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Is the UAW Strike a Watershed Moment for Worker Militancy?

Teddy Ostrow

The UAW’s creative ‘stand up’ strike strategy has inspired confidence from auto workers on the picket line while sending the Big Three scrambling to respond.

At 11PM on September 14, just before midnight, a crowd of United Auto Workers members and their supporters began amassing across the street from Ford’s Michigan Assembly Plant in Wayne. A stream of honking cars had already begun exiting the factory gates. Outside the UAW Local 900 union hall, which sits adjacent to the assembly plant, white shuttle vans were humming at the ready—and before long, the picket lines were up.

At midnight, it was official: for the first time in the union’s history, UAW workers at each of the Big Three automakers—Ford, GM, and Stellantis (formerly Chrysler)—were striking simultaneously. The union’s new strategy of “stand up” strikes, whereby select locals are gradually called out to strike at their plants, had gone into effect. Two hours prior, at 10pm on a Facebook livestream, UAW President Shawn Fain had announced the union’s first targets.

Just under 13,000 workers have walked off the job so far, disrupting truck and SUV production at Stellantis’ Toledo Assembly Complex in Ohio, GM’s Wentzville Assembly in Missouri, and the final assembly and paint departments of Ford’s Michigan Assembly. Thousands more workers are staying home, with more expected to join them, after GM temporarily laid off 2,000 employees at its Kansas assembly plant following layoffs of smaller groups of workers at Ford and Stellantis.

The UAW’s new, more militant union leadership had been warning the Big Three for months that a strike was coming if a tentative agreement was not reached before the previous contracts expired on Sept. 14. Nevertheless, those threats prompted little movement from the companies at the bargaining table, as evidenced by their austere contract proposals.

It’s hard to sum up all that’s at stake in this contract fight. UAW members are determined to make up for decades of backsliding and concessionary bargaining under previous union administrations, and they’re coming to get back what they’ve watched slip away with each successive contract. To get there, the union is fighting for double-digit raises, for the reinstatement of cost-of-living pay increases, the elimination of wage and benefit tiers, the restoration of company-paid retiree medical benefits and pensions for all workers, job security from plant closures, better work-life balance, and an end to the abuse of temporary employees.

Mirroring the union’s history-altering strikes in the 1930s and ’40s, the UAW’s contemporary fight with the Big Three may have implications for the broader working class. How the UAW fares may set the stage for its existential battle to unionize and raise the standards of the burgeoning electric vehicle and battery industries, which Congress and the Joe Biden administration have supported with hundreds of billions of dollars in government grants, loans and tax incentives, though with few strings attached for labor.

“The shameful part of the EV transition is our tax dollars are financing it, and the companies are taking all the money, like always, and not even taking labor into the equation,” Fain told me on the Michigan Assembly picket line. “Corporations and billionaires get all the money, and working class people are left behind. It’s gotta stop.”

Despite their record profits, totaling a quarter-trillion dollars in North America over the past decade, the Big Three have cried poverty and painted the UAW’s demands as wholly unfeasible. But the corporate negotiators have failed to fully appreciate just how serious the membership is about their demands—and their willingness to get them by force.

On that first night, the scene at Michigan Assembly was boisterous, and reporting from the two other picket lines suggested similar vibes.

In Wayne, some workers joined the line in shock. It was new territory for most Ford workers, who haven’t struck the company since 1978. But surprise was inevitable across the companies. The strike targets were intentionally kept secret by the union, from the members as well as the companies, to stoke confusion among the Big Three and prevent them from preemptively counteracting or blunting the effects of the strike. Indeed, In These Times reporters confirmed with Stellantis that the company had no idea its Toledo Jeep plant was one of the union’s first targets.

According to President Fain, more, as-yet unspecified locals will be called to stand up and join the strike by noon on Friday, September 22, if deals with the companies aren’t reached. Meanwhile, the Canadian auto union, Unifor, reached a settlement with Ford on September 20, avoiding a strike by 5,600 workers that would have also put some US production facilities out of commission.

Despite a dizzying mixture of excitement, anxiety, and even some confusion, during the first days of the strike, workers across all three picket lines told me they were ready and willing to fight.

“It’s my first strike, but I’m out here. I feel strong,” Brandi White, an assembly line worker of seven years at Michigan Assembly, told me on the Ford picket line after midnight. Moments after the strike began, White described her mood as “surprised but happy.”

“I feel like we all came together for a bigger cause. We’re all out here struggling, and we’re making it known,” she said.

