Can the UAW make history again?

The United Auto Workers (UAW) first made history with its victorious 1937 Flint sit-down strike against General Motors that ushered in the U.S.’ first wave of industrial unionization during the Great Depression. That victory opened the floodgates to union membership, peaking in the 1950s with roughly one-third of private sector workers belonging to a union.

The UAW made history again in 1979. However, this time its president, Doug Fraser, agreed to massive concessions—including a wage freeze and giving up 17 paid vacation days—when the U.S. government agreed to bail out the Chrysler Corporation from bankruptcy. For Fraser’s collaboration, Chrysler awarded him a seat on Chrysler’s board of directors. Meanwhile, the union movement entered a downward spiral that continues today. Only 6.1 percent of private sector workers belonged to unions last year.

The UAW now has the opportunity—perhaps its last—to revive the class struggle, which is the only way to begin to reverse the balance of class forces weighted so heavily in favor of the employers for so long.

On strike against the Big Three

For the first time in its 88-year history, the union has gone on strike against all of the Big Three Detroit automakers at once, instead of relying on the tradition of “pattern bargaining” in which the UAW strikes one of the companies and then the others abide by the terms of the agreement.

The strike that began on September 15th against General Motors (GM), Ford and Stellantis (formerly Fiat-Chrysler) comes after decades of decline that has gutted the union’s membership numbers. UAW membership peaked in 1979 at 1.5 million but today stands at roughly 400,000—with just under 150,000 of them autoworkers.

But the UAW has public opinion on its side, with an August 30th Gallup poll showing 75 percent support for the autoworkers’ side in the contract fight.

Moreover, the union finally ousted the last of its entrenched and corrupted union leadership clique last spring. In the membership’s first direct election of top officers in UAW’s history, new president Shawn Fain barely eked out a victory, winning just 50.2 of the votes. Fain won as part of the reform slate calling itself “Members United,” which was a part of the union’s reform movement Unite All Workers for Democracy.

As the final votes were being counted, Fain declared “This is the end of company unionism, where the companies and the union work together in a friendly way, because it hasn’t been good for our members.”

As such, Fain refused the traditional union handshake with company officials at the start of negotiations. But this appears to have been more than symbolic. His combative words have thus far translated into action, with demands that workers begin to share in the exorbitant profits that they have generated for the automakers over the last decade—amounting to $250 billion, with $21 billion in the first six months of 2023 alone.

The union demands a 40 percent wage hike that would match the average increase in compensation over the last 4 years enjoyed by the companies’ chief executives: General Motors’ Mary Barra at $29 million; Stellantis’ Carlos Tavares at almost $25 million; and Ford’s Jim Farley at $21 million. Meanwhile, their workers’ wages have risen by only 6 percent, and, according to the Economic Policy Institute, autoworker wages across the U.S. have fallen by 19.3 percent since 2008.

Other demands of what the union calls a “standup strike” include, according to In These Times:

- Ending tiers. Before a major contract concession in 2007, newly hired auto workers could reach the maximum wage rate within three years and have guaranteed pensions and retiree healthcare. But “second-tier” workers — those hired since 2007 — must wait at least eight years before reaching top wage levels and get no pensions or post-retirement healthcare. The Big Three have also increasingly hired workers as low-paid temps, often extending the length of their supposedly “temporary” status before they can become permanent employees. The UAW wants to equalize pay and benefits so that all autoworkers, now and in the future, have pensions and retiree healthcare, and can reach maximum pay and permanent status within 90 days of being hired.
- Double-digit raises. The multimillionaire CEOs of GM, Ford and Stellantis have gotten an average raise of 40% over the past four years, so the union is seeking similarly large raises of around 46% for autoworkers over the course of the four-year contract. The UAW is relatedly calling for significant increases to the pension benefit paid to retirees.

- Restoring cost-of-living adjustments (COLAs), which tie wages to inflation. Once a signature feature of autoworker contracts, the UAW’s former leadership agreed to suspend COLAs in 2009 as GM and Chrysler faced bankruptcy amid the Great Recession.

- Work-life balance. Because their real hourly wages have fallen so dramatically amid years of concessions, many autoworkers put in 60 to 80-hour weeks to make ends meet, leaving less time to spend with their families. In addition to calling for more paid time off, the UAW is making the eye-catching demand for a 32-hour workweek at 40 hours’ pay. “If Covid did anything, it made people reflect on what’s important in life, and it sure as hell isn’t living in a factory,” Fain said last month.

