When United Auto Workers (UAW) President Shawn Fain was running for office earlier this year, auto worker Patrick Mendis wasn’t a supporter. “I just thought he was this troublemaker who had a pipe dream,” Mendis says in an interview.
But when Fain and the new UAW leadership took a serious, militant approach to negotiations with the Big Three auto companies, Mendis, who works at a Ford plant in Flat Rock, Michigan, began to see things differently. “When he started calling [the companies] out publicly,” he recalls, “that’s when I really started realizing that this guy is serious and he’s not going to play any games.”
Mark Gevaart, a General Motors employee at a Fort Wayne, Indiana, plant felt the same:
“He just brought change to a level that I did not see [coming].”
The UAW’s new approach reached fruition on September 14 in a widely supported “stand-up strike,” when 13,000 workers walked out at one assembly plant at each of the three automakers Ford, General Motors (GM), and Stellantis (formed from a merger of Fiat Chrysler and PSA) in Michigan, Missouri, and Ohio.
On September 22, citing inadequate progress by GM and Stellantis in contract talks, the UAW expanded its strike against these two companies to an additional thirty-eight sites across the country. The union has so far decided not to take further action against Ford.
The UAW’s demands center around the restoration of provisions in contracts for Cost of Living Allowances (COLA), a thirty-two-hour workweek, the return of pensions for newly hired workers, and, initially, a 40 percent wage hike over four years. That last demand, which Fain has said reflects the rise in CEO pay at the Big Three, has since been reduced to 36 percent. “Now that the company is so profitable again, we just feel like, ‘Hey, we deserve some of that,’ ” Mendis explains.
It seems like a distant memory now, but in 2008 and 2009, if left to the so-called invisible hand of the market, the U.S. auto industry would have collapsed without the sacrifices of autoworkers and a $17.4 billion government bailout. The financial crisis and its aftermath had bankrupted GM and Chrysler, two of the Big Three.
If those two companies had shuttered, they likely would have taken their suppliers down with them, with further spillover effects on Ford, the other member of the Big Three. If the whole industry had fallen, there was a real fear that the Great Recession could have become a depression.
If left to the so-called invisible hand of the market, the U.S. auto industry would have collapsed.
None of that came to pass because the government financially bailed out GM and Chrysler, but autoworkers played a key and underappreciated role. “In order to help save the company, the employees sacrificed [a lot],” notes Mendis.
Mendis, who started working in the industry in 2007, witnessed the changes firsthand. For years, he toiled away at $16.66 an hour as Ford went through ups and downs. “I couldn’t imagine having to raise a family on $16.66,” he says, adding that he watched as Ford eliminated COLA pay increases, added wage tiers, and even shaved break times by a minute or two.
These measures were sold to workers as necessary to sustain the industry. But whether or not they bought it, these concessions were required of union auto workers by the government bailout of GM and Chrysler. The terms of that rescue package under the Obama Administration also prohibited the UAW from striking until 2015.
By the first quarter of 2011, however, all of the Big Three were turning profits. From 2013 to 2022, the three automakers made $250 billion in profits and provided $66 billion in stock buybacks and dividends to shareholders. Yet fifteen years after the financial crisis, autoworkers like Mendis have yet to see their sacrifices reimbursed. In fact, from March 2011 to August 2023, auto manufacturing workers’ real wages fell by 29 percent.
Before going on strike, the UAW had been negotiating with the Big Three since July. When it became clear that the sides were very far apart, the union’s leadership sought approval from its members to strike at the Big Three, which it received by a 97 percent margin in late August.
Brandon Mancilla, UAW’s regional director for New York, New England, and Puerto Rico, and a member of the union’s international executive board, says that “members are . . . sacrificing to be out on the picket line, and it’s not easy to strike. That’s not a decision you take lightly.”
The union went a different route than an all-out, immediate frontal assault on the Big Three. It chose to initially strike at only three plants, expanding a week later to another thirty-eight at GM and Stellantis.
The UAW is relying on the knowledge from members that the products of one plant are often the parts for another. Because the auto industry is made up of factories along an interlinked supply chain, disruptions at a small number of plants can impact far more than just those.
“If you drop a stone in a still pond [it causes a] ripple,” Gevaart adds, estimating that if his 4,000-employee factory went on strike, it would stop another 8,000 to 10,000 people in the community from working.
The companies, knowing a disruption would be coming, have attempted to shift production in ways that will minimize the damage caused by a selective strike.