“It’s a whole history being made,” said Robert Harrison, a forklift driver at Michigan Assembly. “This is for the future. This is a start right here. This is going to open up many doors from our generation on down.”

“I’m anxious to know what the outcome is going to be,” said Adelisa Lebron, who has worked for three years on the engine line at Ford.

Holding a picket sign with her young daughter at her side, Lebron said she was worried about living on $500 weekly strike pay. “I’m a single mom, I have three children, and that little bit of money is not gonna be able to cover what I have to pay,” she said.

Still, Lebron believes the strike is necessary, and she’s angry at the companies, not at the union: “It’s just irritating for people like us who come in here, bust our butts every day, and management—they just don’t care.”

Fifty miles south, at Stellantis’ Jeep-producing Toledo Assembly Complex, workers broke out into cheers when Fain announced on Thursday’s Facebook livestream that their plant was among the first three to be called upon to strike.

Melanie Smith, who’s worked nine years for Stellantis, was on the phone with her mother, a fellow auto worker, who was on her shift in the body shop of the Jeep plant, when the news broke.

“They were going wild, so excited to finally strike for our rights,” Smith said of the workers in the background of her phone call. “Everybody just started screaming.”

On Friday, Sept.15, I drove to the Stellantis complex in Toledo.

I arrived at one of the picketed gates to find about twenty workers standing outside, many of them dancing to hip-hop that was blasting from a speaker. A burn barrel and a mound of chopped wood sat idle, waiting for use during the colder, six-hour night shifts. I saw similar scenes of jubilance at each of the other gates surrounding the plant.

Samantha Parker, who has worked for ten years in assembly at the Jeep plant, waved her picket sign on the roadside, winning solidarity honks from passersby.

“We’re out here because we want a fair contract, and to get stuff back that we gave up when we helped bail out the automotive industry,” she said.

Parker was referencing the concessions the UAW had given to the Big Three following the bankruptcies, and subsequent taxpayer bailouts, of GM and Chrysler in 2009. That year, to help keep their companies afloat amid a deepening, worldwide financial crisis, auto workers gave up their treasured cost-of-living adjustments (COLA), a fixture of UAW contracts for over half a century that ensured workers’ wages kept up with inflation. When discussing their demand for COLA, workers on the picket line repeatedly referenced the financial strain caused by the previous two years’ unprecedented spikes in inflation.

Two years before the bankruptcies, the union had already established a two-tier system in the ranks as it negotiated away defined benefit pensions and substantial retiree medical benefits for all workers hired after 2007. Second-tier workers instead were given inferior, market-dependent 401K retirement plans, and lower starting and top pay. Eventually, their contracts would equalize pay with tier-one workers, but under an eight-year progression, which workers see as an unreasonably long time to wait to reach the point where they’re earning top rate.

The lack of sufficient retirement benefits is insulting, according to Parker. “We sacrifice so much of our bodies and our time to build Jeeps, and don’t get appreciated for it,” she said. Then she pointed to her left wrist. “I have bilateral carpal tunnel. I just had surgery on one hand and I have to have surgery on my other hand. I have a two-year-old and it hurts to even hold my kid.”

“It’s petrifying,” she continued, “because if my body’s already wearing down now, what’s it gonna be like after I’ve been here for 20, 30 years?”

On the Toledo picket line, frustration also centered on the company’s abuse of temporary workers. The number of “temps” exploded across the Big Three after the bailouts, but especially at Stellantis.

Devin Dominique, who works trim on the production line at the Toledo Jeep plant, has been a temporary part-time worker since 2018—something he called “a little bit of BS.”

At Stellantis, temps’ starting pay is just under $16 per hour, and it taps out around $19. This is a far cry from permanent full-time workers’ $32 per hour top pay. Dominique thinks it’s ridiculous there’s such a disparity between him and permanent workers, because he performs the same work that they do and regularly works 60-hour weeks.

“I believe that every [temp] feels the same way as me,” he said. “I think they all want to be hired in [permanently], and I don’t think it’s too much to ask.”

Both of Dominique’s grandparents worked and retired from the Toledo complex, and he said he would like to do the same. But after five years as a temp, he’s unsure when that will happen as there’s no guaranteed path to him being made permanent. He supports the union’s push for the Big Three to hire all of their current temps immediately and lay out a 90-day pathway to permanent status for any future temporary hires.

