It is Friday, September 22nd, 12 noon in Ypsilanti (Michigan), about 60 kilometers from Detroit. The vast majority of employees at General Motors’ component distribution center begin to leave the plant. They get in and out of their cars, honking and shouting slogans. They don’t get very far. As soon as they leave the site, they park, get out of their cars, hand out banners and form a picket line. “It’s a historic moment,” says Michael Martin, 59, the center’s engagement manager. They are joining a strike that will mark an era with far-reaching labor, industrial and political implications. “Inequality” and “injustice” are the words repeated most often by the dozens of striking workers EL PAÍS spoke to this week. They are fighting to maintain the middle class.
The scene is repeated at 37 other facilities across the United States. The workers are heeding the call of United Auto Workers (UAW) union leader Shawn Fain, who addressed them at 10 a.m. on Facebook and YouTube, urging them to join a historic strike, the first to strike at the same time as the Detroit Big Three. The mobilization began last week with the paralysis of a General Motors plant in Wentzville, Missouri, that makes the GMC Canyon and the Colorado; another from Ford in Wayne, Michigan, where the Bronco model and the Ranger truck are assembled, and a third from Jeep, from Stellantis, in Toledo, Ohio, where the Gladiator and Wrangler models come from.
The strike is called “Stand Up” and is a historical echo of the sit-down strikes almost a century ago, in the midst of the Great Depression. They began on December 28, 1936 at the General Motors auto body plant in Flint, Michigan – then the largest company in the world – due to the layoff of two brothers. The workers left the production line and sat down in the factory. By staying, they escaped police repression, external pressure, bad weather (though no heating outages), and being replaced by scabs. After 44 days of tension and some open disputes, GM granted a 5% wage increase, allowed workers to talk about union issues in the cafeteria, recognized their right to unionize, and admitted the UAW as an interlocutor.
Following this success, the union grew from 30,000 to 500,000 members within a year and spread across the entire industry. One of the heroes of that strike was Walter Reuther, the legendary union leader who took over leadership of the UAW in its golden age. In 1950, he signed Detroit’s Reuther Agreement with General Motors, a collective bargaining agreement that provided health insurance, pensions, the right to unemployment, more vacation, and raises in return for avoiding strikes. The UAW has reached similar agreements with Ford and Chrysler. The doors to the middle class were wide open for autoworkers. In the decades that followed, they could afford a good car, a good house with a terrace for barbecues, send their children to university… The Big Three, benefiting from protectionist measures and a booming economy, could afford it.
Competition from foreign cars, creeping inefficiencies, lack of innovation, and deteriorating quality caused major American manufacturers to rapidly lose market share and profitability in the 1980s and 1990s. On the eve of the Great Recession of 2008, their viability was already at risk and unions were forced to admit sacrifices. The financial crisis caused the bankruptcy of GM and Chrysler (later acquired by Fiat and integrated into Stellantis), the public rescue and restructuring of the companies with plant closures, cost cutting and union concessions. Companies have recovered and in recent years have made millions of dollars in profits that workers believe were not distributed fairly.
Hal Jomaa, 60, is a group leader at the Jeep (Stellantis) assembly plant in Toledo, Ohio, where he has worked his entire life, more than 40 years, but this is the first time he has gone on strike. “We are defending our way of life and trying to get enough money to provide for our families and stay in the middle class. They work hard here, six days a week, ten hours a day. “We don’t see our family and we have to work longer to earn the same as we did 20 years ago,” he denounced this Friday in front of the doors of the factory, dressed in red, the war color of the workers in this strike.
Shawn Fain, 54, is the union’s first president, elected by all members rather than delegates. He has been vengeful since taking office last March. This Friday he called for the strike via live video, in which he appeared in camouflage clothing, like a kind of guerrilla leader, and in which he invited the President of the United States himself to join the picket lines. Joe Biden, who has taken up the gauntlet and will join the protest in Michigan on Tuesday, he tweeted.
Fain gave a wink to history with the “Stand Up” mobilization, but innovated with his strike manual. It was common practice in the UAW to give priority to agreeing to one of the Big Three, including a strike if necessary, and then demand that the other two meet the conditions. Fain dared to attack everyone at once, but with a selective strike. It began with one factory from each group, with only about 13,000 of the nearly 150,000 workers affiliated with these companies. “This strategy will keep companies on their toes. It will give our national negotiators maximum influence and flexibility, and if we have to give it our all, we will,” Fain explained his plan.
This step-by-step approach allows him to use carrots and sticks: this Friday he asked about 6,000 more workers from 28 plants owned by Stellantis and GM alone to resign, saving Ford from burning because it had shown greater willingness to negotiate. At the same time, it maintains its resistance fund, an $845 million fund to compensate striking workers at $500 a month. The factories chosen so far are producing profitable models, but Fain reserves the right to stop the factories that make Detroit’s best-sellers like the Ford F-150 and Stellantis’ Ram trucks, which account for a large portion of the company’s sales and profits turn off . The Big Three and some of their suppliers have laid off about 6,000 workers, which they say is related to the strike and related shortages.
