Posts tagged General Motors
Strike Looms: Marathon Petroleum Workers in Detroit Vote to Authorize Walkout, Union Reports
February 20, 2024 // There are 273 Teamsters working at the refinery in a variety of roles, the union said, adding that their most recent contract expired last month. "If Marathon won't offer the Teamsters whose labor makes them profitable a fair contract, workers are going to withhold their labor," said Steve Hicks, President of Local 283. The refinery has a crude oil refining capacity of 140,000 barrels per day and processes sweet and heavy sour crude oils into products such as gasoline and distillates.
Ford CEO says company will rethink where it builds vehicles after last year’s autoworkers strike
February 15, 2024 // Ford’s highly profitable factory in Louisville, Kentucky, was the first truck plant that the UAW shut down with a strike. “Our reliance on the UAW turned out to be we were the first truck plant to be shut down,” Farley told the conference. “Really our relationship has changed. It’s been a watershed moment for the company. Does this have business impact? Yes.”
Commentary: Biden Administration’s New Investments in Electric Vehicle and Battery Production Could Benefit Black Americans
February 2, 2024 // While some have suggested that transitioning to EVs would necessitate lower pay and standards for auto workers, the UAW’s gains to the contrary show how the Biden administration’s clean energy plan is actually increasing the leverage of U.S. autoworkers and helping them retain or regain a foothold in America’s middle class. These new investments and labor protections demonstrate significant progress for American workers and the auto industry relative to 2017 through 2020, which saw multiple U.S.-based auto plants close. What’s more, in U.S. history, 2023 marked the lowest annual unemployment rate for Black Americans. The strong labor market in Black communities makes it all the more crucial for automakers to invest in skills training, outreach, and their workforces in order to find and retain the requisite talent to fill the tens of thousands of new jobs created by these investments. If they do so, and efforts by the far-right to water down or repeal the Inflation Reduction Act are defeated, there is ample reason for optimism that ballooning investments in EV and battery production in Black communities will help sustain the strong labor market for Black Americans in the months and years ahead.
Workers at Alabama Hyundai plant announce union as UAW drives deeper into Southeast
February 2, 2024 // Thirty percent of the workers at the sole Hyundai plant in the U.S., in Alabama, have joined the United Auto Workers (UAW). The announcement marks the third such public union drive at an automaker in the Southeast.
Dem Demands On Automakers Could Backfire On Their Own Climate Agenda And Americans’ Wallets, Experts Say
January 17, 2024 // “EV cars require fewer workers to build,” Higgins told the DCNF, noting that greater union membership in the auto industry is probably not possible with a corresponding transition to EVs. “That’s just a fact. But that may not matter as much as you might think to the UAW. Believe it or not, only about 150,000 of the UAW’s 400,000 or so members actually work for Detroit automakers. The union has branched out into other areas, such as education, and those areas are growing… So fewer auto workers will hurt the union but not kill it.”
Commentary: UAW campaign to organize Southeast carmakers gets into gear
January 11, 2024 // The announcement in Tuscaloosa follows a similar one by workers at the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tenn., in December. Both the VW and Mercedes announcements are at the leading edge of an “unprecendented” new campaign by the UAW targeting 13 carmakers, from Hyundai and Rivian to Tesla and Honda, according to The Detroit Free Press. That drive pushes the union into territory long hostile to organized labor. Only about 5 percent of Southern workers are in a union, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor and Statistics. Republican politicians have long used the region’s low union involvement as a selling point.
NLRB complaint alleges Lucid fired employees for union effort
January 10, 2024 // This is not the first time the union has attempted to organize outside of its traditional Big Three stronghold. It has been able to get enough support at Volkswagen’s plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee, to have union elections there twice, and twice at plants operated by Nissan in Canton, Mississippi, and Smyrna, Tennessee. But most of the efforts to organize companies like Tesla failed before even reaching the point of an NLRB-supervised representation election.
UAW President Shawn Fain plans to keep automakers sweating
January 1, 2024 // "I don't like what I've seen in my work career with the UAW leadership, where they were too damn close to the companies," UAW President Shawn Fain told CNN earlier this month. But when asked if things work better for his members when there's a less contentious or more contentious relationship between the UAW and the Big Three, Fain responded, "We just negotiated the most successful contracts in our history," he said. "For the last 30 years that I've been a member, we went backwards. So I like to let the body of work speak for itself," Fain said. The success of those contracts is the reason that Shawn Fain is CNN Business' labor leader of the year.
German Union Backs UAW Organizing Effort at VW Chattanooga
December 23, 2023 // IG Metall, which participated in the UAW’s failed organizing drives at Chattanooga in 2014 and 2019, also has a stake in the UAW’s new fight in Tennessee. IG Metall, Germany’s largest labor union, represents 125,000 VW workers.
‘Louisville is a union town’: A look back at the 2023 labor movement in the metro area
December 19, 2023 // This year, Kentucky saw 16 labor actions, including strikes and protests, which is more than the combined total of labor events in 2021 and 2022, according to Cornell ILR’s Labor Action Tracker as of Dec. 7. Each of these labor actions, from union giants such as Teamsters Local 89 at UPS and United Auto Workers Local 862 at Ford to the smaller labor actions at places including Heine Brothers Coffee, Sunergos Coffee and Rainbow Blossom, have resulted in victories for Louisville workers. “People are realizing, those that work for a living in places like Ford, in places like GE [Appliances], UPS and other large employers as well as the smaller employers, the baristas in these coffee shops ... that their only real option to progress themselves at their jobs and in their lives is to come together in solidarity as union members,” Londrigan said.