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Community members, families, and workers are picketing and standing together for economic justice on and off the job at the Big Three.
Source – @UAW
UAW President Shawn Fain says the union could strike at all three automakers simultaneously, a step it has never taken before.
The three companies, Ford Motor, General Motors and Stellantis, and the UAW Union have continued to trade wage and benefit counteroffers and will likely continue to do so into the work week ahead of Thursday night’s strike deadline.
However, on Friday, according to the Associated Press, Fain said that the company’s offers weren’t enough and that he had put them in the trash.
So far, the companies have offered to raise pay by 14 percent to 16 percent over four years. Their offers include lump sum payments to help ease the impact of inflation, and policy changes that would lift the pay of recent hires and temporary workers.
But Fain has called the offers “insulting,” pointing out that the three manufacturers have been making near-record profits for almost a decade, and that pay packages of top executives have increased substantially.
According to the New York Times, the 14 to 15 percent pay increase offered by the companies is not even close to the 46 percent raises in general pay over four years the UAW wants — an increase that would elevate a top-scale assembly plant worker from $32 an hour now to about $47.
Fain has argued that the richly profitable automakers can afford to raise workers’ pay significantly to make up for what the union gave up to help the companies withstand the 2007-2009 financial crisis and the Great Recession.
Over the past decade, the Detroit Three have emerged as robust profit-makers. They’ve collectively posted net income of $164 billion, $20 billion of it this year. The CEOs of all three major automakers earn multiple millions in annual compensation.
General Motors Chairman and CEO Ed Whitacre addresses the gathering after the first Chevrolet Volt battery came off the assembly line at the GM Brownstown Battery plant in Brownstown Township, Michigan Thursday, January 7, 2010. The facility is the first lithium ion battery pack manufacturing plant in the U.S. operated by a major automaker.
Source – Energy.gov. (Photo by Jeffrey Sauger for General Motors) Public Domain
Political and economic fallout from a strike
All this hoopla is taking place as the country makes a sweeping shift from combustion engine cars and trucks to electric vehicles, which require fewer parts and less labor to produce.
At the center of the wage dispute is President Joe Biden’s signature policies. Biden’s effort to counter climate change and create U.S. manufacturing jobs through hundreds of billions of dollars in clean-energy spending is frustrating the UAW, which is demanding that workers share in the benefits from the government-subsidized shift to electric vehicles.
U.A.W. leaders and members are increasingly worried that the transition will eliminate jobs and, over time, reduce wages and benefits.
“We aren’t going to stand by and allow them to drag out the negotiations like they’ve done in the past,” Mr. Fain said Friday in a video on Facebook. “If we hit 11:59 on Thursday without a deal at any of the Big Three automakers, there will be a strike — at all three if need be.”
But to make matters even worse – the autoworkers strike could also coincide with a federal government shutdown if Congress cannot reach a stopgap spending deal by Sept. 30, according to Politico.
The economic fallout could be tremendous. The auto industry accounts for about 3 percent of the U.S. economy’s gross domestic product — its total output of goods and services — and the Detroit automakers represent about half of the total U.S. car market.
While UAW strikers would receive $500 a week in strike pay, it is far less than they would make working. But for the Big Three, a 10-day strike against all three companies could cost them nearly one billion dollars,
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, National Association of Manufacturers, and Motor Equipment and Manufacturers Association, as well as GM, Ford and Stellantis, have either briefed the White House on their point of view or are planning to in the days ahead.
Business officials have shared an analysis with the White House that suggested that 50 percent of suppliers would go bankrupt within two to three weeks of a strike — affecting approximately 345,000 workers.
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