The UAW Is Leading the World Toward a May Day to Remember / by Sam Pizzgati

_{^{UAW workers strike and march in Detroit, Michigan | (Photo: UAW International Union/Facebook)}}

_{Reposted from Common Dreams}

If May 1, 2028, arrives without signed contracts for America’s unionized auto workers, UAW president Shawn Fain has now made plain, these workers don’t plan on walking out alone.

The folks at the U.S. Coast Guard know “mayday” as well as anyone. Every year they handle thousands of “mayday” distress calls. Their counterparts worldwide handle thousands more. Overall, the number of “mayday” calls since the 1920s—when “mayday” became the international go-to for declaring emergency situations—now runs well into the millions.

But we’ve never had a “mayday” more socially consequential than the “mayday” that U.S. auto workers have just thrust upon our global calendar. This potential “mayday” just happens to impact only our world’s richest—and has suddenly become a much more real possibility than a crash of any one of their outrageously deluxe private jets.

What have U.S. auto workers done? They’ve successfully bargained a set of watershed contracts that establish May 1, 2028, as the day the workers of our world may actually unite, for the first time ever, against our world’s super wealthy.

The greatest significance of the new UAW auto industry contracts may be the impact these bargaining triumphs will have on the future. These agreements could become the single most important step to a more equal world that any of us have ever seen.

The new contracts the United Auto Workers union is now signing with Detroit’s Big Three—Ford, GM, and Stellantis—all set April 30, 2028 as their expiration date. That would make May 1 the day the workers the three new contracts cover walk out on strike if no new deal materializes.

This May 1 date, of course, holds enormous global significance. Working people the world over have been celebrating the first of May as “International Labor Day” for generations, in a tradition that began back in 1886 when workers in the United States struggling for an eight-hour day staged a May 1 national protest.

If May 1, 2028, arrives without signed contracts for America’s unionized auto workers, UAW president Shawn Fain has now made plain, these workers don’t plan on walking out alone.

“We invite unions around the country to align your contract expirations with our own so that together we can begin to flex our collective muscles,” says Fain. “If we’re going to truly take on the billionaire class and rebuild the economy so that it starts to work for the benefit of the many and not the few, then it’s important that we not only strike but that we strike together.”

And by aligning the UAW’s next big contract deadline with International Labor Day, the union is clearly inviting coordination beyond the national level. The May Day that workers worldwide have so long honored, as Fain notes, has always been “more than just a day of commemoration, it’s a call to action.” And the labor movement worldwide, as the latest headlines remind us, is showing real signs of acting more in strategic concert.

Within the global auto industry, for instance, no corporation more embodies the inequality our corporate world order has spread so aggressively than the non-union Tesla. Under CEO Elon Musk, the world’s richest single individual, Tesla pays wages that run substantially below the hourly rates at Detroit’s Big Three, and that gap will only widen after the new UAW contracts go into full effect.

This shortchanging of workers has sped the growth of Musk’s fabulous fortune and helped boost Tesla’s share of the global electrical vehicle market to about 60%. The new UAW contracts, predicts German Bender of the Swedish think-tank Arena, could well “boost union interest among Tesla workers.”

That interest already seems to be growing. On the final Friday of the UAW walkout in the United States, workers at Tesla-owned servicing shops in Sweden went out on strike—after five years of fruitless attempts to get Tesla’s Swedish subsidiary to reach a bargaining agreement. That strike has now spread to all auto shops in Sweden that do work on Tesla cars.

This Swedish walkout, the global union confederation IndustriALL has announced, represents the first formal strike against Tesla anywhere in the world. And the challenge to Tesla may soon be spreading beyond Sweden. Germany’s largest union, Bloomberg reports, is hoping to organize a 12,000-worker Tesla plant near Berlin.

Tesla’s over 120,000 workers worldwide will certainly see plenty to like in the new UAW contracts in the United States. At Ford, workers who started as temps making $16.67 an hour will be automatically moving to permanent status and an hourly wage rate of at least $24.91. That rate will hit $40.82 an hour by the contract’s end, and any inflation between now and then will kick that rate still higher.

Workers in major American industries haven’t seen gains that stunning since the middle of the 20th century, a time when the chief execs of America’s largest corporations averaged only just over 20 times the compensation of their workers. That gap today, the Economic Policy Institute calculates, is now running nearly 350 times.

But the greatest significance of the new UAW auto industry contracts may be the impact these bargaining triumphs will have on the future. These agreements could become the single most important step to a more equal world that any of us have ever seen.

The giants of American auto manufacturing, as Fain puts it, “underestimated” their own workers’ capacity to unite and fight together.

“We have shown the companies, the American public, and the whole world that the working class is not done fighting,” he adds. “In fact, we’re just getting started.”

