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.}

Clean sweep: GM settles with UAW after Ford, Stellantis do so / by Mark Gruenberg

_{^{With tentative agreement in place with all Big 3 auto firms the historic strike is potentially over. | Paul Sancya/AP}}

_{Reposted from the People’s World}

DETROIT—The new leadership and bargainers for the Auto Workers—the union’s first-ever popularly elected leaders—achieved a clean sweep of the Detroit 3 auto companies when GM became the last to settle, on October 30, following first Ford and then Stellantis.

The three tentative agreements came so fast that UAW President Shawn Fain hadn’t even taken to Twitter and Facebook as of mid-day October 30 to announce the GM deal. But President Joe Biden, the first-ever incumbent chief executive to walk a union picket line when he joined UAW strikers several weeks ago, did.

“I think it’s great,” Biden told reporters.

While details of the tentative agreement between the UAW and GM were not immediately available, it was expected to be similar to, if not identical to, the pacts with Ford and Stellantis, formerly Jeep/Chrysler.

At Ford and Stellantis, workers get a 25% wage increase over the life of those contracts, an immediate 11% signing bonus, and restoration of cost of living adjustments (COLAs). Combined, that’s over 32%, close to what the workers sought.

GM CEO Mary Parra told Wall Streeters in an earnings call that the tentative agreement “would keep us competitive” with the other two auto firms. Without it, Ford and Stellantis workers would have geared up to resume production while GM wouldn’t.

And Parra was also—with her CEO colleagues at Ford and Stellantis—a target of UAW data, showing all three earned at least $20 million each over the last three years in pay and perks while car company profits totaled $250 billion over a decade. Meanwhile, UAW members’ pay declined, both relative to inflation and, for new hires, in absolute terms.

In one respect, putting all future electric vehicle workers under the union’s master contract with each car company, GM actually had been first, with the other two tagging along.

That’s important because, when that GM agreement on EVs was announced, Fain said it “put the future of the automotive industry” in the union’s hands. The three car companies, the UAW and Biden had all agreed on converting auto plants from producing internal combustion engines and drive trains to electric-battery-powered vehicles.

The process isn’t over yet. Leaders of Ford locals met in Detroit on October 29 and unanimously voted to send the tentative agreement, which will last until April 2028, to their 57,000 members for ratification. Stellantis local leaders are flying into Detroit to review their pact which covers 43,000. GM employs 46,000 UAW members. The expiration dates will be the same for all three: Just before May Day, the international workers’ holiday.

Overall the UAW represents 150,000 workers at the Detroit 3. By the end of its “Stand Up!” first-ever strategy of keeping the car companies off balance with sudden announcements of strikes at key plants, some 50,000 had walked. Now all will return, pending ratification.

The Ford and Stellantis tentative contracts mirror each other but with some specific differences depending on the company. But at all of them, temps are to become full-timers, and there will be pension increases, too.

The three car companies dropped the COLAs, and the feds forced UAW to do so, as part of the federal loan guarantee to then-bankrupt GM and Jeep/Chrysler after the 2008 financier-caused Great Recession.

Then, Ford, though not broke, was “me too,” on eliminating the COLAs. The restored COLAs push the overall basic wage hikes to 32% or more over the life of the pacts.

The hated two-tier systems disappear over the life of all the pacts since workers will now hit the top of scale in three years, not eight.

GM settled just hours after the UAW upped the pressure on it by calling out on strike 4,000 more of its members of Local 1853 who toil at GM plants in Spring Hill, Tenn. Those plants are particularly important to GM because you can’t run a car, a truck, or an SUV without an engine, and the Spring Hill workers craft engines for GM Silverado and Sierra pickups, which are then assembled at nine other GM North American plants, including in Mexico.

Spring Hill, like the Arlington, Texas, GM plant whose UAW workers struck the week before, is a big moneymaker for the firm. Besides engines, Spring Hill workers assemble the electric Cadillac Lyriq, GMC Acadia, and Cadillac crossover SUVs.

At Stellantis some workers, especially temps (+165%) and parts workers (+76%) will get even bigger raises. So will new hires, whose starting pay, including COLAs, will increase 67%.

Stellantis also agreed not only to reopen its Belvidere, Ill., plant, bringing back 1,200 workers there but to build an additional EV manufacturing plant in Belvidere, which will employ a thousand more. Stellantis had irked UAW by shutting Belvidere just before talks began in earnest. Belvidere had also, years ago, been the first plant whose workers were split into the hated two tiers, pitting worker against worker and tanking their finances—and the city’s.

And overall, Stellantis sought to cut 5,000 workers, Fain had said. The tentative agreement will mandate that it add 5,000, instead.

_{We hope you appreciated this article. At People’s World, we believe news and information should be free and accessible to all, but we need your help. Our journalism is free of corporate influence and paywalls because we are totally reader-supported. Only you, our readers and supporters, make this possible. If you enjoy reading People’s World and the stories we bring you, please support our work by donating or becoming a monthly sustainer today. Thank you!}

_{Mark Gruenberg is head of the Washington, D.C., bureau of People’s World. He is also the editor of the union news service Press Associates Inc. (PAI). Known for his reporting skills, sharp wit, and voluminous knowledge of history, Mark is a compassionate interviewer but tough when going after big corporations and their billionaire owners.}

‘Major victory’: UAW, Ford sign tentative agreement with big raises, company givebacks / by Mark Gruenberg

_{^{Back to work: UAW member Marcel Edwards carries picket signs back to Local 900 headquarters near Ford’s Michigan Assembly plant late Wednesday night after the UAW announced it had reached a tentative agreement with the automaker. | AP}}

_{Reposted from the People’s World}

DETROIT—United Auto Workers bargainers with Ford reached a tentative agreement with the Detroit Three auto firm on Oct. 25, union President Shawn Fain and Chuck Browning, its vice-president for Ford, announced on a video the union posted late Wednesday evening. The deal features big raises and company givebacks.

