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Big Three Autoworkers Approve Contracts After UAW Strike
"It's a good contract, you just can't get around that," said one UAW local president. "You look at the investment we got in 2019 compared to now, it's not rocket science. It's just better."
Nov 17, 2023
As voting wrapped up on Friday, United Auto Workers members at Ford, General Motors, and Stellantis were all on track to approve contracts finalized during a six-week UAW strike demanding improved pay, benefits, and working conditions from the "Big Three."
The union's online trackers had the ratification vote results as 68.2% to 31.8% at Ford, 54.7% to 45.3% at GM, and 69.6% to 30.4% at Stellantis as of press time. The UAW and companies have not yet commented on the results.
The UAW launched its "Stand Up Strike" in mid-September, and increased walkouts at various U.S. locations throughout the talks. Rutgers University labor studies professor Rebecca Givan toldThe New York Times that the strategy "really upended a lot of conventional wisdom" in the labor movement and helped reverse some concessions the union had previously accepted, showing that "if workers build enough power, they can win things back."
The pending agreements, which were reached over a few days at the end of last month, don't deliver on all worker demands but celebrated provisions include 25% wage increases and cost-of-living adjustments through April 30, 2028.
As Bloomberg reported:
Workers at Ford's Dearborn, Michigan, truck plant voted 78% in favor of ratifying the agreement Friday, putting Ford over the top, according to UAW Local 600 President Nick Kottalis.
"It's a good contract, you just can't get around that," Kottalis said. "You look at the investment we got in 2019 compared to now, it's not rocket science. It's just better."
The contracts' expiration date sets up a possible mass action around International Workers' Day on May 1, 2028. The UAW said last month that "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."
Also framing the Big Three battle as part of a bigger effort, UAW president Shawn Fain declared last month that "if we are 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."
Fain on Tuesday testified at U.S. Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee Chair Bernie Sanders' (I-Vt.) hearing about how unions raise up working families and take on corporate greed. The UAW leader stressed the "essential role" of federal lawmakers, calling on them to not only support "our fights and other fights like ours," but also "finish the job for economic and social justice for the entire working class."
Already, the historic Big Three deals are leading to "UAW bumps" at other automakers including Honda, Hyundai, Subaru, and Toyota. The union is also aiming to help organize workers at Telsa, the electric vehicle company of billionaire Elon Musk.
Democratic U.S. President Joe Biden, who is seeking reelection next year, became the first sitting president to join striking workers on a picket line in late September, when he rallied with UAW members outside a GM plant in Belleville, Michigan.
The Biden campaign's Ammar Moussa said in a statement Friday that "Joe Biden isn't just saying that he'll always have workers' backs—he's proving it. After President Biden made history by standing with striking autoworkers, unions have notched historic wins and even nonunionized auto companies are taking note, increasing workers' wages.
"This is what happens when you have a president who cares about working people," added Moussa. "Workers win."
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The UAW’s Game Changer: The Right to Strike Over Mass Layoffs
This historic victory could have significant benefits for all working people.
Nov 14, 2023
The United Auto Workers has scored major victories in its new contracts with the Big Three automakers: GM, Ford, and Stellantis. Not only did the union win massive wage increases and other critical demands, but it also won the virtually unheard of right to strike over plant closures. This historic victory could have significant benefits for all working people.
Since the dawn of capitalism, plant closings and mass layoffs have disrupted working-class lives. The problem rapidly accelerated when Republican and Democratic administrations, starting with Reagan in 1980, freed Wall Street from regulations that discouraged job-killing leveraged corporate takeovers and stock buybacks. While researching my upcoming book, Wall Street’s War on Workers, we found that more than 30 million workers have been subjected to mass layoffs since 1996.
