General Motors (GM)

By Keith Brower Brown - Labor Notes, July 25, 2023

David Sandoval remembers when he and his co-workers had a whole 72 seconds to assemble their sections of each seat for the Ford F-150, back when he started at a Michigan parts plant in 2004.

Today, 60 seconds is the deadline managers give each team racing at a dozen stations: to bolt the frame together, lay electronics, add heating and cooling gear, set cushions, and attach trim. Robotic lifting arms help on only one or two steps; handheld tools and elbow grease must do the rest. Each crew is told to clear 680 seats in a 10-hour shift.

That harsh speedup makes it small wonder that repetitive motion injuries are piling up for U.S. auto workers, while the Big 3 auto companies—Ford, General Motors, and Stellantis (formerly Chrysler)—posted $250 billion in profits in just the last four years.

On September 14, union contracts expire for 144,000 Big 3 workers. A company-wide strike at one of the three looks likely, especially after United Auto Workers members elected a reform slate to lead their union. The new president, Shawn Fain, has pledged a contract campaign and a strike–if needed–to end wage tiers, and to put workers at the wheel of the transition to electric vehicles (EVs).

To understand how that contract fight starts from conditions on the shop floor, Labor Notes interviewed workers at each of the Big 3 companies and an independent parts supplier.

From the Midwest to the South, auto workers say that their plant managers have seized on the pandemic and the EV transition to push an unsafe work pace, longer shifts and more of them, and divisions between workers. Meanwhile, some company executives are threatening layoffs and are openly preparing for a strike by stocking inventory and hiring temporary workers.

By Shawn Fein, et. al - United Auto Workers, May 31, 2023

By Dan DiMaggio - Labor Notes, May 18, 2023

Contracts covering 150,000 auto workers at the Big 3 will expire on September 14, and the new leadership of the United Auto Workers is taking a more aggressive stance than in years past.

“We’re going to launch our biggest contract campaign ever in our history,” UAW President Shawn Fain told members in a Facebook live video.

Fain took office in March after winning the union’s first one member, one vote election. Running on the slogan, “No Corruption, No Concessions, No Tiers,” he and the Members United slate swept all the positions they ran for, giving reformers a majority on the international executive board.

While the union has vowed to take on tiered wages and benefits, job security, and plant closures, the transition to electric vehicles (EV) looms especially large.

Since President Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act last August, companies have announced $120 billion in investments in domestic EV and battery manufacturing. The Act includes big tax credits and incentives for clean energy and EVs.

Ford alone is investing $11 billion in a new EV assembly plant and battery factories in Tennessee and Kentucky. The Biden administration wants EVs to make up half of all new vehicles sold by 2030.

By Dan DiMaggio - Labor Notes, May 18, 2023

Contracts covering 150,000 auto workers at the Big 3 will expire on September 14, and the new leadership of the United Auto Workers is taking a more aggressive stance than in years past.

“We’re going to launch our biggest contract campaign ever in our history,” UAW President Shawn Fain told members in a Facebook live video.

Fain took office in March after winning the union’s first one member, one vote election. Running on the slogan, “No Corruption, No Concessions, No Tiers,” he and the Members United slate swept all the positions they ran for, giving reformers a majority on the international executive board.

While the union has vowed to take on tiered wages and benefits, job security, and plant closures, the transition to electric vehicles (EV) looms especially large.

Since President Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act last August, companies have announced $120 billion in investments in domestic EV and battery manufacturing. The Act includes big tax credits and incentives for clean energy and EVs.

Ford alone is investing $11 billion in a new EV assembly plant and battery factories in Tennessee and Kentucky. The Biden administration wants EVs to make up half of all new vehicles sold by 2030.

By Kenny Stancil - Common Dreams, May 4, 2023

"We need to get our members organized behind a pro-worker, pro-climate, and pro-democracy political program that can deliver for the working class," says a memo from the union's new president.

The United Auto Workers is withholding its endorsement of U.S. President Joe Biden in the early stages of the 2024 race in an attempt to extract concessions that would ensure the nascent transition to all-electric vehicles benefits labor as well as the environment.

"We need to get our members organized behind a pro-worker, pro-climate, and pro-democracy political program that can deliver for the working class," says a memo written by UAW president Shawn Fain and shared internally on Tuesday.

Fain, an electrician from Indiana, won a March runoff election to lead the Detroit-based union, defeating incumbent Ray Curry of the powerful Administration Caucus in a major upset. Fain's victory, one of several in which challengers from the insurgent Members United slate prevailed, gave reformers control of UAW's direction. The new president quickly promised a more confrontational approach, decrying "give-back unionism" and vowing to "put the members back in the driver's seat, regain the trust of the rank and file, and put the companies on notice."

A reinvigorated UAW is also putting Biden on notice by holding onto its coveted endorsement. With 400,000 active members and a heavy presence in the battleground state of Michigan, the union remains a significant political force. Its goal is to pressure Biden into improving federal policies related to electric vehicle (EV) manufacturing.

"The federal government is pouring billions into the electric vehicle transition, with no strings attached and no commitment to workers," Fain wrote in his new memo. "The EV transition is at serious risk of becoming a race to the bottom. We want to see national leadership have our back on this before we make any commitments."