“Today we announce a major victory in our Stand Up strike,” a smiling Fain said, referring to the union’s its strategy of leaving the Detroit Three uncertain about which key plant the union strikers might shut next. The strike began at midnight Sept. 14-15, at three big plants, one per car company. It’s now up beyond 40 plants.

This tentative pact gives Ford workers a 25% raise over its 4-1/2 years, larger than the combined raises of 23% cumulatively over 2001-22, Browning said. And there’s an immediate 11% ratification bonus on top of the pay hike, along with major company givebacks, notably restoration of cost of living adjustments (COLAs), which the Detroit Three abolished in 2009.

“Every extra $100 million we took out of the company” over the life of the pact, “we took out because of you,” Fain declared. “We told Ford to pony up, and they did. They put 50% more on the table than they did when we began.”

“We took the strike to a new phase” starting Oct. 23, “with maximum effect,” Fain explained. “On Monday, we called the Sterling Heights Assembly plant”—the 6,800-worker Stellantis plant—“to stand up.”

Then, on Tuesday, he said, “the UAW family at Arlington (Texas) Assembly,” the 5,000 Local 276 workers at GM’s plant there, “answered the call.” The two plants are the firms’ biggest moneymakers.

“Ford knew what was coming for them on Wednesday,” so they settled, Fain said. One Ford shop steward said had the two sides not agreed, UAW would have walked out of Ford’s iconic—and enormous—River Rouge complex in Dearborn, Mich.

The agreement is still subject to approval by the presidents of Ford locals, who will discuss it in Detroit starting Oct. 29 before voting on whether to send it to the 57,000 Ford members for a one-worker one-vote election.

Meantime, Ford workers who walked will return to their jobs. Ford employs more UAW members than GM (46,000) and Stellantis, formerly Fiat/Chrysler (43,000). The total number of UAW strikers at all three combined approached 45,000.

The Ford tentative agreement now puts even more pressure on GM and Stellantis to settle, Fain said, briefly abandoning the smile he wore through much of the video. “The last thing they want is for Ford to get back to full capacity while they mess around and lag behind,” he commented. The two holdouts will not want to allow Ford vehicles to be the only ones re-entering the market.

Browning filled in details on the deal. The base pay plus the COLAs would produce a 33% increase over the pact’s life, not far from the union’s initial demand. Some of the raises will be even larger: 68% in starting wages, and some workers at Ford’s Sterling Heights Axle plant will get up to 85%.

The biggest raise will go to the temps, who will also be on a 3-year, not an 8-year, track to regular full-time work. Some 3% of Ford workers are temps, compared to 12% at Stellantis and 5%-10% at GM, depending on the work at a particular plant, Automotive News calculates.

“For decades, the temps have been abused and exploited. Some will get raises of over 100%,” said Browning. “And UAW members at Ford will see more in general wage increases over the next 4-1/2 years than they have over the last 22 combined.”

The union won the right to strike over plant closings, thus slowing, if not stopping, the exodus of car plants from the U.S. and Canada to less-regulated and lower-paying jurisdictions, such as Mexico, courtesy of the now-dead North American Free Trade Agreement. “That means they [Ford] can’t keep devastating communities and closing plants with no consequences,” said Fain.

The cost-of-living adjustments, along with the raises, are the biggest deal in the tentative pact.

UAW, Ford, GM, and what was then Fiat/Chrysler had to abolish COLAs as part of a federal loan guarantee for the latter two car companies when the 2008 Wall Street financier-caused Great Recession pushed both into bankruptcy. Ford did not go broke but was “me-too” on COLAs.

That loan guarantee pact also ended raises for pensioners and mandated a two-tier wage system and an eight-year period to reach the top of the auto firms’ wage scales. The tiers are gone, at least at Ford’s Sterling Axle plant, Browning said. And the pensioners will get raises, too, said Fain, though he didn’t give out numbers.

Some issues went unmentioned in the Fain-Browning presentation. One was the union’s demand for more time with families and less mandatory overtime via 32-hour weeks at 40-hours’ pay.

Another was the future of converting current plants from manufacturing internal combustion engines and drive trains to electric battery-powered vehicles, part of the goal the car companies and UAW agreed on with the Democratic Biden administration as part of the nation’s commitment to combat global warming by drastically cutting fossil fuel use.

But those EV plants, often built with foreign firm partners and—at least for the first two—in union-hostile Kentucky and Tennessee, would employ fewer workers than traditional auto plants. That left a dual problem: Numbers and whether the contract would cover them.

While Fain and Browning did not mention EVs, the union had reached victory with GM on covering the EV workers under the master contract—but only after planning to walk from the big Arlington, Texas, plant. Facing that threat to its big moneymaker, GM caved on the EV issue but has been stubborn on other conflicts, leading the union to call the Arlington workers out anyway.

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.}

Class against class: UAW’s Fain emphasizes workers vs. bosses / by Mark Gruenberg

_{^{Members of Local 900 hold the line outside the Michigan Assembly Plant. | Photo via UAW}}

_{Reposted from the People’s World}

DETROIT—In his strongest and longest emphasis on the working class versus the corporate class, Auto Workers President Shawn Fain repeatedly stressed that theme while unveiling “a new phase” in the union’s “Stand Up!” strike strategy against Detroit’s Big 3 automakers.

Speaking to union members via Facebook Live (available on YouTube, forward to the 28-minute mark) on Oct. 13, Fain said future decisions by union bargainers to increase pressure on the car companies would be at random by day and by company and told all locals to be ready at any time to be next.