- Job security. With automakers shutting down factories and moving production to wherever in the world they can exploit workers the most — a process that has gone on for over 40 years and continues—the UAW is demanding the right to strike over plant closures and is calling for the creation of a Working Family Protection Program, which would make the companies keep employees at shuttered factories on payroll doing community service work.

- Enhanced profit sharing. With the Big Three’s shareholders reaping the benefits of record profits, the union is proposing that workers get $2 for every $1 million spent on stock buybacks and special dividends.

- A just transition to electric vehicle (EV) manufacturing. Aided by federal subsidies, the Big Three are building EV battery plants as “joint ventures” with South Korean tech firms. But these new factories fall outside the collective bargaining agreements covering other UAW autoworkers, so wages and working conditions are far worse than at plants making gas-powered cars. As part of its fight to eliminate all tiers, the UAW wants to extend the same union standards to new EV plants. Since EV workers are not currently covered by the Big Three contracts, this is a public demand rather than a bargaining proposal. “The people who make cars shouldn’t have to choose between a green, sustainable job and one that pays good wages they’ve negotiated,” Sierra Club Executive Director Ben Jealous wrote last week in support of the UAW.

While it is doubtful that the union expects to achieve all its goals, it is aiming high, nevertheless. And the union’s strategy is not to call an all-out strike from the very beginning. So, it did not start with a bang as a UPS strike would have, if it had happened, in the summer, but rather what might seem to be a whimper. Nevertheless, this is the intent: to start with striking three assembly plants that produce popular SUVs and pickup trucks in Michigan, Ohio, and Missouri, while threatening to expand the strike to more plants if the companies refuse to make more generous offers. Fain has stated that the strike targets will expand by noon on Friday, September 22nd if there is no significant progress in negotiations.

It is worth noting that the first three plants on strike are highly profitable, including those that make the Jeep Wrangler, Chevy Colorado, and Ford Bronco. And auto assembly factories and parts plants are interdependent, so if one plant is on strike, it will soon affect others.

Fain explains this as an escalation strategy, in which the union has sent a signal that it is ready to strike as long as it takes and will roll out more strike targets with the passage of time. The companies will not know which targets are next until a strike happens. And Fain has said “An all-out strike is still a possibility.”

The union has $825 million in its strike fund, and it pays strikers $500 per week, along with every striker’s health care premiums. If the union went on an all-out strike, its funds would last just three months. This strategy will stretch those funds as long as possible—especially since the companies are rolling in profits and therefore able to withstand a strike for a relatively longer period of time.

When Stellantis offered to raise wages by 21 percent, Fain declared it a “no go.” When asked on Face the Nation on September 17th why the UAW would ask for higher wages than non-union autoworkers at Tesla and Toyota, Fain explained, “First off, labor costs are about 5 percent of the cost of the vehicle. They could double our wages and not raise the price of the vehicles and still make billions in profits. It’s a choice. And the fact that they want to compare it to how pitiful Tesla pays their workers and other companies pay their workers — that’s what this whole argument is about. Workers in this country got to decide if they want a better life for themselves, instead of scraping to get by paycheck to paycheck, while everybody else walks away with the loot.”

Shawn Fain: A sharp break from the UAW’s corrupt past

The 54-year-old Fain is a third generation UAW member from Kokomo, Indiana, with no experience running a national union. He started as an electrician at Chrysler, spending years advocating for workers on the shop floor before becoming a negotiator and then advancing to a role in the union administration.

Fain ran for president on a platform of greater transparency and combativeness against the employers. Throughout negotiations and since the strike began, he has hosted regular updates on the progress of bargaining on Facebook Live, attended by thousands of UAW members.

Fain is a devout Christian—not a political radical—but he witnessed first-hand the corruption of the UAW bureaucracy, in which union leaders embezzled $1.5 million in members’ dues and $3.5 million from union training centers. More than a dozen union officials pleaded guilty to the charges, while two former UAW presidents, Gary Jones and Dennis Williams, were sentenced to prison for their crimes.

UAW leaders usurped democracy in the union long ago, under the UAW’s president Walter Reuther, elected in 1946, who had played a key role in the UAW’s ascendancy in some of the key strikes of the 1930s. But Reuther did not run a democratic union. He was not corrupt but demanded complete loyalty within the union—which later led to union corruption. In the 1950s, he joined the anti-communist crusade against members of his own union.

