Associated Press
Mon, September 18, 2023
United Auto Workers members walk a picket line during a strike at the Ford Motor Company Michigan Assembly Plant in Wayne, Mich., Friday, Sept. 15, 2023.
The auto workers' strike against Detroit's Big Three went into its fourth day on Monday with no signs of an early breakthrough and against the threat that the walkout could soon spread.
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said she is hoping for a quick resolution, and that it is too soon to gauge the impact of the strike.
“It's premature to be making forecasts about what it means for the economy. It would depend on how long the strike lasts and who would be affected by it,” she said on CNBC.
Yellen said labor activism this year — strikes by Hollywood writers and actors, by workers at about 150 Starbucks locations and walkouts that were narrowly averted at United Parcel Service and West Coast ports — has been driven by a strong labor market and high demand for workers.
In a sign of the potential economic and political of a long strike, President Joe Biden is sending two top administration officials to Detroit this week to meet with both sides. Biden has sided with the UAW in brief public comments, saying that the automakers have not fairly shared their record profits with workers.
An administration official said Monday that acting Labor Secretary Julie Su and senior aide Gene Sperling will not serve as mediators — they won't be at the bargaining table — but are going to Detroit “to help support the negotiations in any way the parties feel is constructive.” The official was not authorized to discuss private discussions and spoke anonymously.
UAW President Shawn Fain said Monday that the Biden administration won't broker a deal.
“This is our battle. Our members are out there manning the picket lines," Fain said on MSNBC. "This battle is not about the president, it’s not about the former president.”
Rather than launching an all-out strike of its 146,000 members, the union opted to target three factories — one at each company — a plan that could make the union's $825 million strike fund last longer.
A key feature of the strategy is the threat of escalating the strike if the union is unhappy with the pace of bargaining. On Friday, Fain said more factories could be targeted: “It could be in a day, it could be in a week.”
Nicholas Gordon
Mon, September 18, 2023
The president of the auto workers union had harsh words for Elon Musk, the Tesla CEO and longtime nemesis of organized labor.
Workers in companies like Tesla “are scraping to get by so that greedy CEOs and greedy people like Elon Musk can build more rocket ships,” United Auto Workers president Shawn Fain said on CBS’s Face the Nation program Sunday.
In statements outlining their position, Ford Motor, General Motors and Stellantis—collectively known as the “Big Three”—have warned that the union’s demands would worsen the already-existing cost gap with other car companies with non-unionized workforces.
On Thursday, Ford said that meeting the UAW’s demands would double its labor costs, already “significantly higher than the labor costs of Tesla, Toyota and other foreign-owned automakers in the United States that utilize non-union-represented labor.”
Responding to these concerns, Fain claimed on CBS that labor costs made up just 5% of a vehicle’s cost. “[Automakers] could double our wages and not raise the price of the vehicles and still make billions in profits,” he said. The union president called wages at Tesla and other companies “pitiful.”
Representative Debbie Dingell (D-Mich.), whose district covers part of the Detroit area, echoed these concerns on CBS. “Tesla does have a huge discrepancy in what they’re paying their employees. And most people in this country can’t afford a Tesla,” she said, referring to the car’s high price.
But Dingell suggested that a win for the UAW could help non-unionized workers too. “Almost all workers at auto plants benefit from where these negotiations go,” she said.
What are auto workers demanding?
The UAW started a targeted strike on Friday, walking out of three plants in Missouri, Ohio and Michigan. The union has suggested that starting small will allow most of its members to keep working, while preserving room for further escalation.
Negotiations between the union and the Big Three restarted over the weekend. The UAW said it had “reasonably productive discussions” with Ford on Saturday.
Ford said it was committed to reaching a deal with the union in a statement to Reuters on Saturday.
Still, the union and the automakers appear far apart. The UAW is currently asking for a mid-30% wage increase over the lifespan of the new contract, down from the initial demand for a 40% pay hike, but still far from what auto manufacturers have offered, at 20% at most.
The union is also asking for other benefits, including a shorter work week and, importantly, an expansion of benefits to plants working on electric vehicles. (Many of these factories are joint ventures with foreign companies, and not unionized).