That was the meaning, he said, of UAW bargainers’ decision the day before, on Thursday, to have the 8,700 members of Local 862 at Ford’s Louisville truck plant walk. The plant is Ford’s biggest moneymaker, at $25 billion per year “or $48,000 per-worker-per-minute,” Fain said. Prior walkouts had been announced every Friday since the strike began at midnight on Sept. 14-15.

That Thursday call to Local 862 was meant to send a message to the other two car firms, GM and Stellantis, formerly Jeep/Chrysler, too.

From now on, “We’ll be calling out plants where we need to and when we need to—and not just on Fridays and not just at Ford,” he said.

But Fain spent most of his presentation on the contrast between the working class and the corporate class, and not just at the car companies. “Our fight’s not just about us. It’s about the working class. Our companies exploit us across borders. We’ve got to fight back across borders,” Fain began—and he was just getting started.

Fain explained he and the other members of UAW’s new leadership—elected earlier this year in the union’s first-ever one-member-one-vote popular balloting—are responding to members who are fed up with steadily losing ground while firms rake in billions in profits and corporate bosses and Wall Street investors garner millions in pay, stock options, and buybacks from the workers’ labor.

“Our broken economy raised expectations” among the UAW’s 150,000 members who toil for Detroit’s automakers, he said. With the Louisville walkout, approximately one of every six are now on strike.

“Corporate America rebounded after the recession” more than a decade ago “and profits were soaring,” he elaborated. “In fact, corporations hit a 70-year high in profits in 2022.

“Meanwhile, the working class kept going backwards,” with raises, when they occurred, running behind inflation. And prior giveback contracts the firms pushed onto UAW left some workers without a raise at all for more than 15 years. “We’ve seen our standard of living decline and income inequality increase to heights unseen since the Great Depression” of the 1930s.

At the Detroit car companies alone, UAW previously revealed, profits totaled $251 billion in the last decade and were running at even higher levels this year.

At the UAW, Fain said, the cause of the rising inequality “is rising company bank accounts and company executives making hundreds of times what the average worker makes. Standing up for yourself is not dangerous, and it’s an obligation to yourself and future generations.”

Analyses of executive pay data, taken from federal filings and compared to workers’ pay, bear Fain’s statements out. Ford CEO James Farley’s total compensation in 2022 was $20.997 million, 281 times the median compensation of a Ford worker. GM’s Mary Barra took home $28.98 million, 362 times the median compensation for her firm’s workers. The median is the point where half the workforce is above and half below. Stellantis is headquartered in Holland, so it’s not listed in the federal filings.

“What’s truly dangerous” to workers and to society in general “is when inequality spins out of control,” Fain said. “What’s dangerous is when the ultra-rich get richer while the working class falls further behind.”

What he did not get into—but sociologists and other analysts do—is the heightened frustration and antagonism such yawning pay chasms bring to society as a whole.

Reactions to those not only appear in the strike wave that has hit the U.S. in the last two years but also in resentment, expressed, Fain said, by a recent Associated Press poll of registered voters which showed only 9% sided with the car company bosses.

It’s also expressed by voters seeking the proverbial, and dictatorial, “man on the white horse,” sociologists point out.

“What’s truly dangerous is to let companies and politicians kick workers while we’re down, gut our unions, rig our economy” and expect workers to accept crumbs, he said.

“So unless employers start coming to their senses” and yield to workers, especially union workers “gains equal to the gains we’ve seen on Wall Street, we’ll see a lot more strikes” in both the short and long runs, Fain predicted.

Indeed, he noted, another one could start this coming weekend. “In Ohio, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, 1,100 workers at General Dynamics”—a major military contractor, though Fain did not say so—“just took a strike authorization vote and it passed with 97%” approval. “Their contract expires Saturday.”

UAW President Shawn Fain: ‘This isn’t just our fight, it’s everybody’s fight.’ / by John Bachtell

_{^{UAW President Shawn Fain, center, with workers at the huge rally on Chicago’s South Side last Saturday. | John Bachtell/PW}}

_{Reposted from the People’s World}

CHICAGO – “This isn’t just UAW’s fight, it’s everybody’s fight,” declared UAW President Shawn Fain to striking auto workers. “It doesn’t matter if you’re union or non-union, teacher, airline attendant, Starbucks worker. We’re all the same. We want a better life.”

Fain spoke on Oct. 7 to a raucous strike rally of red-shirted autoworkers, their families, and allies that packed the UAW Local 551 union hall, the local representing workers at the Torrence Avenue Ford Assembly Plant. The overflow crowd spilled out into the parking lot under bright sunshine.

Association of Flight Attendants President Sara Nelson, Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) president Stacy Davis Gates, Rev. Jesse Jackson, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, and other elected officials, Chicago Federation of Labor President Bob Reiter, and a leader of the Filipino labor movement joined Fain in solidarity with the striking auto workers.

The “Stand Up” strike against Ford, GM, and Stellantis auto companies, or the Big Three, began on Sept. 15. Members of Local 551 walked out on Sept. 29 under an innovative strategy that expands the strike to new workplaces weekly depending on the status of negotiations.

The UAW demands include a 46% wage increase, a 32-hour week for 40 hours of pay, an end to the two-tier wage system, and restoration of traditional pensions for 145,000 autoworkers.

The Big Three are flush with billions in cash after autoworkers made deep concessions to keep the industry afloat during the Great Recession. Over the last decade, the Big Three made $225 billion in profits. The Big Three raked in $21 billion in profits in the previous six months alone while leaving workers behind.

A key demand of the strike is ensuring a just transition as the auto industry converts to electric vehicles. The UAW fully supports the conversion to a green economy but is worried the auto industry is using the change to eliminate union jobs and radically reduce the workforce through automation because electric cars require far fewer parts. Most EV production occurs in right-to-work “for less” states in the South.