I asked Dominique how he felt when he heard his plant would be striking. The father of two said that he was at home when he heard the news.” My girlfriend actually started crying because she’s worried about our bills being paid,” he said.

“But I told her that this is actually the first sign of relief I’ve had in this company in a long time,” he continued, “because I know that this is one of the only ways that we’ll probably get some of what we want and need.”

For most workers on the Ford and Stellantis picket lines, it was their first time on strike. At GM’s Wentzville Assembly in Missouri, however, many among the rank and file had hit the picket line with 48,000 of their union siblings in 2019.

Kyle McLaughlin, who works the frame line for the assembly of Chevy Colorados and Canyons, was one of them. Over a phone call, he explained that he and his coworkers felt much better prepared this time around.

“I definitely feel like the union is communicating better,” said McLaughlin, referring to UAW President Fain’s bargaining updates over Facebook livestreams and the all-around commitment to greater transparency between the current union leadership and the members.

McLaughlin didn’t like that the previous union leadership held negotiations behind closed doors in 2019. That year, not much was gained to make up for prior years’ concessions. Now, he believes the union is taking harder stances in bargaining, and he appreciates the fact that weekly strike pay was raised from $400 to $500, which will help the strikers financially.

“It’s going to be a lot easier for everyone,” said McLaughlin, and he believes that will put the union in a stronger position to win its demands.

But the changes McLaughlin described reflect a broader shift that has taken place within UAW over the past several months.

For nearly 80 years, until March of this year, the union was run by a single internal caucus. A widespread sense of betrayal from the recent corruption scandals within previous UAW administrations, along with general dissatisfaction with years of backsliding at the bargaining table, convinced a majority of the membership that the union itself needed a change. Aided by the organizing efforts of the rank-and-file reform movement Unite All Workers for Democracy (UAWD), union members were finally able to break the chain. In the union’s first direct election of top officers, members elected a slate of leaders, backed by UAWD, that promised to take seriously their organic demands, and to hold the Big Three accountable.

The “stand-up” strike strategy is just one of many examples of the current leadership’s break with the old way of doing things. Rather than calling all workers out on strike en masse, the union has targeted specific plants, and is wielding the threat of ramping up economic pain on the companies with further walkouts. The logic is to keep the companies guessing about where the union may strike next, in order to maximize leverage in the bargaining room.

The strategy also helps preserve the UAW’s $825 million strike fund, as members in other plants who may be laid off due to parts shortages can pull from unemployment rather than the union coffers. “I think it’s a new, exciting and creative strategy, and I want to see it work,” said Sean Crawford, a UAW Local 160 member, GM worker at Warren Tech Center, and member of UAWD. “I think it’s more likely to work because we’re going to be able to stretch out the strike and defense fund.”

While many workers praised the new strategy on the picket lines, some non-striking members wished it was total war, with all 146,000 auto workers across the Big Three on strike at once. The union does have a long, proud, militant tradition, after all, and they want to be part of that.

But the international UAW has sought to keep up the energy even among members who are still on the job. Fain has encouraged non-strikers, with the support of their local leaderships or not, to “stand up” in any way they can– by keeping up the pressure on their employers with rallies or practice pickets, for example, or by refusing voluntary overtime, as some workers have done at each of the Big Three, so as to slow down production. Meanwhile, UAWD has revamped the union’s famous “Flying Squadron,” rallying workers from various locals to join the picket lines for solidarity and support.

On the third day of the strike in Toledo, members of UAW Local 14 led a caravan to circle the Stellantis plant in solidarity with their striking union siblings at Local 12. In between laps made by the dozens of honking Jeeps and Chryslers, I spoke with Beth Walls, a strike captain and a ten-year veteran of the Stellantis plant’s paint shop.

Walls explained that she and her coworkers can barely afford the Jeeps they manufacture at the Toledo plant. She pointed to her recently purchased Jeep Compass, which she said was Mexican-made. “We want to be able to buy the ones we made,” said Walls.

I asked Walls what she thought of Local 14’s caravan. “It’s awesome,” she said. The night before, her own local had led a convoy around the plant, which was captured by Labor Notes reporter Luis Feliz Leon. But that Local 14 was doing one in solidarity meant a lot, Walls explained.

“Just hyping up everybody and showing their support – we’re all one big family. We’ll do what we have to do for one another.”

After my trip to Toledo on strike day one, I sped back to Detroit to make it to the major UAW rally that same afternoon. Hundreds of red-shirted UAW members and their supporters had packed themselves in between the GM corporate headquarters at the Renaissance Center and Huntington Place, where the Detroit auto show preview gala was being held.

