UAW is framing its battles as fights for the entire working class, and showcasing power like it hasn’t done in years.
A man walks down the road waving American flags outside the Ford Motor Co. Kentucky Truck Plant on October 14, 2023, in Louisville, Kentucky.The Auto Workers now have agreements with each of the Big 3 automakers. The new contracts are a sharp about-face from decades of concessions.
The union announced tentative agreements with Ford and Stellantis last week. The agreements came after UAW members struck at each company’s most profitable truck plant, the latest escalation in the union’s six-week Stand-Up Strike. Workers at two Detroit-area plants, Sterling Axle and Rawsonville Components, will now be on the same wage scale as the rest of the UAW’s members at Ford, meaning that wage tiers at Ford are eliminated. Workers at these two plants had been on a lower tier since 2007, with wages ranging from $16.25 to $22.50. They’ll see immediate raises of 53 to 88 percent.
Temps at Ford will receive profit-sharing checks starting in 2024, the first time they’ve been included. Fain and Boyer said Stellantis will add an additional 5,000 jobs by the end of the agreement, an about-face from the company’s threats to cut thousands of jobs heading into negotiations. The union won the right to strike over product decisions and investment, as well as over plant closures. “That means if the company goes back on their word on any of these plans, we can strike the hell out of them,” said Fain.
Fain said the UAW wants to give time for other unions to align their contract expirations with the UAW and strike together on May 1, 2028 — International Workers’ Day. “If we’re going to truly take on the billionaire class and rebuild the economy so that it starts to work for the benefit of the many and not the few,” Fain said, “then it’s important that we not only strike, but that we strike together.
Labor Notes received a message from a Toyota worker in Alabama the next day, saying management had called an emergency meeting. Toyota—clearly running scared — was raising top pay to $32, he said, and shortening the time to get there from eight years to four. Another worker at a Toyota plant in Kentucky said the company was boosting wages and slashing the progression to top rate in half there, too. The new top rate will increase $2.94 to $34.80 for production workers and $3.70 to $43.
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