The UAW is demanding that the workers in Big Three plants that produce electric vehicles, batteries, and parts be unionized. The union won a major concession when General Motors agreed to cover EV and electric battery plants under the new contract.

“They’ve said we’d be left behind in the EV transition. We didn’t have to negotiate over the future of the EV market. And we said hell no! We launched our Stand Up strike and won victories for 10s of thousands of our members,” said Fain.

Fain placed the importance of the UAW strike within the arc of organized labor’s long history, including the mass industrial strikes in Chicago in 1886 that were crushed following the Haymarket massacre. Elites ridiculed, mocked, and persecuted workers and the Haymarket martyrs for demanding the eight-hour day just like the UAW is for demanding fair wages and benefits and a just transition to electric vehicles.

But workers eventually won the eight-hour day, and that movement and the Haymarket Massacre are commemorated globally as part of May 1 International Workers Day. “Corporations and their cronies forget one thing – we’ve got the power,” said Fain.

The theme of working-class solidarity and multi-racial unity ran throughout the rally, including full-throated singing of labor standards, “Solidarity Forever,” and “Which Side Are You On.”

“We have the power”

“This strike, the Stand Up strike, is our opportunity to show the working class that we have power when we come together. We can set the agenda for the people. We can make this country our country,” said AFA-CWA President Sara Nelson.

“When we stand united for economic and social justice there’s nothing we can’t do and no mountain that we can’t move. Human solidarity is the solution to the problems we face as a nation and as a world.”

Unity of the multi-racial autoworkers union and the need to build alliances with other unions and democratic forces, particularly the unity of labor and the Civil Rights movement, was also a big rally theme.

“Both of our movements are inextricably intertwined,” said Fain. “As one movement goes, so goes the other. It’s no coincidence that when worker rights go backwards we see an attack on voting rights laws and everything else is going wrong.”

Solidarity greetings from Ka Bong Labog, Chair of the Kilusang Mayo Uno, the largest labor federation in the Philippines, also reflected the UAW’s vision of global working-class unity against transnational corporations. Filipino workers are fighting vicious repression from the Duterte government. Ka Bong Labog told the crowd that 72 trade unionists have been murdered in the Philippines under martial law, including four this year and one on Sept. 29.

“Corporate greed doesn’t know boundaries or borders,” declared Fain. “And that’s why it’s so important that we unite as a union, a people, a country. We have to unite as a global working class. An attack on workers anywhere is an attack on workers everywhere.”

Many strikers spoke with pride of coming from families of multiple generations of autoworkers. Fain used his family history to share a lesson of global working-class unity. Fain’s grandparents were “economic migrants” from the South who came North to Indiana during the Great Depression leaving behind destitution. Fain’s grandfather was hired at a union Chrysler shop in 1937 in Kokomo.

“And today people want to bash our neighbors to the south, and they want to talk about building walls,” said Fain. “When I look at those people and see economic migrants from Mexico and Central America, or anyplace, I don’t see a stranger to be excluded or rejected. I see destitute human beings in search of a better life that needs to be organized. I see my grandparents. And the only difference between these people and my grandparents is that my grandparents were lucky enough to be born in America. That’s it. Destitution does not know border lines.”

Several speakers pointed out labor’s role in building a transformational movement at the workplace, streets, and ballot box, including electing workers to office. Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson was a leader of the CTU and citywide movement to fund and defend public education before being elected mayor in April. The new mayor is a movement and labor leader, including the historic 2012 teacher’s strike that rocked the city. The CTU helped build a broad transformative coalition, turned to the ballot box, and now governs.

“You all are doing something that is transformational, it’s about unraveling a system of inequities, of disparities, a system that wants to pit workers against workers,” declared Johnson.

“And we’re not going to stand for it. You’re fighting for not just better wages and working conditions. You’re fighting for a better, stronger, safer Chicago. This city, country, world, doesn’t move without workers,” said Johnson.

“A message to the rest of the world: The power of workers will be heard and felt one way or the other,” warned Johnson. “We’ll make it clear you’ll listen to us at the negotiating table, in the streets, and at the ballot box. And if you don’t hear us, we’ll get a contract we’ll send someone who is part of the labor movement to the fifth floor.”

“These companies are just living off the fat of the land. We just want a piece of the American dream too,” said Will Washington, a 12-year assembly line worker at Ford. “We build the cars and they sit in the office and take the profits. We’re just getting back what we deserve.”

_{John Bachtell is president of Long View Publishing Co., the publisher of People’s World. He is active in electoral, labor, environmental, and social justice struggles. He grew up in Ohio, where he attended Antioch College in Yellow Springs. He currently lives in Chicago.}

Record national strike wave swells as 300,000 hit the picket lines / by Mark Gruenberg

_{^{Striking workers at the Ford plant on Chicago’s South Side. The public overwhelmingly supports the strikers. People’s World.}}

_{Reposted from People’s World}

CHICAGO HEIGHTS, Ill.—Across the country a wave of strikes has grown to tsunami proportions with some 300,000 workers now out on strike and walking the picket lines. One of those strikes, the walkout by 75,000 healthcare workers, is the largest such action in that industry in the nation’s history.

Meanwhile, the historic strike by auto workers has continued with that walkout impacting all kinds of related industries from coast to coast. Part of what is happening there is supply chain ripples all over the country. It is clear that the 300,000 out on strike and workers generally are fed up with corporate greed which has put them in a place where they either just barely get by or often don’t get by at all.

The role is getting longer, with the total soaring close to 300,000 workers, from Detroit to New York to Los Angeles to San Francisco and on and on:

Some 25,000 UAW members are officially on strike against the Detroit 3, while at least 3,700 more are out at parts plants the firms closed because they are not getting needed parts from the places where workers are out on the picket lines. The massive coast-to-coast operation by UAW members is part of the UAW’s “Stand Up!” designed to keep the car companies off balance.