In the lead-up to speeches by Sen. Bernie Sanders, union leaders, and a who’s who of Michigan Democrats, the rank and file danced to music belting from the sound system. If not for the content of their chants, and the demands printed on their picket signs, one might have mistaken the event for a celebration, rather than a rally against corporate greed. In a way, it was both.

“I feel inspired. I feel hopeful,” said Crawford of UAW Local 160. “The whole event is poetic. It’s a beautiful day here in Detroit. The sky is blue, and there’s more people than I’ve ever seen at a rally here before.”

“I feel hyped up, like I’m ready to run through a wall, man,” said David Carey, a temp of almost two years in the quality department of Stellantis’ Detroit Assembly Complex Mack. “I don’t think, I know we’re gonna win a good contract.”

“Looking out at this sea of red shirts today, I see power – the power of a united class,” UAW President Fain told the crowd. “In the [billionaires’] economy workers live paycheck-to-paycheck while the billionaires buy another yacht… So we’re gonna wreck their economy ’cause it only works for the billionaire class.”

“We refuse to live in an oligarchy. We refuse to accept a society in which so few have so much and so many have so little,” said Sen. Sanders. “Let us all, every American in every state and this country, stand with the UAW.”

When the speeches ended, UAW President Fain led his members into the streets, and the pumped-up crowd marched on Jefferson avenue.

“This is what the UAW has always been about,” Ryder Littlejohn, a skilled trades maintenance leader at the Ford Stamping Plant in Buffalo, New York, told me between chants. “We’ve always been a progressive, organized union fighting for the working class. And it’s good to see it come back.”

The crowd tightened as the march bottlenecked on the steps of GM headquarters. Standing shoulder-to-shoulder, the steady beat of “UAW! UAW! UAW!” growing louder, Littlejohn turned to me and shook his head in disbelief.

“Solidarity,” he said. “Isn’t it beautiful?”

(Teddy Ostrow is a journalist from Brooklyn covering labor and economics. He is the host of The Upsurge podcast and his work has appeared in The Nation, The New Republic, and elsewhere. Courtesy: Progressive International, an international organization uniting and mobilizing progressive left-wing activists and organizations.)

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“This Fight Is Global”: Workers Around the World are Standing with Striking U.S. Autoworkers

Jeff Schuhrke

As the first-ever simultaneous strike at General Motors, Ford and Stellantis continues, the United Auto Workers (UAW) union is being cheered on not only by a majority of Americans, but also by much of the international labor movement.

Over the past two weeks, the UAW has received messages of solidarity from worker organizations in multiple countries, including a letter from the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa and an email from Malaysia’s National Union of Transport Equipment & Allied Industries Workers — both of which represent autoworkers in their respective countries.

“The world is watching, and the people are on our side,” UAW President Shawn Fain said last Friday. “From South Africa to Malaysia, we continue to receive letters and messages of strength and support, encouraging our members to hold the line and win big — and we will.”

Such global solidarity is not simply a boost to the strikers’ morale, but is also a critically strategic part of the UAW’s fight to reverse the decades-long race to the bottom, where multinational corporations like the Big Three automakers move production to wherever they can exploit workers the most.

This is especially true of Mexico, the largest auto parts supplier to the United States. Since at least the 1980s — and especially since the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) went into effect in 1994 — the Big Three have used the threat of moving production to Mexico to force concessions from the UAW.

An estimated 300,000 jobs in the U.S. auto industry have been lost since NAFTA, and real wages for U.S. autoworkers have fallen by 30% over the past 20 years.

“Most of that is accounted for by the transfer of work to Mexico,” says Rob McKenzie, a retired UAW representative who worked at the Twin City Ford Assembly Plant in St. Paul, Minnesota. “The only thing that could have changed that was helping Mexican workers raise their wages, benefits and working conditions.”

One of the biggest concessions the UAW made in recent decades was accepting the imposition of separate wage and benefit tiers, which the union is now fighting to eliminate. With the Big Three paying Mexican auto workers significantly less than their U.S. counterparts for doing the same work requiring the same skills (as little as $2.54 per hour), the extreme wage differential across the border is itself a tier.

“The first tier structure was created between Mexican workers and U.S. workers,” says Meizhu Lui, co-coordinator of the México Solidarity Project (MSP), an activist group promoting cross-border organizing.

She continues, “Just as the UAW wants to unify its members by getting rid of tiers, hopefully they also see they’ve got to get rid of this split between Mexican and U.S. workers.”

