UAW Makes the Brave New Economy a Lot More Worker-Friendly

By Harold Meyerson - The American Prospect, October 9, 2023

The news last Friday that General Motors has agreed to the UAW’s demand that workers at GM’s joint-venture EV battery factories will be covered under the automaker’s master contract with the union is a historic breakthrough for American workers as they face transitions to a post–fossil fuel economy.

Until Friday, the U.S. auto companies were almost uniformly resisting the idea that their employees in the EV industry would receive wages and benefits comparable to those that UAW members had long received. Now, GM (and almost surely Ford and Stellantis, following in its wake) will effectively ratify the UAW’s argument that work in the new EV economy can provide the living standards that once enabled UAW members to thrive.

The UAW can now take that selling point to the workers at Tesla, and at the non-union EV factories springing up in the South. And President Biden can cite this breakthrough as a concrete refutation of Donald Trump’s harangues that the shift to EVs foretells the doom of American workers.

In announcing this epochal development, UAW President Shawn Fain said that GM changed its position on the eve of the union’s threatened expansion of its strike to the company’s huge plant in Arlington, Texas, which, Fain said, is GM’s single biggest revenue producer. The escalation to a key GM facility echoes the tipping point in the UAW’s sit-down strike in Flint, Michigan, in 1937, which led to the unionization of most American manufacturing.

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Disclaimer: The views expressed here are not the official position of the IWW (or even the IWW’s EUC) and do not necessarily represent the views of anyone but the author.