As labor organizer and journalist Chris Brooks described in 2020,

The UAW’s Administration Caucus emerged from Reuther’s efforts to maintain control. Organized by Reuther in the late 1940s, the caucus has run the UAW for the past 70 years. Dissidents have long described the UAW as a “one-party state” because of how ruthlessly the Administration Caucus weeds out leaders and staff for so-called disloyalty.

The Administration Caucus moved the UAW toward a “business union” orientation, in which the union focuses narrowly on negotiating an ever-increasing standard of living for workers without broader challenges to how management runs its plants. The UAW won high wages and strong benefits, but work in auto plants remained dirty, dangerous and oppressive. Reuther often referred to auto factories as “gold-plated sweatshops.”

… As long as the companies maintained certain wages and benefits, UAW leaders wouldn’t challenge management’s authority — and would clamp down on militant workers who did. When a wildcat strike shut down Chrysler’s Mack Avenue stamping plant in 1973 to protest unsafe working conditions, UAW Vice President Doug Fraser assembled a “flying squadron” of more than a thousand Administration Caucus loyalists armed with baseball bats and pipes. In an act that would have dismayed the Flint sitdowners, Fraser’s crew beat the strike leaders in order to smash the picket line, and local police personally thanked Fraser for his help in keeping the plant humming.

With his union thuggery credentials thus established, Fraser advanced to UAW president. After negotiating the givebacks of the 1979 Chrysler bailout, Chrysler chairman Lee Iacocca returned, demanding more concessions in the next contract—including a pay cut of $1.15 per hour and the loss of three more vacation days. By 1985, when Chrysler had been restored to profitability, Iacocca had risen to the second-highest paid U.S. executive, while Chrysler had cut 50,000 jobs.

By the time that newly elected president Ronald Reagan crushed the Professional Air Traffic Controllers union (PATCO) in 1981, marking the official start of the employers’ offensive, it was already well underway.

Electric vehicles, Joe Biden and the UAW

President Joe Biden has called himself the “most pro-union president in U.S. history.” He gave the lie to that statement last December when his administration intervened to block railroad workers from going on strike. Now, he has fallen short of endorsing the UAW strike against the Big Three, merely encouraging all parties “to stay at the table and to work 24 and 7 to get a win-win agreement that keeps UAW workers at the heart of our auto future and ensures UAW jobs are good middle-class jobs.”

Biden has also proven that he does not have the labor movement’s priorities in mind, as part of his Inflation Reduction Act has injected billions into electric car and battery development, but without labor guarantees. Most of the money has flowed into Southern anti-union states building non-union factories.

As The Atlantic reported on September 15th, [Unions] worry that the companies are using the shift from internal-combustion engines to carbon-free electric vehicles to simultaneously shift more of their operations from high-paying union jobs mostly in northern states to lower-paying, nonunion jobs mostly in southern states:

Red states are receiving so many of the new projects partly because they have lower tax rates and electricity costs. But most analysts agree that companies have also channeled so much of their new investments toward red states because most of them have “right to work” laws that make it more difficult for unions to organize.

In the auto industry, this preference for states resistant to unions has translated into a surge of investment in the South. Brookings Metro calculated that the South has attracted 55 percent of the total private investment in electric vehicles and batteries under Biden. That’s more than double the portion of the new clean-vehicle investment that has flowed into the Midwest, whose existing auto plants are largely unionized. That torrent of new money includes plans to build EVs or their batteries by Hyundai and Rivian in Georgia, Toyota in North Carolina, Tesla in Texas, BMW in South Carolina, Mercedes-Benz in Alabama, General Motors in Tennessee, and Ford in Tennessee and Kentucky.

In addition, foreign-owned automakers, mostly located in the viciously anti-union South, now produce more vehicles sold in the U.S. than the Big Three companies combined. Today 80 percent of auto plants are non-union, and the UAW has not managed to unionize a single foreign-owned auto facility.

Fain has made clear that today’s UAW supports green investment: “We support a green economy. You know, we have to get behind this,” Fain said recently. But he has insisted that the electric automotive workforce needs union protection: “If we don’t secure this work … it’s not going to be a good future for anyone.”

Will Shawn Fain’s strike strategy win?

Only time will tell if the UAW’s 2023 strike strategy will win. It is the first time that this strategy has been tried. But more important than the strategy is the willingness of the union to stand firm against the employers, who are used to crushing workers over more than four decades—but perhaps they are overconfident now.

At this point, Fain has committed to standing up. And the UAW now has an opportunity to turn the tide.