Anti-union figures like CNBC anchor Jim Cramer have openly encouraged the Big Three to completely relocate to Mexico rather than give in to the UAW’s demands, while Stellantis recently shut down a profitable assembly plant in Belvidere, Illinois and moved production to Toluca, Mexico. These conditions indicate the urgency of international labor solidarity.

Mexico solidarity

Although the Mexican auto industry has long been heavily unionized, for decades, genuine collective bargaining was denied by corrupt “charro” union officials in league with employers and the state. But thanks to a 2019 labor law reform and the Rapid Response Labor Mechanism in the 2018 U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), Mexican workers are forming democratic, independent unions willing to fight for higher wages and better standards despite intense opposition from both bosses and the old, company-friendly unions.

Starting at a GM assembly plant in Silao in February 2022, thousands of workers in Mexico’s export-oriented manufacturing facilities have successfully replaced their corrupt company unions with new, independent unions. The movement in Silao received encouragement and support from the UAW and Unifor, the union representing Canadian auto workers.

“Mexico is probably the most exciting place on Earth to organize because workers are pissed and the new labor law and USMCA create a ton of opportunity,” says Maxwell Ulin, a member of Unite All Workers for Democracy (UAWD), a rank-and-file reform caucus in the UAW that helped elect Fain to the union’s presidency earlier this year.

This spring, Ulin helped start the UAWD Mexico & International Solidarity Committee, which is encouraging the UAW to give financial support to Mexico’s nascent independent worker organizations and develop more direct, collaborative relationships so the unions can carry out strategically coordinated workplace actions on both sides of the border.

“It’s a worthwhile investment for the UAW and other unions to care about the industrial supply chain,” says Ulin. “The whole idea of a union is that you build unity across the workforce to be able to hold up all production.”

Meanwhile, Mexican unionists are already taking action.

Responding to the UAW’s strike, on September 18, a group of workers with the Independent Union of Goodyear Mexico Workers (SITGM) — an affiliate of the League of Mexican Workers’ Unions (La Liga) — held a solidarity protest in front of GM’s offices in Mexico City. Last month, the union overwhelmingly won a representation election to negotiate contracts covering 1,150 workers at a Goodyear tire factory in San Luis Potosí.

In a video message recorded during the demonstration, a SITGM representative addressed UAW members, saying, “We stand in solidarity with your demand for a salary increase, and we think that these corporations should provide a wage increase in every country they operate, such as Mexico.”

Other independent unions are also expressing support for the UAW, including the National Union of Mineworkers (Los Mineros), which represents about 1,500 employees at a Stellantis-owned foundry in Coahuila, and the National Union of App Workers (UNTA). The Federation of Independent Unions of the Automotive, Auto Parts, Aerospace and Tire Industries (FESIAAAN) — which is comprised of several independent unions, including Los Mineros — also sent a solidarity message to the UAW that states, “Regardless of where we work, the fight belongs to everyone.”

Lui says the MSP has heard that some rank-and-file GM assembly workers in Silao are pledging to refuse voluntary overtime in support of the strike, as they did during the UAW’s 2019 strike at the company.

Israel Cervantes, a former GM worker who helped lead the independent union drive in the Silao plant (and was fired by the company for his efforts), will be joining UAW strikers on the picket lines in Detroit this week. Now an organizer with the Casa Obrera del Bajio worker center, Cervantes was invited to speak at the Latina/o Worker Leadership Institute at the University of Michigan before the strike began.

In a statement earlier this month, Cervantes wrote, “With the clear vision that if the employer is transnational, the union representations also have to globalize, we call on the workers of these companies [GM, Ford and Stellantis] and the automotive industry in México to not allow them to increase the speed of their production lines.”

The Border Workers’ Committee (CFO), a nonprofit group focused on women’s and workers’ empowerment in northern Mexico, also posted a solidarity message. Last year, the CFO helped 400 workers at a facility in Piedras Negras who make car upholstery win an independent union. Rather than negotiate a contract, VU Manufacturing — the Michigan-based owner of the facility—shut down production earlier this year and laid off all the workers, leaving 71 of them without legally-mandated severance.

Organizers worry VU’s move could set a negative precedent that slows the progress of Mexico’s independent union movement.

“If they get away with closing and leaving the workers high and dry — not even paying severance packages as was required — that’s just going to be a signal that the USMCA has no teeth and that other companies could try to get away with the same thing,” Lui says.

