A 46% pay raise. A 32-hour week with 40 hours of pay. A restoration of traditional pensions. The demands that a more combative United Auto Workers union has pressed on General Motors, Stellantis and Ford — demands that even the UAW’s own president calls “audacious” — are edging it closer to a strike when its contract ends Sept. 14.
DETROIT — A 46% pay raise. A 32-hour week with 40 hours of pay. A restoration of traditional pensions.
Shawn Fain, the pugnacious new leader of the UAW, has characterized the contract talks with Detroit’s automakers as a form of war between billionaires and ordinary middle class workers. Last month, in an act of showmanship during a Facebook Live event, Fain condemned a contract proposal from Stellantis as “trash” — and tossed a copy of it into a wastebasket, “where it belongs,” he said.
“They get out-of-control salaries,” he said. “They get pensions they don’t even need. They get top-rate health care. They work whatever schedule they want. The majority of our members do not get a pension nowadays. It’s crazy. We get substandard health care. We don’t get to work remotely.” Last week, the union filed charges of unfair labor practices against Stellantis and GM, which it said have yet to offer counterproposals. As for Ford, Fain asserted that its response, by rejecting most of the union’s demands, “insults our very worth.”
Yet even Fain has described the union’s proposals as “audacious” in demanding the restoration of traditional defined-benefit pensions for new hires; an end to tiers of wages; pension increases for retirees; and — perhaps most audaciously — a 32-hour week for 40 hours of pay. The union fears that because EVs are simpler to build, with fewer moving parts, fewer workers will be needed to assemble them. In addition, workers at combustion engine and transmission plants will likely lose jobs in the transition; they’ll need a place to go.
But automakers say a generous settlement would stick them with costs far above their competitors’ just as they start producing more EVs. The inability to bring Hyundai-Kia, Nissan, Volkswagen, Honda and Toyota factories into the union has weakened the UAW’s leverage, said Harry Katz, a labor professor at Cornell.
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