AFL-CIO

By Dan DiMaggio - Labor Notes, November 17, 2023

After a six-week escalating strike, the Auto Workers (UAW) ratified agreements with each of the Big 3 automakers. The deals are a sharp about-face from decades of concessions.

The new contracts go further than many people thought possible, on issues that the companies had insisted were off the table. Stellantis agreed to reopen its idled Belvidere, Illinois, assembly plant. The companies will include most new battery plant workers in their master agreements.

While the contracts don’t abolish tiers for benefits, they mostly get rid of the wage tiers the Big 3 had created to drive down pay. Some workers will see their pay more than double.

The gains are a testament to the UAW’s aggressive strategy under its new leaders, which ramped up the strikes slowly at first and then faster until the companies caved one by one. The strategy threw the companies off guard and kept them guessing throughout.

The Stand-Up Strike began September 15 when 13,000 workers walked out at three Ford, General Motors, and Stellantis assembly plants; by the end it grew to 50,000, out of 146,000 UAW members at the Big 3. The agreements came after a major escalation: striking each company’s most profitable truck plant.

Workers approved the deals at GM, Ford, and Stellantis this week.

At Ford and Stellantis, two-thirds voted in favor. But at GM, the numbers were close. Just 55 percent of workers voted yes, reflecting workers’ heightened expectations and frustration with years of givebacks. Many higher-seniority assembly plant workers at all three companies voted no, saying the raises and retirement gains were not enough.

“They wanted higher increases in pay, higher than the 25 percent, and they wanted it all up front,” said Katie Deatherage, the recently elected president of Local 2250 at GM’s plant in Wentzville, Missouri. “Pensions and post-retirement health care were a huge topic and have been for a long long time.”

Deatherage estimates that 70 to 75 percent of workers at her plant have been hired since 2007, meaning they don’t get a pension or retiree health care. Still, in her 20 years at GM, “it’s the best contract I’ve seen in my career.” She voted yes.

By Jessica Corbett - Common Dreams, November 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."

By Deepak Bhargava and Stephanie Luce - Newsweek, November 16, 2023

Amid growing threats to our climate, economy, and democracy, one thing has become increasingly clear: those who care about confronting these challenges need to get smarter about strategy.

We've seen right-wing extremists make enormous gains on everything from abortion restrictions to anti-trans legislation, and we'd be foolish to believe their war on our rights will slow down anytime soon. They've done so by being laser focused on strategy: specifically dividing and weakening their opposition. The assault on voting rights or on unions through state legislation are both highly strategic efforts to weaken pillars of the progressive coalition. The same goes for the moral panics about trans rights or critical race theory the right is relentlessly pushing.

To help point today's activists in the right direction, we wrote a book around seven strategies that, when used properly, can help progressives win some of our biggest battles ahead. These timeless strategies were deployed by some of our nation's most successful grassroots movements—from the abolition of slavery to the New Deal to the civil rights movement—in the face of enormous opposition, and we've seen a number of them resurrected to great effect in the past year by workers, voters, and progressive coalitions who've enacted sweeping and significant change, even with the odds heavily stacked against them.

Take, for example, the use of disruption to stop business as usual and build economic power. This time-tested strategy used by workers throughout history led to a major victory when auto workers at Ford Motor, Stellantis, and General Motors reached tentative agreements with their employers for record 25 percent raises nearly six weeks after the United Auto Workers (UAW) began a growing wave of strikes against the Big Three. These workers' win is an exemplary testament to the power of prolonged, creative, and unpredictable disruption to bring about a desired result. As we write in our book, disruption is the ability to stop those in power from doing what they want to do and to break up the status quo. After their union contracts expired last month, that's exactly what thousands of workers from the Big Three automakers did when they began ratcheting up a series of walkouts strategically at factories producing some of the automakers' most profitable models.

This was the first time ever that the UAW had struck all three companies simultaneously, and the choice to do so dealt a significant blow to the Big Three's profits. Altogether, 45,000 workers went on strike. Estimates show that after five weeks of strikes, the economic losses for the auto industry surpassed $9.3 billion. To stop the financial bleeding, the Big Three had no other choice but to meet workers' demands at the bargaining table.

By Union Jake, Adam Keller, and Mark Gevaart - Valley Labor Report, November 16, 2023

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. 

By Les Leopold - Common Dreams, November 14, 2023

This historic victory could have significant benefits for all working people.

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.

By Alex N Press - Jacobin, November 14, 2023

In speaking about the details of the tentative agreements now secured with the Big Three automakers, United Auto Workers (UAW) president Shawn Fain said, “One of our biggest goals coming out of this contract victory is to organize like we’ve never organized before.”

“When we return to the bargaining table in 2028, it won’t just be the Big Three, but with the Big Five or Big Six,” he concluded.

Those weren’t empty words. The same day that the union announced that it had reached a tentative agreement with General Motors (GM), the final company of the Big Three to reach a deal, news broke that the UAW was already on the move. Bloomberg reported that workers have formed an organizing committee with the UAW at Tesla’s flagship Fremont, California, plant.