This morning, activists from the MSP, UAW, UAWD, Labor Notes, Democratic Socialists of America, Latina/o Worker Leadership Institute and Casa Obrera del Bajio (including Cervantes) are holding a protest outside VU’s corporate headquarters in Troy, Michigan to demand the company pay severance and owed wages to the laid-off workers.

“Workers in both countries are now realizing how critical it is to build international solidarity to advance their own interests,” says McKenzie, who recently authored a book on a union struggle at a Mexican Ford plant that was violently crushed in 1990. “This hasn’t happened before. This is significant and positive.”

“This fight is global”

Beyond Mexico, unions in Venezuela, Germany and Italy have pledged their support for the UAW’s strike, as has the global union federation IndustriALL. Kristyne Peter, director of the UAW’s international affairs department, tells In These Times that unions and rank-and-filers in Belgium, Spain, the United Kingdom and Thailand have also sent messages of solidarity.

“What’s really surprising is that all of this is organic, which says a lot about the UAW’s message — it’s universal.” Peter says.

Unionized Stellantis workers at an assembly plant in Melfi, Italy staged a one-day strike on September 18 to protest the company’s failure to provide details about new car models set to be produced there. Though the daylong work stoppage was not directly connected to the UAW’s ongoing strike, Fain called it “an inspiration” and voiced support last Friday.

“There is a stronger inclination by today’s UAW to see international solidarity as key,” says Frank Hammer, a UAW retiree and former president of Local 909 in Warren, Michigan.

A long time international activist and member of UAWD, Hammer says he hopes the UAW’s new leadership will support a group of Colombian GM workers in Bogota who were fired without workers’ compensation in 2011 after suffering injuries on the job, and have been demanding justice ever since.

“There’s enthusiasm in the UAW for international solidarity, but I would like to see more of it,” he says.

Perhaps no worker organization outside the United States has shown more passionate support for the UAW strike than Brazil’s powerful Metalworkers’ Union, which represents autoworkers in the major industrial areas of the country’s southeast.

In Curitiba, thousands of workers at Volvo and Renault held mass rallies outside their factories last week in solidarity with the UAW. “It is a shame that executives of [the Big Three], who produce nothing, have their salaries and benefits skyrocket while those of the workers, who are the ones who actually produce, do not keep up with the same pace,” said Sérgio Butka, president of the Metalworkers’ Union of Greater Curitiba. “This fight is global and so is our solidarity.”

The Metalworkers of São José dos Campos and São Paulo also each recorded video messages expressing enthusiastic support for striking U.S. autoworkers.

At the same time that these actions were happening, on September 19, Brazilian Labor Minister Luiz Marinho — who was in New York for the United Nations General Assembly—met with leaders of UAW Region 9 and 9A.

Like Brazil’s left-wing president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Marinho got his start as an autoworker and leader in the Metalworkers’ Union.

Peter, the UAW international director, attended the meeting with Marinho and says the labor minister was joined by the presidents of six Brazilian unions, who wanted to show support for the UAW and discuss the impacts of new technology on workers in both countries.

“He understands what it’s like to put your blood, sweat and tears into the line and what a toll it takes on the body,” says Peter. “He understands what UAW members are trying to achieve.”

Afterward, Marinho briefed Lula about the meeting and the two posed for photos holding a UAW t-shirt. The next day, Lula and Joe Biden announced a new partnership between Brazil, the United States, and International Labor Organization to promote workers’ rights at multilateral forums like the G20 and the upcoming COP30 climate summit.

Back in Brazil, as in many other countries, unionists continue to watch the UAW’s contract fight closely.

“The strike at North American automakers is of great importance for workers around the world, who, in recent years, have felt a restructuring that has lowered wages and rights,” reads a statement by the Metalworkers’ Union of São José dos Campos. “Now, our U.S. comrades are reacting and seeking to recover and expand rights. Their victory will be our victory! All our solidarity!”

(Jeff Schuhrke is a labor historian, educator, journalist and union activist who teaches at the Harry Van Arsdale Jr. School of Labor Studies, SUNY Empire State University in New York City. He has been an In These Times contributor since 2013. Courtesy: In These Times, an American independent, nonprofit magazine dedicated to advancing democracy and economic justice.)

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Record National Strike Wave Swells as 300,000 Hit the Picket Lines

Mark Gruenberg

(As we were preparing to finalise this issue, we came across this article, published on October 5.)

