Posts tagged General Motors
Opinion: Bernie Sanders to Big 3 CEOs: “It is time for you to end your greed.”
September 19, 2023 // Bernie Sanders: "the average American worker is worse off today than he or she was 50 years ago."
Why it seems like everyone’s going on strike on Biden’s watch
September 19, 2023 // Biden was able to intervene directly in talks between railroads and rail workers since federal law gives the government a big say in that industry’s labor relations due to its economic importance. And his top Labor Department official was involved in a deal this year between West Coast ports and dockworkers. Here’s how the administration publicly stepped in — or didn’t — in some of organized labor’s most high-profile moments.
UAW president: Threat of layoffs for non-striking employees won’t make them ‘settle for less’
September 18, 2023 // Ford announced Friday that it temporarily laid off about 600 workers at the plant on Friday, just hours after other workers began a strike. “This layoff is a consequence of the strike at Michigan Assembly Plant’s final assembly and paint departments, because the components built by these 600 employees use materials that must be e-coated for protection,” Ford said in a statement to CBS News. “E-coating is completed in the paint department, which is on strike.” Fain said that the UAW will continue to support the laid off workers, and that the threats do not scare them. “Their plan won’t work. The UAW will make sure any worker laid off in the Big Three’s latest attack will not go without an income,” he said. “We’ll organize one day longer than they can, and go the distance to win economic and social justice at the Big Three.”
UAW strike 2023 against Detroit automakers: Live updates, news from the picket sites
September 15, 2023 //
UAW locals get marching orders for strike against Big Three
September 14, 2023 // At 10 p.m. on Thursday, UAW President Shawn Fain announced three locals were selected to start the strike at midnight. Those locals represent Ford Michigan Assembly Plant in Wayne, Stellantis Toledo Assembly Complex in Ohio and General Motors Wentzville Assembly Center in Missouri. For the first time in union history all three companies came to the UAW’s Solidarity House downtown Detroit, Fain said. All three automakers have made multiple counteroffers but none of been accepted. Fain says the companies were slow to come to the table at the beginning of negotiations.
The UAW Might Drive the Big Three off a Cliff
September 14, 2023 // Automakers face this reality every day. General Motors is losing money on every electric vehicle, a situation that it hopes to change by 2025, though the path is far from certain. Ford’s EV line is expected to lose $4.5 billion this year, up nearly 50 percent over last year. Stellantis’s CEO has said the costs of the EV transition are “beyond the limits,” meaning the industry can’t continue down this road without making EVs prohibitively expensive.
No-Show Workers Add Wrinkle to Stellantis Union Contract Talks
September 14, 2023 // The auto giant has a hard time getting some US factory workers to show up for their shifts. They just don’t align on how to solve it. Stellantis has made fixing absenteeism a priority in contract talks with the UAW for its 43,000 unionized workers. The absentee rate at its US plants was 23% last year, according to a copy of the company’s initial contract proposal reviewed by Bloomberg. Absent workers led to $217 million in lost sales in 2021 and 2022, the company estimated.
Auto workers strike would test Biden’s assertion he’s the ‘most pro-union president in US history
September 13, 2023 // Union support was instrumental in helping Biden overcome a slow start to clinch the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, and it helped him win not just Michigan but Wisconsin and Pennsylvania as he defeated Trump in that year's general election. Underscoring his commitment to organized labor, Biden's lone campaign rally since launching his reelection bid in April came in June in Philadelphia, when more than a dozen of the country's largest and most powerful unions endorsed Biden for a second term. So many unions banding together for an unprecedented joint endorsement so early in the election cycle was meant as a show of strength for the president. Conspicuously absent from the event, though, was the UAW. Fain has since said that if Biden wants the UAW's 2024 endorsement, he'll have to earn it.
How UAW’s Unrealistic Contract Demands Would Backfire on Union
September 13, 2023 // In the current talks, Fain demanded a 46% increase in base pay for hourly workers. With base wages currently ranging from a reported $17 per hour for temporary workers to $32.32 for top-scale assembly workers, the 46% jump would put the range between $24.82 and $47.18 per hour, or $51,600 to $98,100 a year in annual pay. But that’s just the start. The union is demanding a 32-hour work week, for which workers would receive 40 hours of pay. That’s like paying for five days’ worth of groceries, but receiving only four days of food. The UAW’s “pay more for less” demands would bring the true hourly range for workers to between $31.02 and $58.98 per hour. The median hourly wage for all manufacturing workers across the U.S. is $26.59 per hour. At nearly $59 per hour, UAW workers could earn 50% more per hour than registered nurses and 59% more per year than elementary teachers.
Biden’s Union Problems Are a Gift to Trump
September 8, 2023 // Former President Donald Trump, who won Michigan by just under 11,000 votes in one of the biggest political upsets of the 2016 election, weighed in on the possibility of a strike over the Labor Day weekend, referring to Fain as a "respected" union head and vowing to stop the "madness" of electric vehicles. A labor action from UAW is likely to open up an opportunity for Trump to seize one of Michigan's most critical counties. Recent polls show that Biden is in a statistical dead heat against Trump. The Democrat is leading by just one percentage point, according to RealClearPolitics' polling averages. "Fain is in no hurry to endorse President Biden when a significant number of UAW members supported former President Trump in previous elections," Arthur Wheaton, the director of Labor Studies at Cornell University, told Newsweek. "Why risk fractures in union solidarity during a crucial bargaining period. No upside to endorsing now and plenty of potential downside in an extremely difficult bargaining time at the Detroit Three." Political consultant Jay Towsend said that while a UAW strike would be unlikely to damage Biden's image as a union supporter, the economic impact and turmoil that a labor action could cause would give his re-election campaign "a headache it does not need, especially in rust-belt states he must win."