United Auto Workers (UAW)

By Steven Greenhouse and Shawn Fain - In These Times, November 8, 2023

When Shawn Fain won the presidency of the United Auto Workers last March as an insurgent candidate, promising to transform the union and take on Detroit’s automakers, he spoke with veteran labor journalist and Century Foundation senior fellow Steven Greenhouse for In These Times. Fain laid out a militant agenda.

“We need to run contract campaigns where we engage the membership and go after their demands,” he said. ​“We haven’t done this in my lifetime.”

Six months later, Fain led targeted strikes against Ford, GM and Stellantis that have secured tentative agreements that include a 25% wage increase — more than all the raises that auto workers have received over the last 20 years combined. As UAW members began voting on the agreements, Greenhouse spoke with Fain again on November 5.

By Julie Grant - Allegheny Front, November 7, 2023

Transportation is responsible for one-third of the nation’s greenhouse gases, more than any other sector of the economy. To slash these emissions, President Joe Biden set a goal for half of all new US passenger vehicle sales to be electric vehicles by 2030. The 2022 Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) is providing billions of dollars to assist U.S. automakers with this transition. 

As part of the process, automakers have been building or planning battery plants, including about a dozen in the southeast US, six in Michigan, and two in Ohio.

By Peter Dreier - The Progressive, November 7, 2023

If it weren’t for the war in Israel-Palestine, and the election of an abortion absolutist and lesser-known election denier as Speaker of the House, the recent settlement of the United Auto Workers strike with the three major auto companies would have been the biggest news story in the country.

After the strike began on September 15, the union staggered the walkouts at different facilities at different times in order to keep the companies guessing and to escalate when additional pressure was needed, rather than have all 150,000 members who work at the three companies walk out at once.

ltogether, about 34,000 workers at nine auto factories and thirty-eight parts warehouses in over twenty states walked off the job. It marked the first time in the union’s history that it went on strike at all three companies simultaneously. Ford was the first company to reach an agreement with the union, followed by Stellantis (the parent of Chrysler, Jeep, and Ram), and then General Motors on October 30. GM caved in less than forty-eight hours after the union walked out at its largest North American factory in Spring Hill, Tennessee. 

The workers scored one of the most impressive union triumphs in the past fifty years. They included: 

• 67 percent boost to the starting wage for new hires to over $30 per hour over the next four and a half years.
• 33 percent increase on the top wage from $32 to no more than $42 an hour over that period.
• 25 percent overall pay increase and reinstatement of annual cost-of-living adjustments that the UAW lost in 2009.
• An end to the two-tier wage system through which some workers make lower starting salaries and get lower pay increases. 
• Boosts to retirement income, including an increase in 401(k) contributions from 6.4 percent to 10 percent. 
• The right to strike if the automakers seek to close factories and lay off workers.

Temporary workers will also become full-time employees after nine months of continuous employment. “We have slammed the door on having a permanent underclass of temporary workers,” UAW president Shawn Fain said.

The UAW also scored a pioneering victory for both union jobs and climate justice—two goals that some pundits consider to be at odds. The tentative contract includes Stellantis’ agreement to re-open a factory in Belvidere, Illinois, that once employed 1,200 UAW members and to add a new electric vehicle battery plant nearby that will employ 2,000 to 3,000 workers. The company also agreed to invest $155 million into three electrical vehicle factories in Kokomo, Indiana. The UAW’s tentative contract with GM will allow workers at the company’s currently operational and future joint-venture battery plants to hold votes on unionizing and decide whether they want their contracts to be included in the UAW’s master contract.

The tentative contract settlement between the UAW and the two large automakers still needs to be ratified by the union’s rank-and-file members. 

The union’s core message throughout the strike was simple: After years of stagnant wages and painful concessions, workers should share in the auto industry’s prosperity.

By Union Jake and Adam Keller - Valley Labor Report, November 2, 2023

By Union Jake, Adam Keller, et. al. - Valley Labor Report, November 6, 2023

By Kshama Sawant and Bia Lacombe - On Strike, November 6, 2023

By Carolyn Fortuna - Clean Technica, November 5, 2023

Tesla is facing its most serious labor dispute ever in Europe as dock workers in Sweden threaten to block deliveries of new Teslas entering the country. If the November 7 blockade is enacted, “no Teslas will be able to enter Sweden” in the 4 ports of Malmö, Gothenburg, Trelleborg, and Södertälje, says union chair Tommy Wreeth. It’s part of “sympathy measures” as labor unions reinforce the efforts of other workers who are currently on strike against Tesla, as reported by Wired.

The Swedish Transport Workers’ Union represents 57,000 workers. They are rallying to stand by metal workers at Tesla’s Swedish 7 repair shops who have been on strike since October 27. Their dispute rests with Tesla’s refusal to sign a collective agreement with their union, IF Metall. Collective agreements in Sweden are quite common and outline terms of pay, pensions, and working conditions. Without a collective agreement, these repair shop workers earn less and lack the same benefit packages as the others in their field.