Across the country a wave of strikes has grown to tsunami proportions with some 300,000 workers now out on strike and walking the picket lines. One of those strikes, the walkout by 75,000 healthcare workers, is the largest such action in that industry in the nation’s history.

Meanwhile, the historic strike by auto workers has continued with that walkout impacting all kinds of related industries from coast to coast. Part of what is happening there is supply chain ripples all over the country. It is clear that the 300,000 out on strike and workers generally are fed up with corporate greed which has put them in a place where they either just barely get by or often don’t get by at all.

The role is getting longer, with the total soaring close to 300,000 workers, from Detroit to New York to Los Angeles to San Francisco and on and on.

Some 25,000 UAW members are officially on strike against the Detroit 3, while at least 3,700 more are out at parts plants the firms closed because they are not getting needed parts from the places where workers are out on the picket lines. The massive coast-to-coast operation by UAW members is part of the UAW’s “Stand Up!” designed to keep the car companies off balance.

Among the 3,700 UAW workers that most recently joined the walkout of thousands of their brothers and sisters are the 243 workers at Ford’s Chicago Heights, Ill., stamping plant and 90 more at its Lima, Ohio, Ford idled both, saying those workers sent engines and parts to its giant SUV assembly plant on Chicago’s South Side. The UAW’s bargainers first called the South Side’s 4,600 workers out on September 30.

Another 400 workers combined at Ford’s Livonia, Mich., transmission plant and Sterling, Mich., axle plant were told late on October 4 that they were laid off as of the start of the next day. Those plants, too, supply the main Chicago South Side plant, Ford said.

GM, blaming the union, idled 2,600 parts plant workers in the suburbs of Kansas City, Kansas. The K.C. workers sent parts to the GM plant in Wentzville, Mo., one of the first three plants whose UAW members the union bargainers sent out the night the strike started, at midnight September 14-15.

Some 75,000 healthcare workers—support staffers, pharmacists, lab techs, and others—all members of the 12-local Coalition of Kaiser Permanente Unions are in the largest healthcare strike in U.S. history. They’re out from October 4-6.

“Kaiser Permanente workers in multiple states are now on strike to protest unfair labor practices and Kaiser executives’ failure to bargain in good faith over unsafe staffing levels at hundreds of Kaiser hospitals and facilities across the United States,” CKPU said.

Highly profitable Kaiser Health is offering skimpy raises to already low-paid workers even though its hospitals and clinics are concentrated in high-cost metro areas such as Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland Oreg., Denver, Boston, D.C., and Honolulu.

The Kaiser strike follows “months of bad faith bargaining activity by Kaiser executives and repeated appeals by frontline healthcare workers for Kaiser executives to make the kinds of investments in staffing that could help stem employee turnover and reduce growing patient wait times.” CKPU is charging Kaiser with unfair labor practices, a decision up to the National Labor Relations Board.

Refuse to listen

“Kaiser executives are refusing to listen to us and are bargaining in bad faith over the solutions we need to end the Kaiser short-staffing crisis,” Jessica Cruz, a licensed vocational nurse at Kaiser Los Angeles Medical Center told CKPU. “I see my patients’ frustrations when I have to rush them and hurry on to my next patient. That’s not the care I want to give. We’re burning ourselves out trying to do the jobs of two or three people, and our patients suffer when they can’t get the care they need due to Kaiser’s short-staffing.”

More than 14,000 UNITE HERE Local 11 members in Los Angeles are out on a series of rolling strikes against dozens of L.A. and Orange County, California hotels, including the historic Fairmont Century Plaza, the Beverly Hilton, and the Waldorf Astoria. Two of the hotels, with 600 workers combined, have settled: the Biltmore Los Angeles and the Westin Bonaventure. At both, the local achieved its goals.

“My coworkers and I have given years of service making the beds, cooking the food, and washing the dishes of those who visit Beverly Hills, yet we cannot afford to provide for our families. I am on strike because we deserve our fair share,” Waldorf Astoria housekeeper Lucero Ramirez said.

Key issues for Local 11, at all the hotels, are “unprecedented wage increases that keep pace with the soaring cost of housing” in high-cost L.A., affordable family health care, humane workloads and safe staffing for all workers, better pensions and equal justice language—including hotel commitments to hire previously incarcerated people to not use the highly unreliable federal E-verify system to screen workers’ migration status. The struck Biltmore Hotel has settled.