Among the 3,700 UAW workers that most recently joined the walkout of thousands of their brothers and sisters are the 243 workers at Ford’s Chicago Heights, Ill., stamping plant and 90 more at its Lima, Ohio, Ford idled both, saying those workers sent engines and parts to its giant SUV assembly plant on Chicago’s South Side. The UAW’s bargainers first called the South Side’s 4,600 workers out on September 30.

Another 400 workers combined at Ford’s Livonia, Mich., transmission plant and Sterling, Mich., axle plant were told late on October 4 that they were laid off as of the start of the next day. Those plants, too, supply the main Chicago South Side plant, Ford said.

GM, blaming the union, idled 2,600 parts plant workers in the suburbs of Kansas City, Kansas. The K.C. workers sent parts to the GM plant in Wentzville, Mo., one of the first three plants whose UAW members the union bargainers sent out the night the strike started, at midnight September 14-15.

Some 75,000 healthcare workers—support staffers, pharmacists, lab techs, and others—all members of the 12-local Coalition of Kaiser Permanente Unions are in the largest healthcare strike in U.S. history. They’re out from October 4-6.

“Kaiser Permanente workers in multiple states are now on strike to protest unfair labor practices and Kaiser executives’ failure to bargain in good faith over unsafe staffing levels at hundreds of Kaiser hospitals and facilities across the United States,” CKPU said.

Highly profitable Kaiser Health is offering skimpy raises to already low-paid workers even though its hospitals and clinics are concentrated in high-cost metro areas such as Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland Oreg., Denver, Boston, D.C., and Honolulu.

The Kaiser strike follows “months of bad faith bargaining activity by Kaiser executives and repeated appeals by frontline healthcare workers for Kaiser executives to make the kinds of investments in staffing that could help stem employee turnover and reduce growing patient wait times.” CKPU is charging Kaiser with unfair labor practices, a decision up to the National Labor Relations Board.

Refuse to listen

“Kaiser executives are refusing to listen to us and are bargaining in bad faith over the solutions we need to end the Kaiser short-staffing crisis,” Jessica Cruz, a licensed vocational nurse at Kaiser Los Angeles Medical Center told CKPU. “I see my patients’ frustrations when I have to rush them and hurry on to my next patient. That’s not the care I want to give. We’re burning ourselves out trying to do the jobs of two or three people, and our patients suffer when they can’t get the care they need due to Kaiser’s short-staffing.”

More than 14,000 UNITE HERE Local 11 members in Los Angeles are out on a series of rolling strikes against dozens of L.A. and Orange County, California hotels, including the historic Fairmont Century Plaza, the Beverly Hilton, and the Waldorf Astoria. Two of the hotels, with 600 workers combined, have settled: the Biltmore Los Angeles and the Westin Bonaventure. At both, the local achieved its goals.

“My coworkers and I have given years of service making the beds, cooking the food, and washing the dishes of those who visit Beverly Hills, yet we cannot afford to provide for our families. I am on strike because we deserve our fair share,” Waldorf Astoria housekeeper Lucero Ramirez said.

Key issues for Local 11, at all the hotels, are “unprecedented wage increases that keep pace with the soaring cost of housing” in high-cost L.A., affordable family health care, humane workloads and safe staffing for all workers, better pensions and equal justice language—including hotel commitments to hire previously incarcerated people to not use the highly unreliable federal E-verify system to screen workers’ migration status. The struck Biltmore Hotel has settled.

“It is great to see our contribution recognized and our compensation increased. This agreement will allow us to go home and sleep a bit more securely,” Biltmore housekeeper Lucy Mijangos told Local 11. Said local co-president, Kurt Petersen. “This agreement takes steps to ensure that workers who work in LA will be able to live in LA.”

The nation’s 160,000 SAG-AFTRA members still walk picket lines from New York to Los Angeles against their TV, movie, stage, Netflix, and streaming video bosses of the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Professionals. Talks have resumed in that months-long strike.

Key issues are low pay, disappearing residuals, and AMPTP bosses’ eagerness to cut costs through the overwhelming use of computer-generated artificial intelligence as a replacement for real people. AI can craft the image, mannerisms, voice, and character of a performer in a one-day session then let the bosses duplicate and use it forever without paying the performer a penny.

Back in Detroit—and Chicago Heights—other factors are working in UAW’s favor: High public support and a financial warning from teachers’ union pension funds that hold GM, Ford, and Stellantis stock, to settle in the striking workers’ favor. The Chicago Heights workers are members of union Local 588, which represents 1,000 workers. Ford is the company that also laid off 90 workers at its Lima, Ohio, engine plant.

In preparing to manufacture SUVs, particularly the Ford Explorer, their prime product, Ford spent $1 billion four years ago to completely remake and upgrade the Chicago Assembly. Its workers had manufactured the Ford Taurus. Ford spent another $200 million for a remake at Chicago Heights, so workers there could supply SUV parts.

Chicago Heights and Lima are not the first supply plants to close because the parts they ship went to a plant the union bargaining team called out as part of its “Stand up!” strike strategy.

The public blames not UAW, but the Detroit 3, an opinion poll UAW released shows. It reported 78% support for the strike, including 69%-31% among Republicans. The big reason is the workers’ fight against corporate greed.

Navigator Research added that 85% of African-American and Asian-American respondents, as do three out of four whites, support the workers.

Singled out corporate greed

The UAW has singled out corporate greed and profits over the last decade, $251 billion at the Detroit 3 combined, as a key theme in its campaign to recoup the financial losses Auto Workers suffered over the last decade. Auto firm bosses pocketed millions of dollars each, yearly, while Wall Street financiers walked away with $20 billion in gains from stock buybacks alone. Meanwhile, workers’ pay, adjusted for inflation, declined.

