A historic strike at the Detroit Three automakers appears nearly inevitable.
Less than two hours before the strike deadline, United Auto Workers president Shawn Fain revealed the first group of plants that would go on strike starting at 11:59pm Thursday night if the union and the companies — Ford, General Motors and Stellantis — fail to reach agreements on new contracts.
The union is asking for 36% raises in general pay over four years — a top-scale assembly plant worker gets about $32 an hour now. In addition, the UAW has demanded an end to varying tiers of wages for factory jobs; a 32-hour week with 40 hours of pay; the restoration of traditional defined-benefit pensions for new hires who now receive only 401(k)-style retirement plans; and a return of cost-of-living pay raises, among other benefits.
Perhaps most important to the union is that it be allowed to represent workers at 10 electric vehicle battery factories, most of which are being built by joint ventures between automakers and South Korean battery makers. The union wants those plants to receive top UAW wages. In part that’s because workers who now make components for internal combustion engines will need a place to work as the industry transitions to EVs.
Workers at three plants —a GM assembly plant in Wentzville, Missouri, a Stellantis assembly plant in Toledo, Ohio, and part of a Ford plant in Wayne, Mich.—would be among the first to walk off the job under Fain’s new strike strategy.
Dubbed the “stand up strike,” the plan entails having only some of the nearly 150,000 members at targeted auto plants walk off their jobs.
Additional locations would follow at a moment’s notice, depending on how bargaining with the companies progresses — a strategy intended to ramp up the pressure on companies by keeping them guessing about how their operations would be disrupted.
“This is our generation’s defining moment,” Fain told UAW members at a Facebook Live event on Thursday night. “The money is there, the cause is righteous, the world is watching.”
The targeted strikes are a departure from the UAW’s traditional playbook, which has usually involved having all union members at a single company walk off the job at once.
The UAW is also taking the unprecedented step of striking against all three companies at once — another departure from its traditional practice.