“It is great to see our contribution recognized and our compensation increased. This agreement will allow us to go home and sleep a bit more securely,” Biltmore housekeeper Lucy Mijangos told Local 11. Said local co-president, Kurt Petersen. “This agreement takes steps to ensure that workers who work in LA will be able to live in LA.”

The nation’s 160,000 SAG-AFTRA members still walk picket lines from New York to Los Angeles against their TV, movie, stage, Netflix, and streaming video bosses of the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Professionals. Talks have resumed in that months-long strike.

Key issues are low pay, disappearing residuals, and AMPTP bosses’ eagerness to cut costs through the overwhelming use of computer-generated artificial intelligence as a replacement for real people. AI can craft the image, mannerisms, voice, and character of a performer in a one-day session then let the bosses duplicate and use it forever without paying the performer a penny.

Back in Detroit—and Chicago Heights—other factors are working in UAW’s favor: High public support and a financial warning from teachers’ union pension funds that hold GM, Ford, and Stellantis stock, to settle in the striking workers’ favor. The Chicago Heights workers are members of union Local 588, which represents 1,000 workers. Ford is the company that also laid off 90 workers at its Lima, Ohio, engine plant.

In preparing to manufacture SUVs, particularly the Ford Explorer, their prime product, Ford spent $1 billion four years ago to completely remake and upgrade the Chicago Assembly. Its workers had manufactured the Ford Taurus. Ford spent another $200 million for a remake at Chicago Heights, so workers there could supply SUV parts.

Chicago Heights and Lima are not the first supply plants to close because the parts they ship went to a plant the union bargaining team called out as part of its “Stand up!” strike strategy.

The public blames not UAW, but the Detroit 3, an opinion poll UAW released shows. It reported 78% support for the strike, including 69%-31% among Republicans. The big reason is the workers’ fight against corporate greed.

Navigator Research added that 85% of African-American and Asian-American respondents, as do three out of four whites, support the workers.

Singled out corporate greed

The UAW has singled out corporate greed and profits over the last decade, $251 billion at the Detroit 3 combined, as a key theme in its campaign to recoup the financial losses Auto Workers suffered over the last decade. Auto firm bosses pocketed millions of dollars each, yearly, while Wall Street financiers walked away with $20 billion in gains from stock buybacks alone. Meanwhile, workers’ pay, adjusted for inflation, declined.

Those financiers’ gains could become losses, as are union pension funds invested in GM, Ford, and Stellantis stock, Teachers President Randi Weingarten told the CEOs of the Detroit car companies—unless the strike is settled soon on terms favorable to the workers.

She added she’s advising her pension funds’ trustees to review their holdings in the auto companies.

“Our members’ pension funds own over $650 million in General Motors stock—$650 million in workers’ retirement savings now at risk due to GM’s unwillingness, so far, to bargain a fair contract,” Weingarten wrote GM CEO Mary Parra. Letters with identical language, but different stockholding figures, went to Ford’s CEO and Netherlands-based Stellantis’s general counsel.

“Our members’ pension funds have a fiduciary duty to manage our retirement assets in the long-term, risk-adjusted best interest of our members as plan participants,” Weingarten continued. “Significant research shows companies that prioritize constructive labor relationships and sound labor practices make for more stable—and more profitable—investments over the long term.

“Companies that fail to ensure fair working conditions for their workforce face financial, legal, and reputational risks, which in turn puts our members’ retirement assets at risk,” Weingarten warned. She added she sent copies of her letters to the CEOs to her unions’ pension trustees.

“Given the close cooperation between your major global competitors and their governments, the path of conflict with your workforce and with the Biden administration seems likely to place GM at a major global competitive disadvantage.

“As the strike wears on, the deferred wages of AFT members invested in GM are put increasingly at risk, as are the future prospects of your company, an important employer in many communities AFT members serve,” Weingarten said.

“As a union of working people, the AFT stands with striking GM workers. As long-term investors, our pension funds are exposed both to the mounting risks of a prolonged strike and to GM management’s pursuit of a shortsighted strategic approach at our expense.”

Weingarten’s letter may not be the last financial warning to the Detroit car companies to settle fast and favorably with the UAW. Two other big fiduciaries for union pension funds have yet to be heard from on the strike’s impact on their members’ investments.

(Award-winning journalist Mark Gruenberg is head of the Washington, D.C., bureau of People’s World. He is also the editor of the union news service Press Associates Inc. (PAI). Courtesy: People’s World, a voice for progressive change and socialism in the United States. It provides news and analysis of, by, and for the labor and democratic movements.)