The United Auto Employees union is ramping up its strike towards Common Motors and Stellantis – the worldwide firm that makes Chrysler, Jeep and Dodge autos – and getting nearer to a cope with Ford.
About 5,600 UAW members at 38 Common Motors and Stellantis distribution facilities for auto elements in 20 states walked off the job on Sept. 22, 2023, after an announcement by UAW President Shawn Fain.
Employees on the solely Ford plant affected by the strike because it started on Sept. 15 will stay off the job. The whole variety of UAW members concerned within the strike stands at about 18,300.
Underneath Fain’s management, the union is taking an adversarial strategy: It’s railing towards what it describes because the “poverty wages” UAW members earn whereas denouncing the automakers’ CEOs as “grasping” and vowing to “wreck their financial system.”
As a scholar of employment relations, I feel this strike is just too narrowly centered on making up for the wages and advantages autoworkers have misplaced in recent times. However one other huge goal is guaranteeing that autoworkers could have good jobs as soon as most U.S.-made autos are electric-powered.
This dispute alone is not going to resolve this bigger goal. Slightly, I consider administration and labor might want to swiftly transfer on following the strike and work collectively constructively to satisfy that purpose.
UAW’s calls for
The union is demanding an finish to the concessions it made to the three corporations in the course of the monetary disaster that started in 2007. Its members employed by Ford, GM and Stellantis have skilled a 19% decline of their wages, after accounting for inflation, since 2008.
The union additionally needs the automakers – typically known as the Detroit Three – to abolish the tiered wage system, which pays new workers far lower than extra skilled employees, even for a similar work. The UAW initially stated it was looking for a wage improve of 40% over 4 years and the restoration of a cost-of-living allowance that will hyperlink wages to inflation.
Along with these calls for, the UAW needs defined-benefit pensions for all employees restored, company-paid well being advantages for retirees reestablished and the proper to strike over plant closures assured. Different calls for embody extra paid break day and seeing all non permanent employees made everlasting. It has additionally known as for a 32-hour work week and not using a pay lower.
AP Photograph/Paul Sancya
Precedents for working collectively
Though the strike has emphasised the purpose of boosting future autoworker pay and advantages, I consider that employees and administration can look to the previous for concepts which may assist them transfer ahead.
GM’s Saturn partnership presents one potential mannequin.
The corporate’s strategy to its Saturn model of compact autos, launched in 1985, was distinctive in lots of respects. Its governance construction was characterised by shared decision-making at totally different ranges all through the plant. The native union was a full associate in just about all enterprise choices.
GM invested billions of {dollars} on this enterprise, by which it tried to compete with Japanese imports and transplants that had been shortly eroding GM’s market share. Saturns had been designed otherwise than different U.S. autos, however what made these autos particular was the extent to which labor shared the duty for operating Saturn’s fundamental manufacturing facility.
The Saturn partnership was onerous to keep up, particularly following the departure of Roger B. Smith, the Common Motors CEO who had pushed onerous for it. The corporate stopped making Saturns in 2009, however the former subsidiary’s general strategy of involving employees in choices about their jobs and the manufacturing course of stays as important at this time because it was in its heyday.
I might encourage the auto trade to once more invoke the spirit of the Saturn enterprise, which emphasised the collaboration and partnership of labor and administration within the manufacturing of high-quality, world-class autos. Solely this time, the autos will likely be EVs.
AP Photograph/Paul Sakuma
GM presents one other mannequin for optimistic union-management relations.
About 20 years in the past, its Lansing-Grand River meeting plant in Michigan started to have interaction in an analogous instance of what I name joint duty unionism. Administration and the native UAW union established a contractual dedication to work collectively to repeatedly enhance manufacturing by systematically fixing issues and growing productiveness.
Administration and the native UAW union established a contractual dedication to work collectively to repeatedly enhance manufacturing by systematically fixing issues and growing productiveness.
The native union and administration maintain one another accountable for protecting prices down and high quality excessive. The plant, which assembles Cadillacs and Chevy Camaros, continues this strategy efficiently at this time.
Shift the main target to the long run
The UAW is pointing to the billions of {dollars} in earnings auto corporations are at present getting when it calls for an even bigger piece of the pie. The businesses counter that quickly growing EV manufacturing is dear.
GM, Ford and Stellantis already plan to speculate greater than US$100 billion in electrical automobile manufacturing. As manufacturing shifts away from autos with inside combustion engines that burn gasoline or diesel gasoline, the variety of autoworkers wanted to construct them will decline. EVs have fewer elements.
Ford and Volkswagen, for instance, have estimated that they’ll ultimately want 30% much less labor as a result of EV transition.
Present process this transformation with labor and administration at loggerheads can’t presumably profit the UAW or the auto corporations.
As an alternative, they’ll have to give attention to discovering options collectively that improve productiveness, construct a talented workforce and effectively convert vegetation that make standard autos at this time to EV factories tomorrow. In so doing, the UAW is extra more likely to meet its purpose of seeing these EV factories make use of its members.
