UAW Members Ratify Deal with the Big Three

By Mindy Isser - In These Times, November 16, 2023

This article was updated on November 17 to reflect breaking news about the contract votes. 

After a six-week rolling strike across the auto industry that garnered international attention, the United Auto Workers reached tentative agreements with all of the automakers that make up the Big Three: Ford, Stellantis and General Motors. The union’s members recently voted to accept the deal. 

“Everything we’ve won, we’ve won together. Our union just showed the world what’s possible when workers unite to fight for more. We’ve created the threat of a good example, and now we’re going to build on it,” said Shawn Fain, the union’s president, during a live stream.

Ford was the first of the Big Three to reach a deal with the UAW, and that was announced on October 25, but Stellantis and GM were not far behind. The contract at GM, the first to be ratified, was narrowly supported with approximately 55% of members voting in favor. Around 68% of Ford and Stellantis workers voted yes. All three contracts look similar, with workers getting raises; a cost-of-living allowance (COLA); $5,000 ratification bonuses; and for workers hired after 2007 without defined benefit pensions, a 10% annual company contribution to their 401(k). The UAW also secured a demand that Stellantis reopen the Belvidere plant in Illinois, which the company idled in February 2023, laying off 1,200 workers. Stellantis is now planning to invest nearly $5 billion into Belvidere—with the aim of not just reopening the shuttered parts distribution center but also building a new assembly and battery plant, the first effort of its kind. Any future battery plant workers will be covered under the UAW’s Master Agreement with the Big Three. (UAW members at Belvidere overwhelmingly voted in favor of the agreement.)

Fain, who took office only six months before the walkout, has called the agreements ​“an astonishing victory” for the Big Three’s more than 145,000 workers. This was the first time the UAW called a strike against all three companies simultaneously.

In 2008, amid the nation’s economic collapse, the UAW agreed to major concessions during contract negotiations, and it has struggled to fully recover. The union was also hampered by corruption, with more than a dozen officials caught reportedly embezzling millions of dollars in union funds between the early 2000s and as recently as 2021. But those scandals helped pave the way for these monumental new agreements the UAW just secured. That’s largely because before this most recent union election, union officers had been chosen by convention delegates instead of directly by members. Fed up with business as usual, members organizing within a reform caucus, Unite All Workers for Democracy (UAWD), fought hard to pass a one-member-one-vote policy, which allowed workers to directly elect their officers. In the subsequent election, Fain narrowly won after a runoff. His victory was not only a win for him but a referendum on the overall direction of the union, with many members organizing and hoping for a more transparent and militant organization, especially in negotiations with the Big Three. 

Read the rest of the article here.

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.