The UAW’s president wants to recover lost ground after the 2008 auto bailout, when workers agreed to give up longstanding benefits to save auto companies from bankruptcy.
“The workers were unfairly blamed for everything that was wrong with those companies,” Fain said on Sunday, instead blaming “bad decisions on the parts of the companies that put us in that position.”
“We made all the sacrifices,” Fain argued, and “after a decade of massive profits, the workers have [gone] backwards.”
What about Tesla?
The UAW has long tried to organize workers at Tesla, which does not have a unionized workforce.
The union tried, and failed, to organize workers at the EV maker’s plant in Fremont, Calif. in 2018. The UAW then accused Tesla of illegally interfering in unionizing efforts, pointing to a tweet from CEO Elon Musk.
At the time, Musk asked why Tesla’s workers would “pay union dues and give up stock options for nothing” if they voted to join the UAW. The union alleged that workers could interpret the Tesla CEO’s tweet as a threat to take away stock options if they organized.
The National Labor Relations Board ordered Tesla to delete the tweet, as well as rehire a Tesla employee allegedly fired over organizing activity. The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals is now evaluating the order.
Musk has continued to needle the auto workers union on social media. “We pay more than the UAW btw, but performance expectations are also higher,” Musk posted to social media platform X, which he owns, on Thursday.
Yet industry data suggest that Tesla employees earn as much as a third less as their unionized counterparts. Tesla workers earn $45 an hour in wages and benefits, while those at UAW-represented plants can make up to $66 an hour, according to the Wall Street Journal citing industry data.
Tesla employees do receive stock options. Musk on Thursday claimed that “quite a few of our factory techs who work on the line have become millionaires over the years from company stock grants.”
Tesla did not immediately respond to an inquiry about pay at the company.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
Brian Howey
Mon, September 18, 2023
KOKOMO — Buried deep in the wallet of Shawn Fain is a well-worn pay stub of one of his two grandfathers. It’s a reminder of where the new United Auto Workers president comes from.
Two of his grandparents were General Motor retirees at Kokomo and one worked at Chrysler starting in 1937. Nine years later in 1946, the UAW’s negotiation strategy with the then-Big Three American automakers was to bargain with one, and then use that template for the other two.
Fain is now in the vortex of the American labor movement. He was elected as president of the UAW in March after beginning his career as an electrician at the Chrysler Kokomo Casting Plant. His election was seen as a sea change in the world of automaking.
“He’s always been a labor activist. He was always locally popular with rank and file members,” said former Kokomo Mayor Greg Goodnight, who worked for Haynes International and was a union president at the same time as Fain was at Chrysler (now a unit of Stellantis).
Brian Howey
But Fain is negotiating in Detroit far differently than his predecessors. The UAW’s contracts at the Detroit automakers expired at 11:59 p.m. Thursday. He said on Wednesday that while there has been progress, the four sides are still far apart.
In the year before the Great Recession put Chrysler and GM on the brink of extinction in 2008, “Shawn was anti-ratification due to the agreement implementing tiers and cutting wages for workers in half,” the UAW website said. “Many times, at council meetings, he was ostracized for speaking up against the agreements as they didn’t serve the best interest of the Membership.”
Fain was asked on CNN last week whether a strike at the Detroit automakers could damage the recovering U.S. economy. “In the last decade they made a quarter of a trillion dollars in profits,” Fain said. “It’s not that we’re going to wreck the economy. We’re going to wreck their economy, the one that works for the billionaire class. It doesn’t work for the working class.”
Fain also isn’t reticent about wading into American politics. This comes as the House Republican Study Group formerly headed by U.S. Rep. Jim Banks advocated a shift from Republican advocacy of big business to that of blue-collar workers.
Asked on MSNBC whether he plans to endorse President Biden for reelection, Fain responded, “We’ll make that decision when the time is right. Our endorsements are going to be earned, not freely given.”