Those financiers’ gains could become losses, as are union pension funds invested in GM, Ford, and Stellantis stock, Teachers President Randi Weingarten told the CEOs of the Detroit car companies—unless the strike is settled soon on terms favorable to the workers.

She added she’s advising her pension funds’ trustees to review their holdings in the auto companies.

“Our members’ pension funds own over $650 million in General Motors stock—$650 million in workers’ retirement savings now at risk due to GM’s unwillingness, so far, to bargain a fair contract,” Weingarten wrote GM CEO Mary Parra. Letters with identical language, but different stockholding figures, went to Ford’s CEO and Netherlands-based Stellantis’s general counsel.

“Our members’ pension funds have a fiduciary duty to manage our retirement assets in the long-term, risk-adjusted best interest of our members as plan participants,” Weingarten continued. “Significant research shows companies that prioritize constructive labor relationships and sound labor practices make for more stable—and more profitable—investments over the long term.

“Companies that fail to ensure fair working conditions for their workforce face financial, legal, and reputational risks, which in turn puts our members’ retirement assets at risk,” Weingarten warned. She added she sent copies of her letters to the CEOs to her unions’ pension trustees.

“Given the close cooperation between your major global competitors and their governments, the path of conflict with your workforce and with the Biden administration seems likely to place GM at a major global competitive disadvantage.

“As the strike wears on, the deferred wages of AFT members invested in GM are put increasingly at risk, as are the future prospects of your company, an important employer in many communities AFT members serve,” Weingarten said.

“As a union of working people, the AFT stands with striking GM workers. As long-term investors, our pension funds are exposed both to the mounting risks of a prolonged strike and to GM management’s pursuit of a shortsighted strategic approach at our expense.”

Weingarten’s letter may not be the last financial warning to the Detroit car companies to settle fast and favorably with the UAW. Two other big fiduciaries for union pension funds have yet to be heard from on the strike’s impact on their members’ investments.

New York City Comptroller Brad Lander, who has issued similar letters before, has yet to do so in the UAW strike. People’s World e-mailed a request for comment. The CALPERS (California Public Employee Retirement System) board met the day after the UAW strike began, but the strike and its impact did not come up, according to a video of the session.

Show your solidarity with striking UAW workers with this draft resolution / by Special to the People’s World

_{People’s World}

_{The following draft solidarity resolution was developed by the North Dakota AFL-CIO. You can help build support by passing similar resolutions in your own union local, city council, community club, church, or other political or civic organization. You can start with this text, customize it with your own additions, and present it to your group for consideration. When resolutions are passed, share them on social media, in newsletters, send them to your members of Congress, to the auto companies, and other unions. Let the striking UAW workers know that they’ve got support. Download a copy.}

A RESOLUTION OF SOLIDARITY WITH THE UNITED AUTO WORKERS AT GENERAL MOTORS, FORD, AND STELLANTIS

WHEREAS: The members of the United Auto Workers are fighting for a fair contract with General Motors, Ford, and Stellantis; and

WHEREAS: These “Big Three” automakers have made record profits over the last decade; and

WHEREAS: The CEOs and shareholders of these companies have also received record compensation; and

WHEREAS: These record profits were made possible only through the labor of the members of the United Auto Workers; and

WHEREAS: The workers at these companies are demanding their fair share of these profits and compensation; and

WHEREAS: Working people are living in a time of historic income inequality and rapidly increasing basic cost of living;

WHEREAS: We understand that workers, joined together in their unions, their unions joined together in solidarity, forming the modern labor movement, is our best chance at decreasing income inequality; and

WHEREAS: The historic struggle that the United Auto Workers are currently facing may impact the trajectory of the entire working class for years to come; therefore be it

RESOLVED: ________ extends our most heartfelt support to the United Auto Workers and their historic labor struggle at General Motors, Ford, and Stellantis; and be it further

RESOLVED: ________ stands ready to provide moral and material support to these brave workers and their families, and their union.

RESOLVED: ________ reaffirms the bonds of solidarity that connect us all as working people.

DOWNLOAD this draft resolution in .docx format for easy customization and editing.

_{People’s World is a voice for progressive change and socialism in the United States. It provides news and analysis of, by, and for the labor and democratic movements to our readers across the country and around the world. People’s World traces its lineage to the Daily Worker newspaper, founded by communists, socialists, union members, and other activists in Chicago in 1924.}

UAW warns strike will expand Friday if Big 3 don’t get “serious” / by Mark Gruenberg

_{^{United Auto Workers members walk the picket line at the Ford Michigan Assembly Plant in Wayne, Mich., Monday, Sept. 18, 2023. So far the strike is limited to about 13,000 workers at three factories — one each at GM, Ford and Stellantis. The union says that on Friday it may expand the strike to additional facilities if the company does not get “serious.” | Paul Sancya/AP}}

_{People’s World | 09.19.2023}

DETROIT—With “no serious progress” by Detroit’s Big 3 automakers, GM, Ford and Stellantis, in talks on new contracts with the United Auto Workers, UAW’s bargaining team will send more locals out on picket lines by Friday, union President Shawn Fain warned. That will expand the strike to include more than the three plants already involved – a GM facility in Wentzville, Missouri, a Stellantis complex in Toledo, Ohio and a Ford assembly plant in Wayne County, Michigan.

“We’re not going to keep waiting around forever while they drag this out,” Fain told his members in a late-night video while setting the new deadline. “We’re not messing around.”

By Friday Ford in particular may be in even more hot water with its workers.