Before Tesla purchased the plant in 2010, it was a UAW shop, an unusual joint venture between Toyota and GM. The two companies operated the facility for twenty-five years; GM pulled out during its 2009 bankruptcy proceedings, and Toyota shut the factory down the following year. When Tesla took over, the union was not part of the agreement.

Today the 5.3 million square-foot Fremont plant employs some twenty thousand workers, and while there have been efforts to unionize it with the UAW in recent years, those attempts failed, thanks in part to Elon Musk’s unwavering opposition to unions. When Jose Moran, then a production worker at the Fremont plant, led the charge to organize in 2017, the tech CEO called the effort “morally outrageous” and went after Moran publicly, claiming that he was on the UAW’s payroll and didn’t actually work for Tesla. (Moran is no longer employed at the plant, and Musk has appealed the National Labor Relations Board rulings that declared his actions illegal.) None of that history seems to be stopping the UAW.

“We can beat anybody,” Fain told Bloomberg of taking on Tesla. “I believe it’s doable.”

By Sam Pizzigati - ZNetwork, November 10, 2023

Working people the world over have celebrated the first of May as “International Labor Day” since 1886, when workers in the United States struggling for an eight-hour day staged a May 1 national protest.

Thanks to the new deal America’s auto workers have signed with Detroit’s Big Three — Ford, GM, and Stellantis — that day could have new global significance. Their watershed new contracts all set April 30, 2028 as their expiration date.

If May 1, 2028 arrives without signed contracts for America’s unionized auto workers, UAW president Shawn Fain has 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.”

But that May 1 day is clearly inviting coordination beyond the national level.

The May Day that workers worldwide have so long honored, Fain notes, has always been “more than just a day of commemoration, it’s a call to action.” And the labor movement worldwide is showing real signs of acting more in strategic concert.

Within the global auto industry, no corporation more embodies the inequality of our corporate world than the non-union Tesla. Under CEO Elon Musk, the world’s richest single individual, Tesla pays wages that run substantially below those of Detroit’s Big Three, and that gap will only widen after the new UAW contracts go into effect.

The new UAW contracts, predicts German Bender of the Swedish think-tank Arena, could well “boost union interest among Tesla workers.”

By Keith Brower Brown - Labor Notes, November 10, 2023

On breaks between harnessing wires and bolting fenders, Auto Workers across the country are debating the contract offers their strike wrenched out of Ford, General Motors, and Stellantis.

Just a fraction of plants have voted, with the rest set to cast ballots in the next two weeks. Contract details are here.

Ford locals have been the first to weigh in. Three larger locals voted heavily in favor of the deal. Two other major locals passed the offer with a narrower majority, reflecting that members’ expectations were raised sharply by new leaders and an aggressive contract fight.

The first Ford plant to strike was Michigan Assembly near Detroit. With about four-fifths of the 5,000 members casting ballots, the local voted ‘yes’ by 82 percent.

Longtime production worker Audrey Bell says she and her co-workers had few qualms about the major gains made: “I think it’s basically good, especially for the new workers. We made big progress on two tiers. Got the COLA [cost-of-living adjustment] back.”

At Ford Chicago Assembly, members passed the deal by a slimmer 57 percent, on 56 percent turnout. This local has often rejected tentative contracts, turning down the 2019 deal by nearly two-thirds. Members there joined the Stand-Up Strike on September 29.

Scott Houldieson, who’s worked as an electrician at the plant for 34 years, supported the agreement. (He is chair of the caucus Unite All Workers for Democracy, UAWD, which opted for a neutral stance.) “It was a strike that was trying to dig us out of 40 years of concessions, 40 years of cooperating with the companies, 40 years of corruption,” Houldieson said.

By Mike Elk - Payday Report, November 10, 2023

his week, nearly 12,000 Brazilian autoworkers are celebrating a victory after a roughly two-week strike against three central factories in the suburbs outside of Sao Paulo. 

The workers went on strike after G.M. illegally fired 1,244 workers on October 23rd. On Wednesday, the union celebrated as they won the cancelation of those layoffs and back pay for the three weeks they were on strike. 

“Our victory of back pay and the canceling of layoffs is the fruit of the big fight that united workers at three factories and showed our force,” said Valmir Montaeo of the Metalworkers union of São José dos Campos.

G.M. workers in Brazil said that they had been closely watching following the UAW’s strike in the U.S. 

“The strike of American workers served as an inspiration for Brazilians as well,” CSP-Conlutas union leader Luiz Carlos Mancha told Payday Report last month. “It inspired us because the process of reducing salaries and taking away rights is also happening in Brazil. The strike that is happening in the U.S. is a turning point in the situation.” 

Brazilian and American workers have had a long relationship that has impacted trade unionists in both countries. In the 1970s and 1980s, Brazilian and American solidarity played a crucial role in toppling the dictatorship in Brazil.