He then pivoted to “the other person we talked about, the other candidate,” meaning Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump. In 2020, Trump carried Howard County (home to GM and Stellantis plants in Kokomo) with 65% of the vote, to Biden’s 33%, up from 63% in 2016. In Allen County (GM at Fort Wayne), in 2020 it was Trump 55%-43% over Biden. In Lawrence County (GM at Bedford) Trump carried it with 74%. In Grant County (GM at Marion) Trump won with 68%.
“I’ll never forget in the ’16 race when he spoke about workers in Michigan, union jobs in the Midwest, he said we need to do a rotation in this country," Fain said. "We need to move those jobs to other places that pay less money and those people will be begging for their jobs back. That’s not a person I want as my president.”
UAW negotiations: What Detroit automakers have to give the UAW to get a deal, according to experts
UAW membership woes: UAW membership peaked at 1.5 million workers in the late 70s, here's how it's changed
The Wall Street Journal observed on Tuesday: “Unions aren’t the force in the U.S. that they used to be. That doesn’t mean they can’t pack a punch.”
In the coming days, we’ll find out how hard that punch is.
Brian Howey is senior writer and columnist for Howey Politics Indiana/State Affairs. Find Howey on Facebook and Twitter @hwypol.
Brian KNOWLTON
Sun, September 17, 2023
The United Auto Workers (UAW) union is threatening to 'amp' up
The United Auto Workers chief warned Sunday that a historic strike at the top three car manufacturers will expand if the companies do not raise their wage offers in ongoing negotiations.
Stellantis, one of the three, had offered its workers what it called a "highly competitive" wage increase of 21 percent over four years, but UAW President Shawn Fain called that "definitely a no-go."
"If we don't get better offers and... take care of the members' needs, we're going to amp this up even more," Fain told CBS News talk show "Face the Nation," saying General Motors, Ford and Stellantis have "no excuse" for not resolving salary disputes given their massive profits of recent years.
"We're prepared to do whatever we have to do. The membership is ready, the membership is fed up."
The UAW is demanding improved conditions across the board for its workers, including a 40 percent pay raise over the next four-year contract. All three companies have been offering raises of around 20 percent.
A UAW source confirmed that the union held talks with General Motors on Sunday, the third day of the strike, but offered no further details.
The standoff has fed already acrimonious debate in Washington over President Joe Biden’s economic policies ahead of the 2024 election -- and whether he has done enough to avert or resolve the auto dispute.
Only 12,700 of the union's 150,000 workers are currently on strike, but Fain's comments pointed to the possibility of a much broader action, with echoes throughout the economy.
- 2024 presidential race -
Republicans on Sunday tried to tie the strike to voters' concerns on inflation and the Biden administration's overall economic leadership.
"I have no doubt in my mind that all those hard-working autoworkers are living in the same reality as other Americans, and that is that wages are not keeping up with inflation," former vice president Mike Pence said on CNN.
Pence, who is seeking the Republican presidential nomination in the 2024 election, blamed Biden's stewardship for "the worst inflation in 40 years" and added that the administration's electric vehicles push would mainly benefit battery-makers in China.
Pence's former boss Donald Trump, who holds a resounding lead in polls over other Republican presidential aspirants, has been critical of the union's leadership and of Biden's focus on promoting EV manufacturing.
"The auto workers will not have any jobs... because all of these cars are going to be made in China -- the electric cars, automatically, are going to be made in China," Trump said in an interview aired Sunday on NBC's "Meet the Press."
Democrats have lined up solidly behind the autoworkers -- and Biden.
"The president has made it clear which side he is on in this struggle," liberal senator Bernie Sanders said on CNN, adding that Biden had repeatedly said "that a strong labor movement benefits all of us."
On social media, Vice President Kamala Harris said she agreed that "a new contract should promote good middle-class jobs -- and ensure the UAW remains at the heart of our auto economy."
Hakeem Jeffries, the Democratic leader of the House of Representatives, echoed that theme.
"Incredible economic prosperity has been generated for the corporations," he told ABC's "This Week," shortly before heading to Detroit to stand with the workers. "It’s only fair that everyone share in those record profits."
bbk/sms/tjj
No comments:
Post a Comment