The auto industry was one of the first to institute mass layoffs as mismanagement and stiff competition from abroad in the 1970s cut into the Big Three’s market share. Until this recent UAW contract, unions mostly had been unable to stop mass layoffs. Instead, they only had the contractual right to conduct “effects bargaining,” negotiating to secure severance payments for the workers who would be let go. Even if they had wanted to strike, in most cases it would have been prohibited by their contracts.
The UAW has changed that game. If GM or Ford or Stellantis decide to shut down a facility going forward, they will now be forced to think twice. Is the risk of a national strike that could cost them billions, worth the short-term savings that come with layoffs? Or might it make more sense to find another use for the facility and keep everyone working? The new UAW contracts with the Big Three bring this entirely new financial dynamic into the mass layoff game. Already, Stellantis has agreed to reopen its plant in Belvidere, Illinois, and rehire all 1,200 laid-off workers there.
As Stellantis just demonstrated by reopening its Belvidere facility, large corporations are far more flexible than their public rhetoric suggests.
But doesn’t forcing the companies to keep those workers employed weaken them and make them less competitive? That’s what corporations always claim… at least until persuaded and pressured to do otherwise. However, corporate leaders know that mass layoffs often have little to do with production and sales. In many cases, mass layoffs are used to squeeze more cash out of the company to finance stock buybacks – a legalized form of stock manipulation that enriches top corporate officials and Wall Street stock-sellers (see Mass Layoff Capitalism). For example, in the last 12 years, GM has poured more than $21 billion into stock buybacks. No one knows for certain how many jobs were lost to help finance those buybacks, but the number is certainly significant. In 2015 alone, the company laid off 14,000 employees.
Our research suggests that in many, if not most, cases, stock buybacks and/or leveraged buyouts precede mass layoffs. Companies like Toys “R” Us and Bed, Bath and Beyond have been ruined by that process.
But what if an auto company really can’t sell one of its products? How then could it possibly keep a plant open?
As Stellantis just demonstrated by reopening its Belvidere facility, large corporations are far more flexible than their public rhetoric suggests. They are adept at finding ways to cut costs by outsourcing work to non-union labor, here and abroad. If pressured, they have the capacity to redirect that production to facilities that are being shut down here and re-employ union labor.
An excellent example of this flexibility can be found at Siemens Energy. The company decided in 2020 to quit the oil drilling and fracking businesses and announced layoffs of approximately 1,700 U.S. workers and another 3,000 thousand in Germany. In the U.S., all the layoffs took place and the unions involved conducted effects bargaining. But in Germany, where workers hold half the seats on the Siemens board of directors, the union won an agreement that there would be no compulsory layoffs. Instead, the company was allowed to try to entice workers to leave voluntarily with significant pay and benefit packages. The company also agreed to put new production into the six facilities that were originally scheduled to be shut down.
The UAW is forging a new path to build real union power to stop corporate mass layoffs through the right to strike.
In the U.S., workers do not have that kind of leverage on boards of directors. In Germany, it is mandated by laws urged upon them by the U.S. after WWII. The UAW is forging a new path to build real union power to stop corporate mass layoffs through the right to strike.
Shawn Fain, the visionary and effective UAW president, wants these union successes to spread far and wide. He is urging every union to have their contracts end on the same date—May 1, 2028—the internationally recognized Labor Day, which honors the 1892 Homestead strike for the eight-hour work day. With concerted pressure, perhaps the labor movement would develop broader, basic common demands that support the working class. Stopping needless mass layoffs should be near the top of the list.
Can you imagine if every union had the right to strike over mass layoffs and then succeeded in protecting job security? That might lead to an explosion of workers wanting to join unions. We might even see a repeat of a legendary story from the diary of a union organizer during the 1940s: “Today I organized 12 new local unions,” he wrote. Of course, he didn’t go out and organize each one on his own. They were running into the organizer’s office requesting union charters.
Today, for the first time in a long, long time, there’s a decent chance that workers will be running to the UAW.
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The UAW Is Leading the World Toward a May Day to Remember
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.
Nov 05, 2023
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 Institutecalculates, 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.”
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