Around 90% of Swedish employees are covered by collective agreements. “We would like our members working at Tesla to have the same benefits as basically everybody else on the Swedish labor market,” says Jesper Pettersson, spokesperson for IF Metall. “We don’t see any reason why Tesla should play by different rules.”

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has consistently rejected calls to allow the company’s 127,000 employees worldwide to unionize.

“Shame on you, Tesla, shame on you!” Stefan Löfven, former Swedish Social Democrat Prime Minister and former IF Metall leader, exclaimed. Löfven’s message was posted on Facebook on Sunday, October 29. It revealed he would be boycotting Elon Musk’s cabs and encouraged others to postpone a purchase of a Tesla “until an agreement is signed.”

The first stage of the strike affected some 130 mechanics, but the strike was expanded on Friday to include some 470 more workers at 17 other facilities. These facilities service many brands of vehicles, but the work stoppage on repairing cars only applies to Teslas. What does that look like? The workers attend their usual shifts, and they work on other car models as assigned. The Teslas that have been brought in for repairs sit unattended.

By Olivia Rosane - Common Dreams, November 3, 2023

Days after the United Auto Workers announced tentative deals with the Big Three carmakers, Toyota confirmed this week that it would offer raises to its nonunion U.S. factory workers.

The Japanese automaker said Wednesday that hourly manufacturers at the top of the pay scale would see a 9% raise beginning January 1, Reuters reported. UAW president Shawn Fain, who is attempting to use the union's victory to bolster the wider labor movement, said that the timing of Toyota's announcement was no coincidence.

"Toyota isn't giving out raises out of the goodness of their heart," he said in a video statement shared by More Perfect Union on Friday. "Toyota is the largest and most profitable auto company in the world. They could have just as easily raised wages a month ago or a year ago. They did it now because the company knows we're coming for them."

By Union Jake and Adam Keller - Valley Labor Report, November 2, 2023

By Nelson Lichtenstein - Jacobin, November 1, 2023

The UAW’s victory in its forty-five-day strike against the Big Three Detroit automakers is historic and transformative, ending a forty-three-year era of concession bargaining and labor movement defeat that began with Chrysler’s near bankruptcy in 1979 and Ronald Reagan’s destruction of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization two years later.

Not only did the union win substantial wage increases for all members in its tentative agreements (TAs) — at least 25 percent over the four-and-a-half-year contract — but the wage structure is radically progressive, eliminating the second- and third-class status endured by thousands of temps and second-tier workers. With the regularization of their employment status, these workers will enjoy extraordinary pay increases, in some cases upward of 150 percent.

And the union clawed back the annual cost-of-living adjustment (COLA) that had been eliminated during the 2008 financial crisis. COLA had been a standard feature of UAW contracts since 1948, when General Motors first proposed it to the union to blunt the effort, forcefully pushed by then UAW president Walter Reuther, to limit auto and steel industry price hikes either through collective bargaining or government regulation. The labor movement at the time was fighting to limit inflation but secure a healthy wage increase — benefitting working class and middle class alike, union and nonunion, by advancing a program that shifted income and wealth from capital to labor.

That ambition failed during the increasingly conservative postwar years, making COLA increasingly coveted, and not just among industrial workers. During the major 2022 strike of graduate students and other academic workers at the University of California, winning COLA became the key demand of the most radical and activist segment of the student workers. Among the unionized workers of the Big Three, the restoration of COLA will probably add a 7 or 8 percent wage boost to the nominal wages workers earn over the life of the contract. (UAW members still need to ratify the tentative agreements, which they’re expected to do so in the coming weeks given the strength of the deals.)

UAW president Shawn Fain and other progressives, in the unions and out, have correctly denounced the vast pay inequalities that have given corporate CEOs three or four hundred times more income than the bulk of those employed in the same firms. But that income gap has always had an abstract quality. Few workers ever meet a top executive. Far more important, and divisive, have been the petty inequalities within the working class itself. When the person doing the same work on the line or behind the counter is making two dollars more an hour, solidarity decays and resentment festers. That is why Shawn Fain’s campaign for the UAW presidency last year declared, “No corruption, no concessions, no tiers.”

Indeed, this strike victory, spearheaded by Fain and a new slate of union leaders, resembles the dynamic that launched onto the national stage other tribunes of the US working class, from Eugene V. Debs in 1894 and William Z. Foster in 1919 to Walter Reuther in 1946 and Cesar Chavez in the late 1960s, armed with a progressive message and a mobilized membership backing that up. The UAW strike flowed organically from the movement to democratize the union, a multigenerational effort that culminated in the successful push, led by an opposition caucus, United All Workers for Democracy (UAWD), to elect top union leaders by a referendum vote of the entire membership. This would curb the insularity, corruption, and self-perpetuating leadership of a UAW executive board long dominated by a machine known as the Administration Caucus.