a chance to lobby lawmakers or the Biden administration. All are out of town campaigning for the November election. But Weyer had a demand for them, too. “We want them to put working-class people in the front of their hearts and their minds,” he declared. “Any government should be investing in its people.”
In a major win in bargaining with the Detroit auto firms, UAW achieved the right to file grievances against their firms and to strike over labor law-breaking—formally called unfair labor practices—and sudden decisions reneging on “product and investment commitments.”
UAW members at Stellantis won $19 billion in product and investment commitments from the company during last year’s national rolling Stand Up strike against the Big 3. Besides trying to renege on reopening Belvidere, Stellantis announced in August it would lay off up to 2,450 workers at the Warren, Mich., Truck plant who build an older version of the Ram 1500 pickup, the Tradesman.
But when Stellantis violated that provision in Belvidere, thousands of employees represented by UAW locals started to file grievances in August against that and against moving Dodge Durango production out of Detroit.
“Stellantis made a promise to invest in America and we’re making sure they keep the promise,” said UAW President Shawn Fain in a statement. “The commitments we won in our contract aren’t goals, they’re guarantees. The company claims they don’t have the money to make these investments. But since the year began, they’ve dumped more than $3 billion into stock buybacks. They have the money to Keep The Promise.”
“A contract was negotiated. Stellantis violated it,” said UAW Region 4 Director Brandon Campbell. “They made a promise. They signed on the dotted line. We fought for the right to strike over grievances of this nature, and if necessary, we damn well intend to use that right.”
Other Stellantis locals which can file grievances and take strike authorization votes include Local 12 at the Toledo Assembly Complex, Local 1700 at the Sterling Heights, Mich., Assembly Plant, and Michigan Locals 7 at Jefferson North, 51 at Mack Assembly, 869 at the Warren Stamping Plant and 1264 at the Sterling Heights Stamping Plant, as well as Kokomo, Ind., Locals 685 and 1166.
The past week, UAW members “Keep the Promise” rallies at the Local 869 union hall in Warren and at Local 1264 in Sterling Heights.
Almost 200 full-time workers were laid off at the Sterling Heights, Mich., Assembly plant earlier this year as well. Another 539 supplemental employees were cut in January at several plants, 341 were cut in March at Toledo Assembly, and 239 workers were cut at the Freud Street parts sequencing facility near the Jefferson North Assembly plant.
The union planned a rally on October 11 at Belvidere, to discuss a strike authorization vote and “to combat the devastating narratives” around so-called “free trade” agreements, such as the now-dead NAFTA. Senate Labor Committee Chairman Bernie Sanders, Ind.-Vt., UAW President Fain, Region 4 Director Campbell, and Local 1286 President Matt Franzten will speak.
“In the 1990s, they went after what remained of our good manufacturing jobs,” the union said in a video. “Republicans and some Democrats, including a Democratic President”—Bill Clinton—“passed NAFTA…An estimated 90,000 factories closed over the next 25 years due to NAFTA and similar trade deals. And corporate America, with friends in both parties, won again.”
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