The workers seem ready to follow the pace set by their leader: “It is a new day. We have to try new tactics. We can’t try to do the same things and play the same games. We played the game they wanted, and here we are, working, making less, living paycheck to paycheck. “We can’t live like this for the next four years,” Michael Martin complained at the GM plant in Ypsilanti. “It’s strategic,” agreed Jomaa at Stellantis in Toledo. Justin Nelson III, 48, who has worked as a painter at the Ford plant in Wayne for 27 years, used the same word Thursday. “It seems that companies are worried,” he added.
The list of demands is long, including a 32-hour work week that does not seem to be a priority, but focuses on three points: higher salaries and pensions, abolition of the double pay scale for which new employees are paid half ($16 ) earn. per hour) than the oldest and guarantees the switch to the electric car.
The UAW is calling for cost-of-living pension adjustments and a 40% raise in four years, which it calculates is what corporate CEOs received in their salaries. Executives’ multimillion-dollar salaries have inflamed tempers and are a catalyst for protest. Guadalupe Pérez, 64, from Río Bravo, Tamaulipas, Mexico, who works on the assembly line at the Toledo, Ohio, assembly plant, believes the company is treating her “unfairly.” “I’ve worked here for 40 years and haven’t had a raise in 10 or 12 years [los ejecutivos] “They make a lot of money.” “We made a lot of concessions in 2008, but now it’s 2023 and inflation is skyrocketing, everything is going through the roof and all we’re asking for is something back.” We haven’t even asked for more than before. We only ordered what we would have had if we were them,” said Justin Nelson III.
“Inequality is a big backdrop to this strike, with the gap between the compensation of managers in the auto industry and that of workers an understandable grievance,” Chuck Collins, who leads the institute’s inequality program, told EL PAÍS. from Political Studies in Washington. “After 40 years of wage stagnation and a pandemic that has seen income and wealth gains primarily benefit the wealthiest 1%, the UAW and other workers believe they need to share in the productivity gains of recent decades,” he adds.
According to the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), a think tank with a 37-year history, the compensation of companies’ top executives, or CEOs, has increased by 1,460% since 1978, while the compensation of the typical worker has increased by only one. 18%. Looking at the 350 large publicly traded companies, the boss earns 399 times as much as a typical employee, whereas that ratio was 20 to 1 in 1965 and 59 to 1 in 1989. In the case of the Big Three, an average Stellantis worker would have had to work 365 years to accumulate the salary that Carlos Tavares, the CEO, earned in 2022. General Motors (GM) CEO Mary Barra earns 362 times more than the average employee. And in Ford’s case, his first manager, James Farley, achieved compensation that was 281 times higher than that of the average or typical worker, where there are as many who earn more than him as those who earn less. Their salaries ranged from $20 million to $30 million, so workers don’t want to hear a word about the raises being unaffordable.
“My understanding is that the labor cost for these vehicles is only 5 to 6%. And I understand that if they gave us the increases we asked for, it wouldn’t affect the cost of the car. However, if you take into account the CEOs’ 30 million a year, it definitely affects the cost of the car,” said Jomaa in Toledo this Friday. “It is a fight of the working class against the rich, of the haves against the have-nots, of the billionaire class against everyone else,” Fain said in one of his speeches.
“The level of inequality has become almost medieval in recent decades. “Part of the broad support of UAW workers comes from people’s awareness of how extreme inequality has infected the United States,” Collins explains. Crowds of cars and trucks driving past the picket lines honk their horns to show their sympathy for the protest.
The double salary scale, one of the unions’ concessions in the midst of the financial crisis, also irritates employees. “The abuse of temporary, unskilled, and substandard workers must end,” the UAW demands. “This strike is important for equality, to make us all equal. One band, one sound. We just want justice,” said Gary Jarano, 50, who joined the GM dealership in Ypsilanti this year. “That’s very unfair,” Jomaa agreed. “There is another person working alongside you who earns half of what you earn and does exactly the same work, builds the same vehicle, but he is still not entitled to any share of the profits, he is not entitled to any bonus.” That’s not the American way: two people do the same thing and don’t make the same money,” he explained.
As the strike spread, the Auto Show, the most important in the United States, was celebrated this week in Detroit. Its star models include new electric vehicles. Picket workers believe this threat is more distant, but UAW leaders are keenly aware of it and are calling for a just transition. “Car manufacturers are even closing profitable plants. The Big Three are destroying jobs and destroying communities. That must have an end. The government is giving the Big Three billions of dollars in electric car subsidies, but workers at its new battery plants are stuck in high-risk, low-wage jobs. “The transition to electric vehicles is a historic opportunity to raise, rather than lower, standards for auto workers,” he emphasizes.
The managers claim that complying with the UAW’s labor demands would make their companies unprofitable. They point out that they already have much higher labor costs than Tesla (which has a huge efficiency advantage) or foreign manufacturers with plants in the United States whose workers are not unionized. And that the additional costs would deter them from making the large investments needed to transition to electric cars.
The auto strike comes at a time of union resurgence in the United States, due in part to the loss of purchasing power caused by inflation. Workers at Starbucks, Amazon and Apple have begun unionizing despite business pressure. This summer set records for the number of days lost due to strikes this century. The automobile strike joins the Hollywood actors and screenwriters’ strike, the Los Angeles hotel workers’ strike and other conflicts. UPS and rail delivery drivers were able to prevent the strike at the last minute. As with the sit-down strike nearly a century ago, workers in many other sectors are paying attention to the stand-up strike. “This is the defining moment of our generation,” says Fain.
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