“Record profits mean record contracts” sounded like an aspirational slogan as the United Auto Workers went on strike against the Big Three automakers. But it’s what the union made happen over a six-week strike that now ends thanks to a tentative agreement with General Motors. Ford and Stellantis had agreed to tentative deals in recent days. Workers still need to ratify those contracts, but workers are back on the job at Ford and Stellantis and will be heading back to work at GM.
The union made big gains on pay and ending the two-tier system that left newer workers making much less than their longer-tenured coworkers. But that’s not all: The agreements offer both hope for a more just clean energy transition and a rebuttal to the top Republican talking point about the strike.
Donald Trump and other Republicans, like Sen. Josh Hawley, have just loved claiming that President Joe Biden and Democrats were going to mandate electric vehicles, which would automatically mean that all auto manufacturing jobs would go to China. It was Biden’s “ridiculous all Electric Car Hoax,” as Trump called it in a September Truth Social post. “Within 3 years, all of these cars will be made in China.”
It’s absolutely true that the UAW went into this strike concerned about a transition to electric vehicles and has withheld its endorsement from Biden over that issue even as UAW President Shawn Fain welcomed Biden in a visit that historians said made Biden the first sitting US president to join a picket line. The two men also spoke following the GM agreement, with Biden then telling reporters, “These agreements ensure the iconic Big Three can still lead the world in quality and innovation.” Even as they kept up the pressure on Biden, instead of embracing Republicans who used this as an excuse for opposing electric vehicles, the UAW negotiated hard for a future in which EVs would be made by union workers in the United States.
In early October, GM agreed to include battery plant workers in its master contract with the union. Last week’s tentative agreement with Ford included a provision that, as the Detroit News reported, “would create a pathway to allow workers at future battery plants as well as a new electric vehicle complex in Tennessee to join the union and be included in the master agreement ‘at master agreement wages,’ Fain said.” Surplus UAW workers will have transfer rights to the Tennessee Electric Vehicle Center in Memphis, which will fall under the master agreement once either its workers are majority UAW, or the workers there unionize through card check. The agreement with Stellantis includes similar provisions—and the company will add a battery plant in Belvidere, Illinois, in addition to reopening its idled Belvidere Assembly Plant.
”For workers and further ensuring a just transition to clean energy, these tentative contracts are truly historic,” Sierra Club Executive Director Ben Jealous said in an emailed statement. “The transformation of the auto sector—and the economy more broadly—to meet US climate commitments represents a generational opportunity to build an economy that works for everyone.”
The UAW didn’t just sit around moaning about the possibility of electric vehicle jobs going to China—or to nonunion companies in the US It fought to ensure that as many of those jobs as possible would be good union jobs, and announced the long-term goal of unionizing more EV manufacturers in the US. Republicans just wanted an accusation to cudgel Democrats with. Auto workers wanted good jobs for the future, and they’re making it happen.
Laura Clawson is assistant managing editor at DailyKos, where this appeared.
From The Progressive Populist, December 1, 2023
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