_{Sam Pizzigati is a veteran labor journalist and Institute for Policy Studies associate fellow. He co-edits Inequality.org, the Institute’s weekly newsletter on our great divides. He also contributes a regular column to OtherWords, the IPS national nonprofit editorial service.}

After GM Boasts Higher Revenue, Auto Workers Strike Its Cash Cow / by Keith Brower Brown

_{^{Auto workers at GM’s Arlington Assembly walked out this morning. The 5,000 Arlington workers joined 41,000 already on strike against the Big 3 automakers. Photo: UAW.}}

_{Reposted from Labor Notes}

General Motors CEO Mary Barra started her day boasting to company investors how much car sales and revenues have recently climbed.

Two hours later, Auto Workers reminded her who made those revenues happen. The Auto Workers (UAW) struck GM’s most profitable plant, the massive Arlington Assembly, just outside Dallas.

On grounds stretching across 250 acres, the 5,000 workers at Arlington make every GM model of full-size SUV, like the Tahoe and Escalade. According to an industry analyst at Benchmark, it’s “the most profitable auto plant in the world,” producing about 30 percent of GM revenue.

They join 6,800 workers at the top Stellantis moneymaker, Sterling Heights Assembly near Detroit, who struck their plant yesterday. Of the 146,000 Big 3 UAW members fighting for a contract, about 46,000 are now on strike.

FINAL PUSH TO END TIERS?

Tiffany Martin says her plant has been on pins and needles the last two weeks, and the majority are happy to go out—at the very least, to get some time off. The plant has been on a mandatory six-day schedule, she says, “for 10, 11 years.”

Martin hopes the Arlington strike is the union’s “last push to get them to come to the table with a good offer.” She thinks the top items left to be won are ending tiers and improving retiree benefits.

Nicole Adams has two full-time jobs inside the Arlington plant. On midnight shift four days a week, she builds chassis for GM as a temp. Afterwards, she works days as a custodian for a contractor, Caravan, unionized with a different UAW contract.

Although the Caravan workers are not on strike, she will be honoring the GM workers’ picket lines. “Working six days,” Adams said, “a lot of people are tired. They’re ready to stand up and get a better contract for the long haul.”

WALL STREET PAYOUTS

Seeking to reassure investors today, GM top brass posted revenue of $44 billion in July through September, up 5 percent from last year. Total vehicle sales grew 21 percent.

That period only counts the first two weeks of the UAW strike, before the company started running low on vehicles.

With production stopped at two assembly plants, analysts this week said GM dealers have about 10,000 fewer cars on their lots than before the strike, and popular models are hard to find.

Despite the bluster from executives, GM’s stock price fell to lows it hasn’t seen since grim early-pandemic days in 2020. Hoping to bribe the way to forgiveness, Barra recently announced another $125 million in dividend handouts to shareholders, for the third time this year.

While making handouts to Wall Street, GM management was quick to accuse the six-days-a-week assembly workers at Arlington of asking too much with their “unnecessary and irresponsible” escalation.

CREATIVE BUILDUP

For weeks, UAW Local 276 members in Arlington have been organizing to refuse voluntary overtime, holding practice pickets, and finding creative ways to avoid doing the company any favors.

To cover the hundreds of acres at the plant, UAW electricians and other repair workers typically hop on bikes to cross the factory floor. “Now even the electricians are refusing the overtime,” said Martin two weeks into the strike. “And I noticed a few of them not using their bicycles to get to the breakdowns in the line. They have been walking without any rush.”

Adams said body shop workers have refused to work through their breaks.

“We were ready on the first go-round,” Adams said. She credits Local 276 President Keith Crowell for keeping members engaged with weekly Facebook Live events modeled after Fain’s appearances.

Adams said her co-workers have traveled to nearby parts distribution centers to stand in solidarity with fellow workers. Workers at GM and Stellantis parts centers have been on strike since September 22.

“We understand the struggle,” Adams said. “This is my second strike. My first strike pay was $250 a week, so I can imagine how stressful it is to just be making a portion of your paycheck.” The UAW raised strike pay to $500 a week earlier this year.

On October 6, the UAW was in gear to strike the Arlington factory, and told the company so. At the eleventh hour, GM agreed to put battery plants for electric vehicles into its national union contract. The plant stayed open.

If Arlington’s strike threat was enough to win that battery breakthrough, Adams said, her co-workers were thrilled to think what they could win by finally going out: “Everybody is on cloud nine right now. People were ready for things they have never seen. And we’re getting it.”

_{Luis Feliz Leon and Jane Slaughter contributed reporting to this article.}

_{Keith Brower Brown is Labor Notes’ Labor-Climate Organizer. keith@labornotes.org}

The UAW Strike Has Transformed the Organizing Landscape / by Keith Brower Brown

_{^{Workers picket outside a Ford assembly plant as the UAW strike against the Big Three automakers continues on October 10, 2023, in Chicago, Illinois. (Scott Olson / Getty Images)}}

_{Reposted from Labor Notes}

The UAW strike isn’t over, but workers have already won major victories on everything from plant closures to electric vehicles. Going forward, the UAW will be in a position to launch an organizing offense at Big 3 battery plants and nonunion companies alike.

