union busting

By Carolyn Fortuna - Clean Technica, September 30, 2023

Instead of joining a debate with 7 Republican candidates vying for the position of party presidential nominee, Donald J. Trump decided to visit a non-union auto parts plant in Michigan. During the stop, Trump excoriated the Biden administration for its push toward transportation electrification. The language Trump used during his Detroit stop was part of a broader goal to divide a self-identified pro-union advocate in President Joe Biden from an automotive workforce that is in turmoil.

The campaign rally was concurrent with the ongoing UAW strike, in which concerns over wage loss, diminishing benefits, and the length of workweek have led to an impasse between Detroit automakers and their workers. Moreover, the UAW feels the billions of dollars in tax incentives and loans sprinkled on automakers to retool their factories for EVs was flawed, as the incentive had not stipulated that automakers with a union-only workforce would benefit.

Trump sought to use the campaign stop to appeal to white working class voters in a critical swing state. The UAW malaise has been positioned by both parties as a gauge for potential votes, and the strike is having its effects on automakers — Ford halted production on its CATL project this week.

The language Trump used during his Detroit area stop is indicative of his powerful and quite scary persuasive capacity. Let’s zoom in on how he described EVs and his personal commitment to autoworkers. We’ll deconstruct facts, fantasy, and the ever-so-difficult gray areas that auto manufacturers are facing as they open a door to a new era of innovation – and the costs thereof.

By Chris Townsend, Union Jake, and Adam Keller - Valley Labor Report, September 29, 2023

By Union Jake and Adam Keller - Valley Labor Report, September 28, 2023

By Union Jake and Adam Keller - Valley Labor Report, September 27, 2023

By Teddy Ostrow and Barry Eidlin - Jacobin, September 25, 2023

On Friday, September 22, United Auto Workers (UAW) president Shawn Fain announced that the union would be expanding its “stand-up strike” against the Big Three automakers to thirty-eight parts distribution centers owned by General Motors (GM) or Stellantis. The five thousand workers at those sites are joining the thirteen thousand autoworkers at three assembly plants who walked out when the strike began on September 15.

The UAW’s strategy — striking all of the Big Three at once, but escalating gradually by beginning at a few worksites and calling out more over time to ramp up pressure — is unprecedented in the union’s history. The strike represents a dramatic departure from the union’s recent history in other ways as well, with leadership actively working to involve members in the contract campaign, and President Fain declaring that the union is fighting “for the good of the entire working class.” The leadership’s new approach is due in large part to the election of Fain and other officers associated with Unite All Workers for Democracy (UAWD), a union reform caucus that earlier this year swept out the corrupt old guard that had dominated UAW for over seventy years. 

Jacobin contributor Teddy Ostrow recently sat down with Barry Eidlin, associate professor of sociology at McGill University, to talk about the stand-up strike’s precedents in the 1936–37 sit-downs, the long history of efforts to reform the UAW, and the current strike’s implications for the broader labor movement in the United States and Canada.

By Talia Baroncelli and Frank Hammer - The Analysis News, September 25, 2023

By Sydney Ghazarian, Nima Shirazi, and Adam Johnson - Citations Needed, September 22, 2023

By Union Jake and Adam Keller - Valley Labor Report, September 19, 2023

By Luis Feliz Leon - American Prospect, September 7, 2023

Patricia Elliston, 54, was laid off two years ago after nearly a decade at the Stellantis auto assembly plant in Belvidere, Illinois, when the company cut the second shift. She took a transfer to Stellantis’s Mopar Parts Distribution Center in Michigan, where she rents a house and rooms with other autoworkers in the Detroit suburb of Warren. Elliston’s husband, a non-union Machinist on disability, remained in Belvidere, caring for his elderly mother. His father retired from what was then named Chrysler in 1999, after decades working as an electrician in the skills trade department.

“We were told that moving out here would only be temporary, and we’d have the option to come back to Belvidere,” Elliston said. “But now that they’ve idled the plant, we don’t know if we can come back.”

Last year, Stellantis indefinitely shuttered its assembly plant in Belvidere, laying off more than 1,300 workers. It moved production to a plant in Toluca, in central Mexico, upending the lives of generations of families dating back to the company’s 1965 roots in Illinois.

That plant, and others in the U.S., are being used as bargaining chips in Stellantis’s negotiations with the United Auto Workers (UAW), which has approved a strike authorization if no deal is reached by September 14. Workers involved with the plant believe that the company is holding the plant’s idle status as leverage. “They’re dangling that they can reopen the Belvidere plant if we give up this or that,” Elliston said. “And nobody wants to give up anything—we’ve given up enough!”

By press associates - People's World, August 2, 2023

A National Labor Relations Board administrative law judge has strongly blasted the Warrior Met coal company in its long-running dispute over a new contract with the United Mine Workers—a dispute which led bosses to lock out the firm’s 1,100 miners for more than a year and a half. The judge formally ruled the firm’s unfair labor practices provoked the conflict.

In an 88-page ruling, ALJ Melissa Olivero came down particularly hard on company officials for claiming they couldn’t afford the union’s demands for raises in each year of a new contract, and the union’s tries at reclaiming the givebacks the workers had to yield to keep the firm going when it was the old, and bankrupt, Jim Walter mine.

Even as the firm gave out big bonuses to its corporate honchos, in a poor area of rural Alabama, and shoveled out millions of dollars in stock options and dividends to its Wall Street investors, it was claiming poverty and saying paying the miners would force it to close, Olivero said. It denied making the closure threat, but Olivero found its denials were not credible.

Such claims, Olivero noted, entitled the Mine Workers (UMWA) to review the mine’s books, but the mine bosses refused to turn them over, and that broke labor law, too, Olivero said. That led UMWA to declare the strike was about Warrior Met labor law-breaking, formally called unfair labor practices.

That made the strike, and Warrior Met’s lockout of the workers, an unfair labor practices strike, Olivero ruled. Warrior Met appealed her decision to the full board, which has called for briefs from both sides by late August.

Warrior Met also was hiring subcontractors to work alongside the miners, Olivero noted—another bone of contention in the bargaining between the two sides.