That’s because Unifor, the separate and independent Canadian Auto Workers, had planned to strike by September 18 unless it got a contract, too. It’s extended the deadline by a day, but the threat remains. The union’s 5,600 members primarily work for Ford plants in Windsor, Ontario, across the Detroit River from the main Ford plants in Detroit.

The Auto Workers had reported “a little company movement” at the bargaining table as the union entered the fifth full day of its strike at three auto plants, one per company. UAW’s “Stand Up” strategy calls for striking selected plants by selected locals without advance notice, thus keeping the companies off-balance and guessing.

So far, locals representing 12,700 workers combined at the GM plant in the St. Louis suburb of Wentzville, a Ford production and paint plant in Wayne County, Mich., and a Jeep/Stellantis plant in Toledo, Ohio, are walking picket lines.

And Ford in particular faces another union of angry workers: The separate and independent Canadian Auto Workers, Unifor, planned to strike on September 18, but delayed deciding for a day, President Lana Payne announced. The 5,600 workers it represents toil in Ford plants in Windsor, Ontario, across the Detroit River from the U.S.

“Unifor is extending negotiations with Ford Motor Company for a 24-hour period. The union received a substantive offer from the employer minutes before the deadline and bargaining is continuing throughout the night. Unifor members should continue to maintain strike readiness,” said Payne. Wages and pensions are the key issues in Canada.

A call for solidarity and support

Meanwhile, the CPUSA Labor Commission issued a call “to support the picket lines in person” with the UAW. Picket line information is at UAW.org.

“Many folks are introducing resolutions of support in their unions or other organizations. Here’s a link to a good model from the North Dakota AFL-CIO,” it added. It added Fain’s “powerful video” explains UAW’s strategy and links the current strike to the sit-down strikes of the 1930’s. “Great to show to any gathering too,” the Labor Commission added.

Meanwhile, UAW received key outside support from Senate Labor Committee Chairman Bernie Sanders, Ind-Vt., and AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler.

The developments came in a one-step-forward one-step-back sequence from the car companies. The one step forward was the three firms increased their wage offers, though still far from what the UAW members demand.

The one step back came after the three UAW locals the union initially sent out to strike started their picket lines on September 15. The auto firms’ response was to lay off another 600 UAW members elsewhere—and blame the layoffs on the union due to lack of parts from the struck plants.

And Stellantis said it’s considering reopening a profitable plant it had suddenly shuttered in Belvidere, Ill., throwing another 1,200 UAW members out of jobs, earlier this year. That plant was the first to be put under the hated two-tier salary system, terrifically hurting the workers and the town. UAW said Stellantis was dangling Belvidere’s reopening as “a bargaining chip.”

Top demands from the UAW include a cumulative 36% raise over four years, down several percentage points per year from initial demands members made. Ford, GM and Stellantis are offering 20% over four and a half years. Neither figure counts profit-sharing or bonuses.

The car companies also aren’t offering automatic cost-of-living increases. Those died when the federal government assembled a rescue package for then-bankrupt GM and FiatChrysler after the financier-caused Great Recession. The workers want them restored.

The workers also demand an end to the two-tier wage system, restoration of full health benefits and pensions, including for new hires, promotion of thousands of temp workers to full-time jobs and—given the lack of work-life balance for assembly line workers—a cut in the workweek with no cuts in pay. And they want the right to strike over plant closures.

Workers have routinely toiled 60 hours or more in six-day weeks, including mandatory overtime, and mandatory work every third Sunday. The assembly line jobs feature fast line speeds, ergonomic injuries and confined spaces in the factories. There’s often not enough break time to run to the bathroom.

“The fight you are waging here is not just about decent wages and working conditions and pensions in the automobile industry,” Sanders declared at a September 15 mass rally in downtown Detroit. “It is a fight to take on corporate greed and to tell the people on top, this country belongs to all of us, not just a few.

A struggle for justice

“Every worker, white collar, blue collar, in between, has got to stand with the UAW in your struggle for justice,” he proclaimed. Apparently, they do. Opinion polls show 75% support for the workers.

UAW President Shawn Fain “has made this point over and over again: In the last 50 years, there has been a massive redistribution of wealth. Problem is, it’s gone in the wrong direction,” Sanders continued.

“Instead of going from the top down to the bottom, it’s gone from the bottom up to the top. And what this strike is about, and what workers are standing up all over this country for, is that we’re going to reverse that trend. If the ruling class of this country wants a redistribution of wealth, we’re going to give it to them.

“Gone are the days of corporations running roughshod over workers with impunity.”

“When working people stand together, united by justice and dignity, we have the collective power to demand the respect and fairness on the job we deserve,” Shuler declared at the same rally. She said UAW members “are bravely striking to strengthen America for all of us.

“We’ve got your backs and will stand with you however long it takes to win a fair contract that recognizes your value.”

Like Fain and like a constant theme the workers have been propounding on the picket lines, the Detroit car companies “earned exorbitant profits reaching a quarter of a trillion dollars over the past decade,” the AFL-CIO chief continued.

“Instead of rewarding workers’ commitment and sacrifice, the Big 3 pay CEOs tens of millions while refusing to acknowledge the working people who are the backbone of these companies. Workers are striking for what we all deserve: Fair pay, safety and security on the job; a clean energy future with good union jobs; and dignity in retirement.”

Shuler and Sanders both understated the extent of Wall Street greed and capitalist concentration of wealth behind the car companies’ adamant stands. Fain didn’t. Neither did The Lever, a progressive newsletter. Both point out Ford, GM and Stellantis lined their top honchos’ pockets with millions of dollars—and Wall Street investors with billions in stock buybacks. And that doesn’t count dividends.

