union busting

By Union Jake and Adam Keller - Valley Labor Report, November 21, 2023

By Ryan Cooper - The Prospect, November 21, 2023

Electric-vehicle manufacturer Tesla has been involved in an escalating dispute with IF Metall, the trade union representing its mechanics in Sweden. After several years of the union trying to get the company to sign a collective-bargaining agreement, the mechanics went on strike on October 27—and now Tesla is facing a full-blown campaign of sympathy strikes. Dockworkers are refusing to unload Tesla shipments, electricians will not repair Tesla chargers, cleaning companies will not service Tesla buildings, and now as of Monday, the Swedish postal union is refusing to deliver Tesla mail and packages.

As my colleague Harold Meyerson noted last week, these kind of strikes are largely illegal in the United States thanks to the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act (though the exact legal details, as usual in the American context, are hideously complicated). Carry out a sympathy strike in the States and you might be fired, see your union decertified, or even be sued for damages.

In theory, Tesla could just abandon the Swedish market, but it is quite large relative to its size—nearly 45 percent of auto sales there this year have been EVs, and the Tesla Model Y has been the best-selling vehicle by a big margin. So it’s worth examining the Tesla situation for some lessons.

This is far from the first time an arrogant foreign business, convinced that it can impose U.S.-style hyper-exploitative labor relations at will, has tangled with Nordic union power and been unceremoniously crushed. Probably the most famous previous example was when McDonald’s tried to bigfoot the Danish labor movement in the 1980s by refusing to sign any union contracts.

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 Chris Townsend - Marxist-Leninism Today, October 30, 2023

Any knowledgeable observer of the United Auto Workers Union (UAW) over the past 50 years would have inevitably been forced to note that over recent decades the union’s membership had been dramatically slashed by hostile employers and politicians, that both union activity levels and influence had declined massively, and in many quarters the auto union had been transformed into a particularly virulent company union.

So addled and company-captured was the UAW top leadership that by 2014 a series of federal government criminal investigations and prosecutions grew, expanded, and eventually led to the removal of more than 30 national UAW leaders. The resulting U.S. government-ordered union election which produced Shawn Fain as new President of the UAW in March of this year was an earthquake both inside and outside the union.

Auto union old guarders and employers alike both feared the election of Fain. But by the narrowest margins Fain was elected to the top spot, and in just several months the union is already well into an expanding process of renewal. It is still early, and only time will tell, but the current strike struggle is clearly solid evidence of the new leadership’s intention to restore the union to a serious trade union path.

By Laura Clawson - Daily Kos, October 30, 2023

“Record profits mean record contracts” sounded like an aspirational slogan as the United Auto Workers went on strike against the Big Three automakers. But it’s what the union made happen over a six-week strike that now ends thanks to a tentative agreement with General Motors. Ford and Stellantis had agreed to tentative deals in recent days. Workers still need to ratify those contracts, but workers are back on the job at Ford and Stellantis and will be heading back to work at GM.

The union made big gains on pay and ending the two-tier system that left newer workers making much less than their longer-tenured coworkers. But that’s not all: The agreements offer both hope for a more just clean energy transition and a rebuttal to the top Republican talking point about the strike.

By Chris Townsend, Union Jake, and Adam Keller - The Valley Labor Report, October 12, 2023

By Daniel Boguslaw - The Intercept, October 10, 2023

Stellantis — one of the big three automakers locked in negotiations with the United Auto Workers — is mobilizing its internal diversity groups to provide volunteer labor at parts distribution facilities affected by the UAW strike, according to internal emails obtained by The Intercept. The communications marked with Stellantis’s Diversity and Inclusion logo seek members of the company’s Business Resource Groups, or BRGs, to help keep parts flowing to the automakers’ customers. 

Company officials put out a request last week for volunteers to staff its parts distribution centers across the country, particularly in Michigan. The Working Parents Network, a BRG, forwarded that call-out to its members, noting, “Each BRG will pick a specific day of the week/weekend to volunteer as a team.” The email continued: “Help continue to be the RESOURCE the BUSINESS can count on!” In another email, the parents group wrote that “Stellantis needs your help in running the Parts Distribution Centers (PDC) to ensure a steady supply of parts to our customers while negotiations continue. Working Parents Network has identified Friday, October 13 as WPN’s BRG Day at the PDCs!” 

The initial request — sent by Stellantis’s North America Chief Operating Officer Mark Stewart, and Mike Koval, head of Mopar North America, Stellantis’s parts subsidiary — came three weeks into the 150,000-member union’s strike against Stellantis, General Motors, and Ford. UAW President Shawn Fain has praised Ford for making good-faith progress and announced last week that General Motors had agreed to include battery facilities in the national UAW master agreement — heading off contentious battles over unionizing new electric vehicle facilities. Stellantis’s call for volunteer labor to break up the strike, meanwhile, comes as the company remains intransigent in the face of negotiations.

By Union Jake and Adam Keller - Valley Labor Report, October 3, 2023

By Carolyn Fortuna - Clean Technica, September 30, 2023

Instead of joining a debate with 7 Republican candidates vying for the position of party presidential nominee, Donald J. Trump decided to visit a non-union auto parts plant in Michigan. During the stop, Trump excoriated the Biden administration for its push toward transportation electrification. The language Trump used during his Detroit stop was part of a broader goal to divide a self-identified pro-union advocate in President Joe Biden from an automotive workforce that is in turmoil.

The campaign rally was concurrent with the ongoing UAW strike, in which concerns over wage loss, diminishing benefits, and the length of workweek have led to an impasse between Detroit automakers and their workers. Moreover, the UAW feels the billions of dollars in tax incentives and loans sprinkled on automakers to retool their factories for EVs was flawed, as the incentive had not stipulated that automakers with a union-only workforce would benefit.

Trump sought to use the campaign stop to appeal to white working class voters in a critical swing state. The UAW malaise has been positioned by both parties as a gauge for potential votes, and the strike is having its effects on automakers — Ford halted production on its CATL project this week.

The language Trump used during his Detroit area stop is indicative of his powerful and quite scary persuasive capacity. Let’s zoom in on how he described EVs and his personal commitment to autoworkers. We’ll deconstruct facts, fantasy, and the ever-so-difficult gray areas that auto manufacturers are facing as they open a door to a new era of innovation – and the costs thereof.