Negotiating with the UAW: Predictions for September 14th and Expires for the Big Three Automobile Manufacturing Co-Operators
A strike by the United Auto Workers will start on September 14th, and will last until the end of the year. If the Big Three auto manufacturers don’t agree to the demands of the union for wage increases, shorter working days and stronger pensions.
A gradual escalation of the strikes across the three companies, Fain said, would keep Stellantis, Ford and GM on their toes about how their operations would be disrupted, giving the union more leverage.
Workers at the Wentzville, Missouri, Ford plant and the Toledo, Ohio, Ford plant could be the first to walk off their jobs under Fain’s new strategy.
It’s going to keep the Companies guessing on what will happen next and it’s going to give us more power to negotiate.
“We’re living in a time of incredible disparity in our society,” said Fain. “We’re living in a time where our industry is undergoing massive transformations, and we’re living in a time where our labor movement is redefining itself.”
The initial wage proposals by the three automakers were reduced from 9 or 10% increases to as high as 20% in the most recent offers. The union claimed that those offers did not account for years of stagnant wages.
The union’s pension and retiree healthcare proposals have been rejected by the companies. Other economic issues, including cost of living adjustments and profit sharing, remain points of contention.
“We do not yet have offers on the table that reflect the sacrifice and contributions our members have made to these companies,” Fain told union members. We’ll probably have to take action to win.
The targeted strikes are a departure from the UAW’s traditional playbook, which has usually involved having all union members at a single company walk off the job at once.
Ford would have lost over 15 billion dollars if they signed up for the demands of the UAW, according to Jim Farley. There is no way that we can be sustainable.
Fain said he, along with other top UAW leaders and Sen. Bernie Sanders, will attend a rally in Detroit on Friday, regardless of how negotiations pan out over the next 24 hours.
A long strike is potentially threatening the U.S. economy. In a scenario in which all of the about 150,000 UAW auto union members were to strike for six weeks, the impact on the economy would amount to shaving an estimated 0.2% off fourth-quarter GDP.
Simmering at the center of contract negotiations between the union and the automakers are lingering questions around the industry’s massive, multibillion-dollar shift to electrification. The autoworkers fear that they will need fewer workers to assemble the EV.
Meanwhile, the Big Three are pumping billions of dollars into EVs in a race to catch up with Tesla, which employs a nonunion workforce. The Biden administration put EV at the center of it’s efforts to fight climate change and subsidized these investments.
The Fate of the Auto Workers: Why the Three Big Three aren’t Ready to Deal with the Economic Problems of the Automotive Industry
It is pretty likely. According to analysts at Evercore ISI and Wedbush Securities, there’s about 85 percent of a strike at all three companies. The union’s most recent proposal was a 36 percent wage increase, down from 40 percent, which suggests talks are still ongoing. The two sides don’t agree on a lot of issues.
Simply put, better pay, shorter working hours, a shift back to traditional pension, the elimination of compensation tiers, and a restoration of cost-of-living adjustments. The UAW points out that its members have made huge concessions over the last two decades, as the auto industry was roiled by foreign competition and economic downturn.
Fain was elected president of UAW in March (the first time a UAW president was picked through a democratic vote by the union’s membership) on a promise of “no corruption, no concessions, no tiers,” according to Labor Notes, which likened his election to the shakeup at the Teamsters. While he has a mandate to fight for his membership, he also wants to take his union in a more militant direction.
Their issue is the cost gap between themselves and nonunion factories in the South owned by foreign manufacturers like Nissan and Toyota. They say this puts them at a major disadvantage competitively because it means they’re spending roughly $64-$67 an hour on total labor costs, including benefits, while their rivals only spend around $55 an hour.
The total labor costs for the non union workforce is between $45 and $50 per hour. This is the reason why the Big Three have been unable to keep up with a company that holds 60 percent of the EV market in the US.
The three companies have also put cost of living protections on the table — though the union says these offers wouldn’t provide enough wage protection to keep up with inflation over the next four-and-a-half years.
Do We Really Need a Strike? Telling Us Why We Think We Can Do Anything to Stop Our Race to The Bottom with Autonomous Vehicles
Privately, Fain has been more skeptical about the shift to EVs, calling it a “race to the bottom” in an internal memo, according to The New York Times.
“Hopefully this gets resolved before it gets to that point,” @CarDealershipGuy, independent dealership owner and pseudonymous Twitter user, wrote the other day. “But tbh, I highly doubt it.”
Often, the cost of a strike is portrayed in terms of its effect on a state or nation’s economic output. A 10-day strike would likely push the Michigan economy into a recession and cause US gross domestic product to be reduced by more than $5 billion, according to reports.
The cost of doing nothing is higher according to the union. “Corporations want us to believe there’s nothing we can do to stop our race to the bottom,” Fain said in a Facebook Live video on September 8th. If our labor is not valued, we have the power to take it away. 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.”
The UAW March 17 Strikes: The Case For a Better Way To Save Our Future, Not Ours, But Ours and Ours
It’s a strategy intended to keep companies guessing about how operations would be disrupted if additional locations were to follow at a moment’s notice.
“This is our generation’s defining moment,” Fain told UAW members at a Facebook Live event on Thursday night. The money is there, the cause is righteous, the world is watching.
He has doubled down on the union’s economic demands, including 40% pay raises, the restoration of pension and retiree healthcare, and cost of living adjustments.
Collectively, the Big Three automakers have seen their profits soar during the pandemic when factors including parts shortages led to surging car prices, padding the profit margins of companies.
During a Facebook Live event on Wednesday night, Fain compared the companies’ profits to the wages of autoworkers, who saw their pay increase by just six percent over four years.
The companies say that they’ve tried to reach agreements. General Motors attempted to head off a strike with a down-to-the-wire offer on Thursday afternoon, a proposal CEO Mary Barra called a “compelling and unprecedented economic package.”
The new offer by GM addresses the things that are most important to you, in spite of the heated rhetoric from UAW leadership, said GM chairman and CEO Mary Barra in a statement.
The UAW walkout is the 17th strike in the U.S. involving more than 2,000 workers so far this year, according to data from the Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations.
After months of contentious negotiations that led 340,000 UPS workers to the brink of a strike, the Teamsters union in July secured a 48% average total wage increase, over the course of the five-year contract, for existing part-time workers.
The Allied Pilots Association succeeded in persuading American Airlines to raise pilots’ pay by more than 42% over the next four years.
The First Three Workers to Walk Off the Job Under Fain’s “Stand Up Strike” Strategy: a Case Study in the Midwest
The Big Three were once the most popular cars in the US. But today, the market is populated with foreign automakers such as Toyota and Volkswagen, which are not being impacted by strike threats and can continue to produce cars at a steady clip.
The ability of automakers to shift production to the non-union South or abroad is one of the reasons why they don’t have exceptional leverage.
Instead, workers at three Midwest auto plants — a General Motors assembly plant in Wentzville, Missouri, a Stellantis assembly plant in Toledo, Ohio, and part of a Ford plant in Wayne, Mich. — were the first to walk off the job under UAW president Shawn Fain’s “stand up strike” strategy.