The highest stakes of the United Auto Workers (UAW)’s strike could be for workers not yet hired, at plants not yet built.

In the last few weeks, the “stand-up” strike has wrenched breakthrough offers out of all three automakers — Ford, General Motors (GM), and Stellantis — that will have big implications for the transition to electric vehicles (EVs).

Moving beyond the dead-end job security strategies of the past — concessions and corporate partnership — the union is digging footholds to fight for an electric future on workers’ terms.

Six thousand jobs across four planned GM battery plants will now be covered under the UAW’s master national agreement, rather than a separate low-wage contract.

And at Ford and Stellantis, the union has won the right to strike the entire company over any plant closure during the next contract — a significant win given concerns about job security in the EV transition.

Now the union is aiming to lock in all these wins at all three companies.

For a generation, hostile bosses and anti-union politicians have shut the UAW out of every part of the auto industry beyond the Big Three. The EV transition could have knocked the union into a downward spiral, as the companies planned to shift the electric supply chain into low-tier union contracts, or none at all.

Instead of that grim version of the EV future, this strike has set the UAW in position to go on offense with organizing, both at Big Three battery plants and at nonunion auto factories.

Battery Triumph at GM

UAW president Shawn Fain announced October 6 that GM had agreed in writing to put its electric battery manufacturing work under the national master agreement with the union. That contract currently includes stamping, assembly, and drivetrain plants, along with parts hubs.

“We’ve been told for months this is impossible,” Fain said. “We’ve been told the EV future must be a race to the bottom. We called their bluff.”

The CEOs had been insisting that bringing battery work under their national agreements was legally impossible because of a move they had made themselves: shuffling their EV supply chain plans into “joint ventures” with foreign electronics firms like South Korea’s LG and SK On.

But under the pressure of the strike, GM must have found a way around its legal quibbles.

“People here were very happy,” said Local 2250 trustee Shana Shaw, an assembly worker at GM’s striking plant in Wentzville, Missouri. “It’s a huge win.”

Workers at the Ultium Cells battery plant in Lordstown, Ohio, a joint venture between GM and LG, voted to join the union in December and have been negotiating a first contract.

The thirteen hundred workers there were on a pay scale that started at $16.50 an hour and rose to $20 over seven years. In an interim deal in August, they won a raise of $3 to $4 and thousands of dollars in back pay.

GM’s offer includes the Ultium plant in Ohio and new ones being built in Indiana, Michigan, and Spring Hill, Tennessee.

The top rate under the master GM agreement is $32 — and it will likely rise by at least 20 percent over the course of the new contract.

Ultium workers also demanded stronger health and safety standards after multiple spills and accidents at the EV plant. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration cited plant managers for “failing to use and train workers on safety and emergency response procedures.” Under the master agreement, union safety committees will now have paid time and contract rights to push management to fix shop floor hazards.

An Open Door?

ews of the battery plant win spread fast at GM Spring Hill, where gas-powered and electric vehicles are made on the same line. The company is building a major battery plant down the street under its Ultium joint venture.

“To be honest, it was an incredible shock,” said chassis assembly worker William Pigg. “GM, Ford, Stellantis, they have the means to do it. They told us they couldn’t do this, then they did it.”

Spring Hill has another EV-related tier that the union is still fighting to eliminate. As a condition of making an EV at the plant, GM demanded to outsource paint and injection molding jobs to GM Subsystems, a shell company that has a separate UAW contract where wages start at $15 and end at $17 after four years.

Although EVs changed nothing about paint and plastics work, UAW members under the master agreement were suddenly laid off, forced to scrap for openings in other parts of the plant.

For Pigg, the key question is how current workers will be able to transfer into battery jobs. Will they retain their seniority and wages? Those details are still being hashed out at the bargaining table.

Transfer rights into battery plants could be life-changing for thousands of autoworkers who have moved from closed plants. “It’s an opportunity for workers at my facility to transfer back home,” Local 14 president Tony Totty told the Toledo Blade. Hundreds have transferred to GM’s Toledo transmission plant from the shuttered Lordstown plant, three hundred miles away, where GM’s first major battery plant now looms nearby.

A Fighting Defense at Ford

The UAW will now attempt to push Ford and Stellantis to bring their battery plants under the master contract, too.

Stellantis has been furthest behind in rolling out EVs, but has announced two battery plants in partnership with Samsung in Kokomo, Indiana, requiring three thousand workers.

Ford has two battery plants already under construction in Kentucky and Tennessee, with the electronics firm SK On, plus a wholly owned Ford subsidiary plant planned in Marshall, Michigan, where the company recently paused construction. According to CEO Jim Farley, these three plants would hire seventy-five hundred workers, part of the company’s goal to quadruple EV production by the end of next year.

Ford went so far as to hold a press conference on September 29 — its first of the strike — in which it accused the UAW of holding up a contract agreement “over battery plants that won’t come online for two to three years.”

Farley said that rather than putting the plants under the master agreement, “we want to make an agreement where we can become competitive in any area of the country.”

