- The first-ever Stand-Up strike will rotate walkouts at various Detroit Three plants without prior warning.
- The UAW’s last strike, against GM in 2019, lasted 40 days and cost the automaker about $3 billion.
- Most of the union demands would reverse concessions the UAW made after the Bush and Obama administrations’ bailouts of the US auto industry some 14 years ago.
About 13,000 United Auto Workers stood up and walked out at midnight Thursday from Ford’s Michigan assembly plant producing the Bronco and Ranger, Stellantis’ Toledo assembly complex building the Jeep Wrangler, and General Motors’ Wentzville assembly plant in Missouri, which builds the Chevrolet Colorado, GMC Canyon, and the aged Chevy Express and GMC Savanna full-size vans.
The UAW also planned a mass rally for 4 pm Friday at the UAW-Ford National Program Center with union President Shawn Fain to be joined by independent Sen. Bernie Sanders from Vermont.
“Tonight, for the first time in our history we will strike all three of the Big Three at once,” Fain—using the old nickname for what is now better known as the Detroit Three—told the UAW’s 150,000 members via Facebook Live about two hours before the strike deadline.
In 1936-37, the UAW staged a Sit-Down strike against GM in which workers occupied the Flint, Michigan, plant and relaxed and played games rather than assemble bodies.
The first-ever Stand-Up strike will rotate walkouts at various Detroit Three plants without prior warning.
“The locals that are not yet called on to join the Stand-Up strike will continue working under an expired agreement. No contact extensions,” Fain said on Facebook Live. Though the contract has expired, terms and conditions remain in place, and the union members cannot be fired or disciplined for no reason.
“This strategy will keep the companies guessing,” Fain said. “It will give our national negotiators maximum leverage and flexibility in bargaining. And if we need to go all out, we will. Everything’s on the table.”
The UAW’s last strike, against GM in 2019, lasted 40 days and cost the automaker about $3 billion.
Fain’s strategy had Ford CEO Jim Farley guessing earlier Thursday. From the floor of the North American International Auto Show in Detroit, he told reporters, according to NPR, “There’s still time, but it’s hard to negotiate when you don’t get much feedback.”
GM CEO Mary Barra told CNBC from the Detroit show floor Friday morning that she is “extremely frustrated and disappointed.” Adding that GM began negotiations with the UAW in July and put “an historic offer” on the table, she said, “We don’t need to be on strike right now.”
Sam Fiorani, vice president for Global Vehicle Forecasting at AutoForecast Solutions, said, “If a strike were to stretch out for weeks, not only will the manufacturers not recover their volumes in 2023, but the potential remains for suppliers to be hurt.”
Fiorani said the strike seems to have been in the cards all along. “President Fain wants to flex his muscles and demonstrate to the union that he’s making a clean break from the earlier leadership that looked to be too close to the Detroit Three,” he said.
Current UAW Demands
- Eliminate tiered wages. Top pay for the entry hire tier is about $19 an hour.
- Wage increases of 36% over the four years of a new contract. The UAW started at 6%; Latest offers are 20% from GM and Ford, 17.5% from Stellantis, says the AP.
- Restore the annual cost of living wage increases.
- Defined benefit pensions for all workers.
- Re-establish retiree medical benefits.
- Restore the right to strike over plant closures and the Working Family Protection Program, which pays workers from closed plants for community service work.
- End “abuse” of temporary workers (who are hired and laid off at-will with the ebb and flow of production demands).
- More paid time off to be with families.
- Significant increase in retiree pay.
Though not specified on the website, Fain also has called for a four-day, 32-hour work week, citing evidence that the reduction in hours typically results in better productivity. But as the UAW also says most of its members typically put in 60 or more hours a week, this demand would essentially add eight hours per week of overtime pay.
Most of the union demands above would reverse concessions the UAW made after the Bush and Obama administrations’ bailouts of the US auto industry some 14 years ago. In particular, the two-tier wage system and stopping pay for workers laid off under factory closures ended GM, Ford, and Chrysler’s deep cost-disadvantage to non-union foreign automaker “transplants” and more recently non-union Tesla.
Since then, the Detroit Three has thrived, first with high-profit trucks and large SUVs and more recently by saving its computer chips for high-profit luxury vehicles during the pandemic’s supply chain crisis. GM, Ford, and Stellantis earned a combined profit of $21 billion in the first-half of 2023, according to American Public Media’s Marketplace.
For 2022, GM’s Barra earned nearly $29 million, Ford’s Farley earned about $21 million, and Stellantis’ Carlos Tavares earned $24.8 million, according to Securities & Exchange Commission filings cited by NPR. Fain says a UAW worker at GM’s Ultium battery cell plant in Lordstown, Ohio, starts at $16.50 per hour.
But the Detroit Three’s accelerating shift to electric vehicles could take its toll on the UAW’s future, as GM and Ford have already warned that the technology will require fewer white-collar—and blue-collar—workers.
Contributing Editor
As a kid growing up in Metro Milwaukee, Todd Lassa impressed childhood friends with his ability to identify cars on the street by year, make, and model. But when American automakers put an end to yearly sheetmetal changes, Lassa turned his attention toward underpowered British sports cars with built-in oil leaks. After a varied early journalism career, he joined Autoweek, then worked in Motor Trend’s and Automobile’s Detroit bureaus, before escaping for Mountain Maryland with his wife, three dogs, three sports cars (only one of them British), and three bicycles. Lassa is founding editor of thehustings.news, which has nothing to do with cars.
Read the full article here