[ With its successful strike, UAW broke with decades of
concessions, won on pay and workplace democracy, and launched a new
national labor leader. There’s much more organizing to be done, but
this is an unmitigated victory for the entire working class.]
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UAW STRIKERS HAVE SCORED A HISTORIC, TRANSFORMATIVE VICTORY  
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Nelson Lichtenstein
November 1, 2023
Jacobin [[link removed]]


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_ With its successful strike, UAW broke with decades of concessions,
won on pay and workplace democracy, and launched a new national labor
leader. There’s much more organizing to be done, but this is an
unmitigated victory for the entire working class. _

A UAW worker pickets outside the General Motors plant in Spring Hill,
Tennessee, October 30, 2023., Photo: Kevin Wurm / Bloomberg // Jacobin


 

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
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— 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
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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.

The Leader and the Strategy

Fain was not a leader of UAWD, but he made a name for himself inside
the union, in 2009, when he vigorously opposed the concessions at his
Kokomo, Indiana, Chrysler local that other UAW leaders accepted. He
was chosen by UAWD to head an insurgent slate after a 2021 referendum,
in which a majority of UAW members voted to henceforth elect top union
officers by union-wide election.

Although most on the Fain slate easily defeated candidates of the
ruling Administration Caucus, Fain was forced into a runoff against
incumbent Ray Curry, who argued for the virtues of “experience”
when the next round of collective bargaining began. The academic
workers and graduate students, who now comprise nearly a quarter of
the UAW membership, might well be credited with putting Fain over the
top. They had not participated in large numbers, but when they did,
university-employed people voted overwhelmingly for a changing of the
guard.

Fain got off to a running start right after the election results were
certified in March 2023. He put a new cohort of energetic labor
militants on his staff, toured the country to mobilize support for a
major confrontation with the corporations, and developed a rhetorical
voice that grew in strength, radicalism, and self-confidence in the
months leading up to the start of the strike on September 15 and
during the conflict itself.

From Walter Reuther
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the legendary UAW leader, Fain channeled the vision of the UAW as a
vanguard institution setting the pace and purpose for a newly
empowered working class; with Bernie Sanders
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he openly denounced the billionaire class. In a highly symbolic
rebuff, Fain absented himself at the formal start of negotiations when
UAW leaders and company officials offer an across-the-table handshake
for the press. Instead, Fain turned up at factory gates, pressing the
flesh with the UAW membership in preparation for the struggle ahead.

And there is one more element that has made Fain a forceful spokesman,
not only for his membership but for many thousands more. Fain deploys
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social gospel in a very skillful fashion. Raised in a Protestant
family, he declares that the UAW can “move mountains” when workers
have faith in their power and righteousness. He denounces the greed
and arrogance of corporate chieftains with the outrage of a prophet
and declares that in the contemporary industrial world they have
created a “hellish” underworld where men and women are forced to
endure overtime, insecure jobs, and wages that fail to keep pace with
either inflation or the never-ending growth of executive salaries. On
occasion, Fain has also unleashed a sort of Midwestern populist
condemnation of his cosmopolitan adversaries, as in one speech where
he told UAW members that the CEOs at the big auto companies would
never want to have dinner with their blue-collar employees or offer
them a ride on their corporate jets. To such class contempt, Fain
offered an even larger portion of disdain in return.

But rhetoric alone did not win the auto walkout. In a dramatic break
from a seventy-seven-year bargaining tradition, the UAW did not choose
just one company to strike and thereby set the “pattern” the
others would follow. Instead, the union hit selected plants at all
three companies, ratcheting up the number of factories and parts
depots on strike according to the progress — or lack of progress —
in negotiations.

Fain and his team called this the “stand-up strike,” in homage to
the Flint sit-downs that founded the UAW and the modern US trade union
movement in 1936–37. This strike and bargaining strategy had three
advantages: it kept the conflict in a suspenseful news cycle as each
new factory was shuttered; it preserved the UAW strike fund because
only a minority of all workers would be out of work; and it applied a
diverse set of pressures to all three corporations, in some instances
generating last-minute concessions just before the UAW was scheduled
to announce which new facility would be struck.