He added that the size of the Marshall plant under construction will be determined by labor costs. “We can make Marshall a lot bigger or a lot smaller — we’re pausing to determine that.”

Still, while Ford has yet to budge on EVs, one week into the strike it gave in to another important demand — granting the union’s right to strike the entire company if Ford closed a single plant. Workers laid off indefinitely from closed plants would also be guaranteed income security for up to two years, with health care.

Many Big Three stamping and assembly plants are already adding electric vehicles onto their lines. Gas engine and transmission plants, however, have little obvious role in an electrified future.

Ford put out a statement on October 3 pledging that “none of our employees, including powertrain employees, will lose their jobs due to our battery plants during this contract period.” (The union is seeking an agreement through May 1, 2028.) But just last year at a Detroit conference, Farley touted how EVs would require 40 percent less labor than gas cars.

Credible researchers say it’s not yet clear whether EVs will actually cut jobs, since the industry is still experimenting with the work process. A recent study by engineers at Carnegie Mellon University estimated the whole EV supply chain will take slightly more labor than gas-powered cars, if batteries and all other components are included.

Electrifying the Organized

The Big Three will produce only a fraction of the EVs and batteries made in North America. Most EVs on the market today are made by workers at nonunion plants operated by companies like Hyundai, Volkswagen, and the very anti-union Tesla. New entrants like Vietnam-based VinFast are building US plants, too.

But the UAW strike is making waves among nonunion autoworkers. Fain told NBC News the UAW is “looking at organizing half a dozen auto companies in the coming years. Pretty soon we won’t just be talking about the Big Three — more like the Big Five, Big Seven, Big Ten unionized automakers. We’re just getting started.”

Contrary to popular belief, employment in the US auto industry has grown about 30 percent since the early 1980s to 1.3 million workers, while UAW membership in the industry shrank from over half a million to 160,000. Anti-union manufacturers expanded rapidly in the South, while the Big Three outsourced more parts by the year to nonunion companies.

UAW wins on cost-of-living adjustments and higher wages may help drive up wages even for nonunion workers and hopefully draw their interest to join.

“I think organizing those [nonunion] plants needs to be our number one priority after we get done organizing the Big Three,” says Ryan Ashley at Ford’s Cleveland Engine. “With how significant the gains are looking in this contract, they’ll see it. And it’ll help.”

_{Keith Brower Brown is a department steward in United Auto Workers Local 2865 and a member of the Democratic Socialists of America.}

Shawn Fain Is Channeling the Best of the UAW’s Past / by Barry Eidlin

_{^{United Auto Workers president Shawn Fain at a rally for striking workers at UAW Local 551 on October 7, 2023, in Chicago. (John J. Kim / Chicago Tribune / Tribune News Service via Getty Images)}}

_{Reposted from Jacobin}

The ongoing UAW strike, led by president Shawn Fain, is a marked departure from the union’s recent history. In many ways Fain is channeling early UAW leader Walter Reuther — before the union and Reuther himself downsized their ambitions.

Amid a year of attention-grabbing strikes, few have grabbed more attention than the United Auto Workers (UAW)’s ongoing strike against the Big Three automakers, launched on September 14. The union’s novel “stand-up strike” strategy, which involves targeted strikes that progressively ratchet up pressure on the companies, has kept the companies guessing while galvanizing public support. As auto company executives have found themselves in the awkward position of defending lavish stock buybacks and exorbitant pay for themselves, available polling suggests that the public supports the strikers by more than two to one.

With this week’s surprise announcement calling out an additional eighty-seven thousand workers at the Ford Kentucky Truck Plant, roughly one-quarter of the 150,000 autoworkers under the Big Three contracts are now on strike. While a comprehensive deal remains far off, the UAW’s targeted approach has already won major gains at all three automakers, including eliminating some tiers, reinstating cost-of-living (COLA) wage adjustments, winning the right to strike over plant closures, and, perhaps most impressive, bringing future electric vehicle (EV) production at General Motors (GM) under the master agreement.

The union’s approach to bargaining and striking is a sharp departure from the UAW of recent decades. Instead of allowing the companies to dictate concessions while keeping members in the dark during negotiations, the UAW leadership has staked out what it has described as an audacious, ambitious agenda that seeks to reclaim the union’s historic role as the standard-setter for the entire working class. It has actively involved members in the contract campaign and strike, and has encouraged and embraced member creativity on the picket line and in the plants, as autoworkers yet to be called out on strike have independently refused voluntary overtime and engaged in “work-to-rule” campaigns to slow down production.

The leadership has also been much more open about the bargaining process, with regular updates on social media, via texts and emails, on the picket lines, and in the plants about progress in negotiations (or the lack thereof).

Much of what’s making this strike so different from recent UAW strikes has to do with the approach taken by recently elected union president Shawn Fain, whose leadership was made possible by a successful reform effort with UAW and a broader climate of increased labor militancy. In many ways, Fain’s bold approach hearkens back to that of early UAW leader Walter Reuther — before the union, and Reuther himself, downsized their ambitions.