“Our union proposed an enhanced profit-sharing formula that would provide workers $2 for every $1 million spent by Ford on stock buybacks, special dividends, and increases to normal dividends,” Fain told members on a Facebook live video in early September. “Ford has responded with a concessionary proposal that would change the profit-sharing formula so that workers would actually earn less.”

The Lever elaborated on the buyback boodle: $484 million last year alone from Ford, nearly $3.4 billion in buybacks from GM in the past 12 months and $1.6 billion from Stellantis to its shareholders in February. One third of that was distributed two days before the strike deadline.

“What you’re seeing” in the strike and “all over this economy is greed on the top and suffering on the part of the working class, and people are tired of it,” Sanders later told CNN anchor Jake Tapper.

_{Mark Gruenberg}_{is head of the Washington, D.C., bureau of People’s World. He is also the editor of the union news service Press Associates Inc. (PAI). Known for his reporting skills, sharp wit, and voluminous knowledge of history, Mark is a compassionate interviewer but tough when going after big corporations and their billionaire owners.}

UAW strike gives new hope to the entire working class / by Sam Pizzigati

_{^{United Auto Workers members attend a rally in Detroit, Friday, Sept. 15, 2023. The UAW is conducting a strike against Ford, Stellantis and General Motors. | Paul Sancya/AP}}

_{People’s World | 09.19.2023}

DETROIT–Unionized workers are showing the rest of us that the rich don’t always have to get richer — at everyone else’s expense.

Just hours before the expiration of the United Auto Workers contract with Detroit’s Big Three, UAW President Shawn Fain had plenty on his mind.

Most of that plenty would be obvious and predictable. The impending expiration of his union’s auto industry contract, with no new pact in sight. The state of the union’s readiness for what could be the UAW’s most pivotal strike since 1937. But Fain had something else on his mind as well: The continuing and unforgivable maldistribution of America’s income and wealth.

“Just as in the 1930s,” Fain reminded his fellow Auto Workers, “we’re living in a time of stunning inequality throughout our society.”

Back then, in those 1930s, UAW members began a generation-long struggle that put a significant dent in that “stunning inequality.” By the early 1960s, auto worker struggles and sacrifices had helped give birth—in the United States—to a mass middle class. A majority of a major nation’s households, after paying for life’s most basic necessities, actually had money left over.

In all of world history, that had never before happened.

We have numbers that can help tell this dramatic story. In 1928, just before the Great Depression hit, households in America’s richest 0.1% held a quarter of the nation’s wealth, households in the bottom 90% only just over 15%. By the mid-1970s, that bottom 90% wealth share had more than doubled, to a third of the total.

And the richest 0.1%? The super wealthy’s share of the nation’s wealth had plummeted over those same years from a quarter of America’s treasure to just over 7%.

But then a grand turnaround began. Since 1976, as the economists Thomas Blanchet, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman have detailed, the pretax incomes of America’s top 0.1% have jumped ten times faster than the incomes of working adults in the nation’s middle 40%.

Over those same years, the real incomes of working-age adults in the top 0.01% have soared 856%. The poorest half of the nation’s working adults, in that same 47-year span, have hardly seen any increase at all, with their incomes rising just a minuscule 21%.

Autoworker take-homes have been doing even worse. Their real wages have actually been sinking over recent years. Between 2008 and July 2023, Economic Policy Institute analysts reported, real average hourly earnings for U.S. auto manufacturing workers fell 19.3%.

Top auto industry execs, meanwhile, have been watching their earnings skyrocket. CEO compensation at the auto industry’s Big Three–Ford, General Motors, and Stellantis, the corporate outfit that’s swallowed up Chrysler—has jumped 40% over the past four years, with each of the three CEOs last year taking home at least $21 million. GM’s current chief exec has pocketed over $200 million since 2014.

These same three corporate auto giants, the Economic Policy Institute adds, have “paid out nearly $66 billion in shareholder dividend payments and stock buybacks” over the past decade, not counting the $14 billion in dividends and buybacks shelled out so far this year.

The Big Three’s overall $250 billion in profits since 2013, the EPI goes on to point out, “amounts to nearly $1.7 million for each of the roughly 150,000 workers covered by UAW collective bargaining agreements.”

UAW President Shawn Fain seems to understand, just like his UAW predecessors back in the middle of the 20th century, that any real economic justice for auto workers is always going to demand imaginative struggle on multiple fronts.

Striking UAW workers in 1937 didn’t just walk the picket line. They staged sit-down strikes that captured the imagination of working people the nation over. And that early UAW didn’t just bring imagination to collective bargaining. UAW activists advanced bold egalitarian proposals on other key fronts as well, most strikingly on taxes.

In April 1942, President Franklin Roosevelt proposed a 100% federal income tax rate on income over $25,000, the equivalent of about $470,000 in today’s dollars. Who convinced FDR to push for that income cap? A New York Times report gave that credit to the UAW.

FDR didn’t end up getting Congress to give him a green light on that 100% top tax rate. But by 1944 our nation’s richest would face a 94% tax rate on income over $400,000, and that top rate would hover around 90% for the next two decades, years that would see the distribution of U.S. income and wealth become significantly more equal.

In other words, the rich don’t always have to get richer—at everyone else’s expense.

The distribution of U.S. income and wealth can change, over relatively brief stretches of time and to a consequential extent.

The last time that consequential change took place in the United States, the UAW played a consequential role. That role may now be re-emerging.

_{We hope you appreciated this article. At People’s World, we believe news and information should be free and accessible to all, but we need your help. Our journalism is free of corporate influence and paywalls because we are totally reader-supported. Only you, our readers and supporters, make this possible. If you enjoy reading People’s World and the stories we bring you, please support our work by donating or becoming a monthly sustainer today. Thank you!}

_{Sam Pizzigati is a veteran labor journalist and Institute for Policy Studies associate fellow Sam Pizzigati 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.}