The union anticipated this tactic brilliantly. UAW’s communications director, Jonah Furman, reportedly called its strategy “operational chaos” in a leaked Twitter exchange. (Furman has not confirmed the authenticity of the exchange to The Detroit News, which first reported it).
Ford and GM, for example, reportedly sent trucks to pick up engines from factories, believing their workers would be on strike, only to find that those facilities were still in production. This wastes resources and disrupts the companies’ ability to manufacture vehicles and parts, which accomplishes the same goal as a wider without as much risk and resources. “They were played the fool for a moment,” as Gevaart put it.
In another clever tactic, someone appears to have leaked a fake list of plants scheduled to go on strike to the industry paper Automotive News; this likely wasn’t the only instance of the use of this tactic.
“[If] we can keep them wounded for months, they don’t know what to do. The beauty is we’ve laid it all out in the public and they’re still helpless to stop it,” Furman reportedly said in the exchange.
Furman also reportedly noted that by escalating the strike against GM and Stellantis while not doing so against Ford, the union was pitting the companies against each other. This is in contrast to previous union administrations’ tactic of “pattern bargaining.”
“I like what they’re doing, and not engaging in the traditional, sort of ritualized Kabuki dance of picking . . . one of the auto companies and striking them and leaving the other ones alone,” says Peter Olney, retired organizing director of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) and longtime labor activist.
The decision to strike at a limited number of factories also preserves the union’s strike fund, which gives $100 per weekday to striking members, who are going without pay, risking their health insurance, and facing other unpredictable challenges. Currently, the UAW is paying out as much as $1,860,000 each weekday.
The bigger the strike gets, the more that figure grows. A strike encompassing all 146,000 Big Three members would leave the union paying as much as $14,600,000 per weekday and would empty the union’s $825 million strike fund in just three months, according to the Associated Press. As it stands, Ford, GM, and Stellantis are being forced to continue to pay more than 80 percent of UAW auto worker members while the strike continues.
As much as the current strike is about current conditions, it is also the story of a rapidly resurgent union.
Perhaps the strongest argument for the UAW’s current strategy is that the union can continue to expand or reshape the strike if any or all of the companies remain uncooperative, that there is room for escalation depending on how the companies react. Only about 13 percent of the union’s autoworkers are currently on strike.
“I support what position we’re in right now and the tactics we’re taking because I understand our history and I understand where the UAW has come from in the past,” says Gevaart.
As much as the current strike is about current conditions, it is also the story of a rapidly resurgent union. Today’s “stand-up strike” takes its very name from a reference to the 1936 to 1937 sit-down strike in Flint, Michigan by the UAW against GM. “You'd probably have to go back to that dispute to find [a UAW strike] as . . . exciting and creative and that’s capturing the public’s imagination the way this one is,” says Olney.
Since the 1970s, according to Mancilla, the union had been drifting away from its militant roots, becoming increasingly “concessionary.” Moreover, in recent years, the union faced a massive corruption scandal that brought more than a dozen government prosecutions and federal intervention into the union’s affairs.
Ironically, it may have been the government’s demand that the union allow members to decide on direct voting for its executive officers that paved the way for that old militant energy to find a new voice. But even with the previous leadership discredited among many members, Fain only narrowly won election to his seat. “A lot of people were just scared of what . . . could happen,” Mendis says, “and that prevented them from throwing support vocally for Shawn Fain.”
But many workers like Gevaart considered the previous leadership’s record and decided to throw in their lot with Fain. Fain, in turn, has not shied away from directly calling out auto executives’ greed. “In their economy,” he said in the introduction to a September 22 livestream announcing updates on activities throughout the union, “workers live paycheck to paycheck while the billionaires buy another yacht. In their economy, we make all the sacrifice, and they take all the profit . . . so we’re going to wreck their economy because it only works for the billionaire class.”
Fain’s speeches have become popular among the union’s rank-and-file. “Everybody’s amped up,” Mendis says of his coworkers’ reception to the livestream. “Half the plant” watched Fain live on their phones while at work, eagerly awaiting the latest news, he adds.
Auto workers aren’t the only ones paying attention; with tens of thousands of them in swing states, President Biden traveled to Detroit to speak there on September 26. He is believed to be the first sitting president in recent history to have visited a picket line.
“Let’s get back what we lost, okay?” Biden said to striking workers.