A Public Approach

Fain’s weekly live streams, which get tens of thousands of views and have become the new “must-see TV” for UAW members and supporters alike, are emblematic of the union’s new tack. In a ritual that evokes reality television, Fain sits at his desk in his sparse office, surrounded by picket signs, looking straight at the camera. He often takes the opportunity to make bold fashion statements, with recent sartorial picks including a white camo-print, quarter-zip golf shirt, a crisp red zip-up hoodie given to Fain by the Italian Federation of Metalworkers (FIOM), and a custom-made “Eat the Rich” T-shirt — perfectly timed for the day after the New York Times published a Fain profile under the headline “New U.A.W. Chief Has a Nonnegotiable Demand: Eat the Rich.”

Starting off by greeting his UAW family, Fain always begins not with an update on Big Three auto negotiations, but by talking about strikes and organizing victories elsewhere in the union, making explicit the links between these different struggles. He then moves to discussing the auto talks, laying out where the companies have moved on union proposals and where they have fallen short. The updates are both informational and motivational, as Fain frames the negotiations as part of a broader fight for social and economic justice, and chastises company executives for their greed and the disrespect they have shown toward workers.

Then comes the moment everyone has tuned in to watch: the announcement of who will be called on to “stand up” and join the strike that week. Fain has mixed it up week to week, sometimes calling out workers at all three companies, sometimes sparing a company that has made bargaining progress that week, sometimes standing pat. Most recent, with the Ford Kentucky Truck Plant, Fain did not wait for his weekly update to escalate the strike, instead staging a Wednesday walkout. The following Friday, Fain announced that the UAW would no longer schedule potential strike escalations to coincide with the Friday live streams.

Fain’s public and unpredictable approach has left company executives apoplectic, with CEOs issuing statements criticizing Fain for engaging in “theatrics” and holding an agreement hostage. But even as they complain, the companies have been forced to move. The Friday live streams have provided a deadline that has concentrated the minds of company negotiators. Three times already, the live stream has been delayed not due to technical difficulties, but due to company negotiators reaching out with last-minute concessions in the hopes that their company will be spared from strike escalation that week.

Back to the Future?

Some aspects of the UAW’s approach, like its expanded social media presence, are decidedly new. And some, like the president’s redefinition of picket-line chic with his live stream outfits, are unique to Fain himself. But as many observers have noted, the current strike is drawing heavily on the earlier history of the union, before it fell victim to corruption and concessionary bargaining.

Tactically, the stand-up strike of 2023 deliberately invokes the sit-down strike of 1936–1937, which first established the UAW. But at a deeper level, the current strike marks a return to the UAW as a force fighting for the entire working class and a broader social vision.

In this, some note that Fain seems to be channeling elements of the last UAW president to gain such national prominence: Walter Reuther. It was Reuther who, first as UAW’s GM director and then as president, built up the pattern agreements in auto that set the standard for working-class jobs in the postwar period. He also sought to tie those contracts to a broader social democratic vision in which unions like the UAW would play a much larger role in shaping social, political, and economic life.

Reuther fell short on that count, resulting in a bargaining regime with the Big Three that led to real improvements for autoworkers while also setting the stage for the crises the union faces today. With the current strike, Shawn Fain is taking cues from the old Reuther playbook — but this time fighting for a different outcome.

We can see this if we turn back the clock to the GM negotiations of 1945. In that round of bargaining, Reuther was fighting for a broader vision that included having the union exert control over company investment decisions. He was not only negotiating over autoworkers’ wages and benefits, but also over questions such as how much cars would cost. The union’s main demand, framed under the slogan of “Purchasing Power for Prosperity,” was a 30 percent raise for autoworkers without increased car prices — an explicit attempt to divert company profits from capital to labor.

Like Fain today, Reuther viewed the 1945 negotiations as political, linking autoworker demands to efforts to “get a more realistic distribution of America’s wealth,” as he put it. He demanded that GM “open its books” to demonstrate that it could afford the increase. Beyond wages, Reuther also tied the negotiations to a wider vision of social democracy, which included fighting for public social benefits like national health care, pensions, improved vacations and leave policies for all workers, expanded unemployment benefits, and more.

Because he was waging a broader fight and making it political, Reuther also made the 1945 negotiations into a more public confrontation. He opened 1945 bargaining not only to members but to the press, literally bringing a stenographer into talks so that bargaining exchanges could be reprinted in the media.

Predictably, GM wanted none of Reuther’s broad vision, leading to a 113-day strike lasting into 1946 that completely shut down the company. It was a hard-fought battle, and part of the largest strike wave in US history, in which fully 11 percent of the nonfarm workforce went on strike in a single year.

The resulting settlement was a win for the UAW in many ways. But it was, historian and Reuther biographer Nelson Lichtenstein put it, a “pyrrhic victory,” as the union won wage increases but failed in its efforts to exert control over price setting. Rampant postwar inflation largely wiped out the substantial raises won in negotiations.

