Grassroots/Hank Kalet

Surfing the Strike Wave

It looks like Red Hot Union Summer is stretching into the fall. The United Auto Workers have kicked off a “targeted strike” against the nation’s Big Three automakers, seeking to win back basic work rights given up under past leadership.

As I write this in September, about 13,000 UAW members are on the picket lines at three plants in the Midwest, one from each of the Big Three — General Motors, Ford and Chrysler owner Stellantis. The multi-employer strike is the first in the union’s history, according to the Associated Press, and it will be the biggest private employer strike in several decades.

The UAW walkout is just the latest in a run of strikes and organizing drives sweeping the nation in a cross-section of the American workforce — academic workers (I was out for a week in April at Rutgers), warehouse workers and delivery drivers, baristas, “team members,” auto workers, nurses. The level of energy and militancy among workers has not been this high since the ’60s, many observers have said, triggered by a growing economic divide and a pandemic that underscored just how uneven the playing field has become.

And the demands are not just about money. They are about safety and workplace democracy, about having a say over the conditions under which one works. In academia, we are fighting to roll back the growing use of adjunct and contingent labor, which depresses wages and creates an underclass of underpaid instructors who lack healthcare or job security.

At Starbucks, workers want control over their schedules, while Amazon workers are seeking to shed the computerized models that have left many of them straining to keep up. Teamsters at UPS, who threatened but avoided a walkout, sought and won air-conditioned vehicles and other health and safety upgrades

I recently visited the picket lines in New Brunswick, N.J., where nurses, represented by the United Steel Workers, were on strike. Nurses told me they were forced to manage far too many patients and that staffing levels at Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital in New Brunswick had to increase to ensure that patient-to-nurse ratios were not too high. Money, they said, was not the issue, and they were striking to ensure better care.

The UAW strike also is about more than money. True, the UAW is seeking a 40% wage hike over four years (which would barely make up for what workers lost to inflation and represents a far smaller increase than the companies’ upper management has received in recent years). But, as Reuters reports, it also wants “shorter work weeks, restoration of defined benefit pensions and stronger job security as automakers make the shift to electric vehicles.”

The limited-strike tactic, according to union leaders quoted by the New York Times, was the first salvo in a broader battle. The 13,000 who have walked represent about 8.5% of the union’s nearly 150,000 members at Big Three plants, and UAW President Shawn Fain, who was elected on a reform slate earlier this year, says “workers could strike at more plants if the companies don’t come up with better offers.”

On Sept. 18, Fain issued a video on the UAW website announcing that, if “serious progress” was not made by Sept. 22 (I’m writing this on Sept. 19 ), “more locals will be called on to Stand Up and join the strike. That will mark more than a week since our first members walked out. And that will mark more than a week of the Big Three failing to make progress in negotiations toward reaching a deal that does right by our members.” [Another 5,000 UAW members at 38 GM and Stellantis parts distribution facilities joined the strike Sept. 22. Ford was spared because of “real progress” in negotiations, Fain said.]

UAW members have the support of the public for now, though observers question whether that will continue when the strikes affect the broader economy. These observers — often writers for the business press used to crafting fawning profiles of business leaders — have little experience with what the UAW is doing, or with the kind of strike wave we are living through. Workers understand they are interconnected, and they understand that success by the UAW will buoy the hopes of others who are organizing or preparing walk outs.

When Ronald Reagan fired striking PATCO workers in 1981, it crippled labor organizing for generations. A win by the UAW will continue the recent successful run by labor and could have a similarly broad effect, signaling that the union movement is strong and that union organizing is the only way we can take back the economy from the bosses.

Hank Kalet is a poet and journalist in New Jersey. Email, hankkalet@gmail.com; X (Twitter), @newspoet41; Instagram, @kaletwrites; Substack, hankkalet.Substack.com.

From The Progressive Populist, October 15, 2023

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