As The New York Timesreported Wednesday:

In April, the Biden administration proposed the nation's most ambitious climate regulations yet, which would ensure that two-thirds of new passenger cars are all-electric by 2032—up from just 5.8% today. The rules, if enacted, could sharply lower planet-warming pollution from vehicle tailpipes, the nation's largest source of greenhouse emissions. But they come with costs for autoworkers, because it takes fewer than half the laborers to assemble an all-electric vehicle as it does to build a gasoline-powered car.

But it's not just potential job losses that are of concern to UAW leaders. They also want to see higher wages and better benefits for workers at EV facilities.

By Keith Brower Brown - Labor Notes, April 25, 2023

Huge changes are coming for our workplaces, quick as a heat wave. This month Joe Biden inked new rules to make all-electrics the majority of new cars sold in America within a decade.

o charge all those batteries, many of the largest states are pushing to power their grids with two-thirds clean energy by the same deadline.

These green shifts have put billion-dollar signs in the eyes of bosses. Public cash is pouring out to subsidize cleaner manufacturing and energy. Corporations aim to cash in double by cutting unions out.

Automakers like General Motors are setting up huge parts of the electric car supply chain in anti-union “joint venture” plants. Solar energy jobs, as of 2022, were 90 percent non-union across the country. Union-busting is even more disgusting in a green disguise.

But as the song goes, “Without our brains and muscle, not a single wheel can turn.” That goes for electric wheels, too.

The enormous sweat and smarts needed for any climate transition worth the name give workers huge potential leverage, from electricians in Arizona to auto workers in Tennessee.

And around these green boom-towns, childcare, education, health, and logistics workers could see their leverage grow, too.

By Paul Prescod - ZNet, December 21, 2022

The transition to electric vehicles is mandatory to address climate change. But if done haphazardly, it could result in massive job losses. Bold industrial policy and a rejuvenated United Auto Workers union can make electric vehicles a win for workers.

As the climate crisis grinds on, policymakers and economic elites are finally reading the writing on the wall for fossil fuels. The major automobile manufacturing companies have been devastatingly slow on the uptake, but they’re now starting to signal a greater commitment to the transition to electric vehicles.

Over the summer, Ford announced plans to invest $3.7 billion in electric vehicle production facilities across the Midwest. General Motors has increased its electric vehicle production target from one million by 2025 to two million. Newer companies like Tesla, Rivian, and Lucid have made their mark by manufacturing electric vehicles and are set to continue to grow.

While electric vehicle production is not free from environmental problems, the use of these cars over gas-powered ones would certainly be better for the climate.

But without broader changes to our industrial policy, the transition to electric vehicle production will not necessarily be good news for workers in the automobile industry.

As a recent study by the Economic Policy Institute outlines, without increased domestic production of electric vehicle batteries and other power train components, the large-scale introduction of electric vehicles could result in the loss of over two hundred fifty thousand jobs in automobile assembly and parts production. Currently, 75 percent of power train components for gas-powered vehicles are manufactured in the United States, as compared to just under 45 percent for electric vehicles.

The assembly of battery-powered electric vehicles is less complex and requires fewer workers than vehicles with an internal combustion engine. These job losses can only be offset if two conditions are met: a significant strengthening of domestic industries in the electric vehicle supply chain and electric vehicles rising to 50 percent of domestic automobile sales by 2030.

The Economic Policy Institute modeled various scenarios for the large-scale introduction of electric vehicles in the US market. In a scenario where electric vehicles reach 30 percent of the market share with current domestic production levels of electric vehicle power train components, around twenty thousand assembly jobs and twenty-five thousand parts jobs would be lost.

However, if an increase in electric vehicle market share can be matched with corresponding levels of power train production, over a hundred fifty thousand jobs would be gained.

While these scenarios may seem like abstract and technocratic formulations, they have deep implications for the future of important segments of the working class. For those still employed in the production of automobiles, the industry represents a critical gateway to a higher standard of living.

By Gordon Lafer, Derrick Figures, Cindy Estrada, Kyle Moore, and Jennifer Sherer - Economic Policy Institute, November 9, 2021

By Derek Seidman - Labor Notes, June 2, 2021

With its contracts expiring in 2022, the Canadian Union of Postal Workers is stepping up the fight for its own vision of the post office of the future.

It’s a model for exactly the kind of Green New Deal campaign that U.S. unions should be launching now for a post-Covid economic recovery.

For several years, CUPW and its allies have proposed a visionary plan called Delivering Community Power. It advances a big but simple idea: take Canada Post, an institution that’s already publicly owned and embedded in communities, and reinvent it to drive a just transition into a post-carbon economy.

The post office would help to jump-start green vehicle production and infrastructure; it would provide free Internet access for all; it would create a nationwide system of public banking. And all these measures would help to shore up and expand the post office as a unionized, community-centered alternative to the proliferation of Amazon delivery vans. (For more detail, see the box at the bottom of this article.)

By Francesca Hannan, Stephen Buhler, and Simon Black - The Socialist Project, April 4, 2021