The strike settlement also marked the beginning of a political backlash, leading to Republican takeover of Congress in 1946 and culminating in the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, which severely hamstrung labor. At the same time, social democratic legislation like the Wagner-Murray-Dingell bill, which aimed to establish a national health care system, failed.

The Two Souls of Walter Reuther

This meant that Reuther found himself in a much different position when bargaining with GM resumed in 1950. He still had the broader social vision that animated him in 1945, but its wings were clipped. And that fundamentally reshaped the UAW’s scope and style of bargaining. Unable to achieve those bigger goals, Reuther settled for winning what essentially amounted to a private welfare state for autoworkers. And unable to exert control over management’s investment and production decisions, he settled for negotiating the terms of autoworkers’ exploitation.

The result was what came to be known as the “Treaty of Detroit.” Unlike 1945, bargaining happened largely in secret among top-level union and company officials. It gave autoworkers unprecedented increases in their overall standard of living. It guaranteed not only regular wage increases on top of an automatic COLA, but also pension and health benefits.

In exchange, GM got stability and control. Unlike previous contracts, the 1950 agreement lasted for a then-unprecedented five years. Additionally, the union gave GM complete control over management and production decisions.

At the time, future noted sociologist Daniel Bell, then working as the labor editor for Fortune magazine, published an analysis of the agreement that got to the heart of what the Treaty of Detroit was about. Bell wrote that “GM may have paid a billion for peace. But it got a bargain . . . General Motors has regained control over one of the crucial management functions — long range scheduling of production, model changes, and tool and plant investment.”

For his part, Reuther saw the Treaty of Detroit as a base upon which to build toward his more ambitious vision. But it ended up being a high-water mark that limited labor’s scope of action. It oriented unions away from broader social goals and toward building firm-level private welfare states for their own members. Not only did this make it harder to win broader policy reforms, but it contributed to creating an image of labor as a narrow “special interest” only out for its own members.

It is also the origin of what came to be known as the “legacy costs” of having individual corporations fund pension and health care benefits. As health care costs soared and some companies ended up with more retirees than workers, these private welfare states frayed.

So even though the Treaty of Detroit laid the foundation for the more economically equitable and prosperous postwar decades in the United States, it also planted the seeds of labor’s decline — particularly the UAW’s.

What is refreshing and hopeful about the UAW’s current fight is that Fain is trying to channel more of Reuther circa 1945 and less of Reuther circa 1950. He is making bargaining more political, tying worker wages to corporate profits, and articulating a broader social ideal through demands such as a shorter workweek with no cut in pay, among others. Fain is also going beyond Reuther in embracing the rhetoric of class war, denouncing the billionaire class, and calling on workers to be the agents of their own liberation.

It’s a heady, ambitious vision, and it may fall short this time. But it marks the first time in decades we have seen a critical part of the US labor movement try to shift onto a fundamentally different path.

_{Barry Eidlin is an associate professor of sociology at McGill University and the author of Labor and the Class Idea in the United States and Canada.}

‘The Cost of Doing Nothing Is Much Higher’: Big Three Auto Workers Prepare to Strike / by Luis Feliz Leon

_{^{Members of United Auto Workers Local 12 in Toledo, Ohio, present contract demands. Photo: UAW.}}

_{This article was reposted from Labor Notes}

Two days before their contract expires at midnight Thursday, the Auto Workers (UAW) are poised to strike the Big 3 automakers—General Motors, Ford, and Stellantis—to recoup concessions made over the past two decades, end tiers, boost wages, and fight for a shorter workweek and other quality-of-life demands.

The auto companies are preparing for a strike, given the UAW’s new fighting spirit, on display in rallies and on the shop floor.

UAW President Shawn Fain was elected in March on a slate backed by the reform movement Unite All Workers for Democracy (UAWD), on a platform of “no corruption, no concessions, no tiers,” ending nearly 80 years of one-party rule in the union.

The reform slate won every seat it contested and came into office with a mandate to take the union in a more militant direction, similar to the leadership shakeup in the Teamsters in 2021.

MANDATE TO FIGHT

Members had grown cynical and disconnected from the union over the decades—owing to leaders’ cozy relationship with management, not to mention corruption scandals. But it’s a new day.

Chris Viola, who works at GM’s electric vehicle plant in Detroit, Michigan, has seen a big shift among his co-workers in UAW Local 22. “In my plant, it’s a 180,” he said. “People are coming up to me to tell me what’s going on, instead of the other way around.”

UAWD member Dawnya Ferdinandsen has been an auto worker since 2006. She worked for GM parts supplier Delphi until it went bankrupt. In 2016 she was rolled over to work directly for GM in Toledo, Ohio.

“I lost everything,” she said: 10 years of seniority and her entire pension. She hopes the new contract will make the former Delphi workers whole.

Ferdinandsen credits the union’s new leaders with a more transparent and militant approach to negotiations. “President Fain reaches out to the membership and gets us involved,” she said. “He keeps us updated on what’s going on. That has never happened—at least not in my lifetime.