A Political Strike

The UAW strike was of a fundamentally political character, which is
why it has often been compared to the UAW walkout against General
Motors in 1945 and 1946. At stake in the recent strike was not just a
wage hike big enough to compensate for the 20 percent drop in real
wages during the previous two decades. Of equal importance was the
entire auto industry’s transition to producing electrical vehicles.
The Detroit Big Three, as well as all the nonunion companies, wanted
the new generation of battery plants — the majority slated to be
built in the South — to pay wages substantially lower than those
mandated in the standard UAW contract. Virtually all the battery
plants and some additional facilities were to be joint ventures
between Korean or Chinese firms and US automakers, and thus excluded
from contract coverage.

The UAW saw this as a union death sentence, and so did the most
progressive parts of the Biden administration. The trillion-dollar
Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) offered billions to the auto companies
in loan guarantees and outright grants to advance the green
transition. Although the legislative sausage-making stripped the IRA
of its capacity to coerce or incentivize companies to unionize their
new facilities, Biden clearly wanted the UAW to get a strong contract,
and he became the first sitting president in US history to actually
show up on a picket line (at a GM distribution center in Michigan).
His presence was intended not only to curry favor among a strategic
strata of Midwestern industrial workers but also to counter the
argument put forward by Donald Trump and other Republicans: that a
green industrial policy was a recipe for low wages and lost jobs.

“Industrial policy” means that corporate managers are no longer
the sole arbitrators of new investment in plant product, location, and
technology. It’s not quite government planning, let alone workers’
control, but it does help politicize and, to a degree, democratize the
industrial future.

As a result of the strike, the UAW has taken an important step in this
direction. First, it has forced the Big Three to include contract
language guaranteeing that their new battery production facilities
will be included in the master UAW agreement. And the union won
important leverage to ensure that plant closures will no longer be at
the sole discretion of management: UAW will now have the right to
strike an entire company to prevent the shuttering of a production
facility.

Indeed, the UAW did something unprecedented at the conclusion of its
strike against Stellantis, the parent company of the old Chrysler
corporation. The new contract guarantees that the Belvidere Assembly
Plant, located in the small Illinois city of the same name, will
reopen after management mothballed it last February. This is an
absolute first in the auto industry, making clear that investment
decisions are not those of management alone. Stellantis has also
agreed to place a new battery plant in Belvidere, which will
eventually add some five thousand additional jobs to the town.

The Next Fight

However, unless the rest of the auto industry is soon organized, the
UAW victory in Detroit will turn Pyrrhic. Auto executives like
Ford’s James Farley have complained that the labor cost differential
between his unionized firm and nonunion Tesla will hamper Dearborn’s
competitiveness and the employment levels the company can sustain.
With Toyota, Nissan, Volkswagen, Mercedes-Benz, Honda, Tesla, and
Hyundai all nonunion, the UAW represents workers producing less than
half of all cars sold in the United States. Despite the signal success
of this contract round, those companies keep a steady, downward
pressure on the wages that the Big Three can profitably pay.

For more than forty years, UAW leaders, even the most stolid, have
been well aware of this threat. And yet the union has repeatedly
failed to organize these nonunion competitors. The reasons are
manyfold, but the incapacity of the UAW to demonstrate what a powerful
union can accomplish is certainly paramount.

Now that has all changed. “One of our biggest goals coming out of
this historic contract victory is to organize like we’ve never
organized before,” said Fain after the union won a tentative
agreement with GM. “When we return to the bargaining table in 2028,
it won’t just be with the Big Three. It will be with the Big Five or
Big Six.”

_[NELSON LICHTENSTEIN is research professor at the University of
California, Santa Barbara. His newest book, which he wrote with the
late Judith Stein, is A Fabulous Failure: The Clinton Presidency and
the Transformation of American Capitalism
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Our new issue, “Aging,” is out now. Follow this link for $20
introductory print subscriptions!
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* UAW
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* UAW Strike
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* Auto Strike
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* United Automobile Workers
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* Shawn Fain
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* UAW President Shawn Fain
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* second-tier workers
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* temp workers
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* COLA
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* Ford
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* General Motors
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* Stellantis
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* Big Three
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* UAWD
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* United All Workers for Democracy
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* Rank and File
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* labor militancy
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* Tesla
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* Working Class
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* Trade Unions
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* Labor Movement
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* Electric vehicles
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* battery plants
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