“And I have family who have been UAW, so I have deep roots in the union ever since I was little. I’ve never seen such militant action.”

SELF-SABOTAGE

The companies have responded with a counteroffensive. As contract expiration nears, members say Stellantis managers are stalking the factory floor, looking for ways to write workers up and speed them up, in violation of the contract.

“They brought industrial engineers from France to reset our jobs, because our industrial engineers are union,” said Chris Falzone at the Stellantis Toledo Assembly Complex, where he transferred after the shuttering of the Belvidere Assembly plant in Illinois.

“The industrial engineers have doubled up jobs, eliminating half the quality jobs,” he said. “Then they are complaining to us about the quality. They’re shooting themselves in the foot and then being like, ‘Oh, look at what the union workers are doing to us.’”

Nick Livick, a UAWD member and GM worker in Kansas City, says his co-workers are refusing to help management as they normally would—instead they are waiting for direct orders, and stopping the line when management starts it up early after a break.

Workers’ newfound eagerness to challenge management raises the question whether more might adopt “work-to-rule” tactics if they are still working after the contract expires. In a work-to rule workers follow management dictates to the letter rather than use the usual workarounds to keep things running.

“Work to rule! Don’t work around!” may soon be a slogan on the lips of auto workers.

FORD PREPARES

Ford has secured a $4 billion line of credit, stockpiled parts, and trained 1,200 salaried employees as replacement workers to staff 23 parts distribution centers across 15 states, according to The Detroit News. Ford is planning to have engineers and other white-collar workers fill in for blue-collar workers to meet dealerships’ orders for replacement parts, from taillights to bumpers, in the event of a strike.

The Big 3’s 60 parts distribution centers , spread out over 25 states, have relatively few workers but are consumer-facing. They generate high profits, as was revealed during previous strikes.

“Collision parts were [more greatly] impacted by the strike because those parts have to be stamped at the plants,” a GM spokesperson toldThe Detroit News after the 2019 strike, as customers with damaged vehicles grew frustrated with a parts shortage. “We’re sorry for the inconvenience some of our customers are experiencing. We have mobilized our entire network of suppliers, our warehousing and distribution teams and our dealers to minimize the impact to customers and get back to normal operations as quickly as possible.”

THE COST OF DOING NOTHING

As the automakers are making contingency plans, so is the union, filing unfair labor practice charges against GM and Stellantis for bargaining in bad faith. It’s a common tactic unions deploy in anticipation of a strike to discourage the companies from hiring permanent replacements.

“They’re getting ready, so we’re getting ready,” said Fain on Facebook Live September 8; at the height of participation, 13,000 people were tuned in. “I’ve got two words for every Big 3 worker out there listening: ‘Stand up!’

“Be ready to stand up for yourselves. For your families. For your communities. Be ready to stand up against corporate greed, against management’s lies, against distortions in the media.

“Corporations want us to believe there’s nothing we can do to stop our race to the bottom,” Fain said. “Never forget that when our labor isn’t valued, we have the power to withhold it. We have the fundamental power of a strike. The cost of a strike might be high, but the cost of doing nothing is much higher.”

A recent Gallup poll found that 75 percent of Americans support auto workers in their negotiations with the Big 3. The companies have been immensely profitable, raking in $21 billion in total profits in the first six months of this year. That’s on top of a combined $250 billion in North American profits from 2013 to 2022.

The last strike at the Big 3 was against GM in 2019; 46,000 workers pounded the pavement for 40 days, hammering the company’s bottom line to the tune of $3.6 billion. This time around, a first-ever simultaneous strike at all three automakers is looking increasingly likely.

STRIKING ALL THREE

“A simultaneous strike at the Big 3 has never happened because pattern bargaining was so entrenched,” said historian Nelson Lichtenstein, author of Walter Reuther: The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit. “The UAW targeted one of the Big 3 automakers, and after the settlement the other two copied the new contract. It was once thought that Ford was more amenable to various breakthroughs, because that company did make money but was family-owned, which gave management there more latitude if Ford was worried about family PR.”

The Ford family has been amassing control over the company in the past years, holding 40 percent of voting power. At Stellantis, Exor, a holding company controlled by the Italian Agnelli family, founders of Fiat, is the top shareholder. Investment management firms Capital Group and BlackRock are the top shareholders of GM.

The Canadian auto union Unifor selected Ford as its target in negotiations last month.

Industry mouthpiece Automotive News has speculated about how a bottleneck strike targeting key production sites may play out, providing a helpful list of possible targets.

NO MORE TIERS

Negotiations kicked off in July. When Fain spoke on Facebook September 8, he gestured to a garbage can behind him labeled “Big Three Proposals,” where he trashed the automakers’ counter-offers.

The union has put forward bold demands including a 40 percent wage boost and ending wage and benefit tiers. In the tier system, newer workers doing the same work as long-term ones are on a permanent track of lower wages and fewer benefits.

“We need a Johnson & Johnson Baby Shampoo contract: no more tiers,” said Joe Van Ostenbridge, a tier-two worker who drives a tractor-trailer for Stellantis in Michigan. “I drove a school bus for Birmingham Schools for $25 an hour—I came here for the benefits, but it takes you eight years to get to top scale and you have no pension, no retiree medical.”

“Knowing what we had in the past: You worked hard for 90 days and you were elevated to regular status,” said Tomica Alexander, a materials handler at the Stellantis Mack Assembly plant in Detroit. “Now we have two separate groups of workers.”

The UAW has proposed a 90-day progression to top rate and restoring pensions and health care post-retirement for all workers.

Exacerbating the inequality, new hires must start as temps until they are even allowed to become second-tier workers. David Williams is a temp at Ford’s Kentucky Truck Plant building Super Duty Trucks, Expeditions, and Lincoln Navigators. He says ending tiers would be a game-changer.

“We really wouldn’t have to worry about living paycheck to paycheck to make car and house payments,” he said.

Since Williams has not reached second-tier status yet, he’s constantly forced to choose between retaining his job and caring for his three daughters. He’s fearful that if he misses a day of work, it will count as a strike against him in the company’s point system, where after five write-ups, a temp is fired.

Temps have no control over their schedules. “I spent five years as a temp before I got rolled over,” said Adam Devooght, a second-generation auto worker at Stellantis in Michigan. “You’re walking on eggshells. You didn’t know what day you were going to work.”

UNFAIR DIVISIONS

“When they first start they’re glad to have the job—they’d scrub toilets with a toothbrush,” said UAW Local 898 President Corey Frost at a Labor Day march in Detroit. “But after a while, they’re working next to someone doing the same job for half the wage—it creates divisions. It’s not fair.”

Ford put a five-year progression in its counter-proposal, down from eight years, but still with no pensions or retiree health care for the second tier. GM and Stellantis proposed a six-year progression, also rejecting pensions and retiree health care.

GM’s proposal would also lock in a lower wage scale for its Component Holdings and Customer Care and Aftersales workers, who currently earn $16 to $17 an hour with an eight-year progression to top pay of $22 (CCA) and $31 (GMCH). The progression can be even longer when you count layoff periods.

COKE ZERO

The union is also demanding a shorter work week and the restoration of cost-of-living adjustment (COLA) raises pegged to inflation, which it lost in 2009. Stellantis and GM didn’t move on the COLA demand; both have proposed lump sum bonuses instead.

Ford declared it was impossible to bring back a real COLA. Instead it has proposed a COLA that would kick in only when inflation goes above a certain threshold. The threshold is so high, the union says, this formula would result in zero COLA raises over the next four years, and would have meant no COLA raises in 10 of the last 13 years.

“That’s not COLA. That’s not even Diet COLA. That’s Coke Zero,” Fain said.

Over the weekend, the companies finally started bargaining in earnest, putting forward new counter-proposals. But as of today their proposals are still far from meeting members’ demands.

“It’s unfortunate the companies have waited until the last moments to get focused on the needs of 150,000 autoworkers, our families, and our communities,” said Fain September 11.

Conversion of temporary workers into permanent employees is a major sticking point at Stellantis, where temps are a greater share of the workforce than at the other two automakers.

The UAW is demanding that temporary workers be converted to permanent employees after 90 days, with full pay, benefits, and profit-sharing. The automakers have agreed in their proposals to raise temp pay to $20 an hour, but so far denied a path to full wages and benefits.

Other union demands address job security, as the auto industry undergoes seismic shifts in the transition from gas-powered to electric vehicles. The UAW is demanding that the EV transition not come at the expense of good jobs and should be used instead to improve safety standards and working conditions in auto manufacturing—conditions that have eroded over decades of concessions, capital flight, offshoring of jobs to Mexico, and the proliferation of non-union foreign-owned auto factories in the U.S.

SAVING UP

These demands have raised expectations and fueled rank-and-file militancy. The strike authorization vote was nearly unanimous, and in the last weeks members have taken more than 100 actions, including rallies, practice pickets, and wearing red T-shirts on Wednesdays.

Falzone said his co-workers have been saving up for the strike, making sacrifices to go the distance. “It’s not, ‘Are we going to strike?’” he said. “It’s people asking, ‘How long do you think we’ll strike?’ There’s a real positive energy that people want what we’re owed.”

Livick reported from his GM plant that managers are getting ready: they have stopped stocking vending machines and removed some ice machines. “My plant is nervous but excited,” he said, “because we know from 2019 the cost to us for a strike, but everyone is optimistic, especially now that we know what we are fighting for.

“I was talking to someone who needed assistance from Harvesters [a food bank, in 2019] and he was saying he’d take it that far again if he had to, but he’s better prepared now.”

_{Luis Feliz Leon is a staff writer and organizer with Labor Notes. luis@labornotes.org}

_{Jane Slaughter contributed reporting.}