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UAW Strikes at Select Plants

The 'Stand Up Strike' is intended to keep the Big Three automakers
off-balance.

At midnight, the United Auto Workers began targeted work stoppages at
plants across the United States.

The "Stand Up Strike," as the union is calling it, is modeled on strikes
in the 1930s, when GM workers occupied plants to protest inequality. The
UAW plans to selectively picket production sites of Ford, Stellantis,
and GM, gradually escalating pressure and keeping the Big Three
automakers uncertain of their next steps.

Reached on Thursday afternoon at a hardware store in northwest Indiana,
where he was purchasing wooden sticks for picket signs, Scott
Houldieson, a worker at a Ford assembly plant in Chicago, told the

**Prospect** he believes the stand-up strike is "a brilliant strategy."

"It keeps the company off guard, and it doesn't deplete our strike
fund," he said. The UAW strike fund is estimated at $825 million
,
enough for three months of $500 weekly payments to workers if all plants
were on strike simultaneously.

"We're not extending the contracts. We are working under expired
contracts, in the places where we'll continue to work," Houldieson
explained. "That's going to allow us to take other plants out at a
moment's notice."

As of Friday morning, GM Wentzville Assembly Local 2250, Stellantis
Toledo Assembly Local 12, and Ford Michigan Final Assembly and Paint
Local 900 plants were on strike. The closures were announced by UAW
president Shawn Fain on Thursday night. "If we need to go all out, we
will," Fain said. "Everything is on the table."

The day before, business news host Jim Cramer told
viewers that
the Big Three automakers still have a "nuclear option": They could
revive threats to move plant operations overseas. As recently as
December, the automaker Stellantis shuttered a U.S. plant
-and
automakers have used the threat

of more outsourcing as leverage in negotiations.

The strike could reverberate far beyond the auto sector. With pro-union
sentiment running high, other labor unions have thrown their support
behind the autoworkers, pledging to join the picket lines.

Teamsters President Sean O'Brien announced yesterday that his union
would not cross the UAW picket line, and Teamsters in the carhaul
industry told the Detroit Free Press

that drivers delivering Big Three vehicles will hold off, in solidarity
with the UAW.

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Later on Friday, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) will join Fain and the UAW
in Detroit for a rally
.

Rising corporate profits have lent credibility to workers' demands.
UPS's profit margins could be squeezed, an executive lamented to The
Wall Street Journal
,
after a new contract ratified in August by the Teamsters raised
drivers' pay. With annual gross profits up by as much as 50 percent at
GM compared with 2019, autoworkers are hoping to score a similar
victory.

"They pretend the sky will fall if we get our fair share of the quarter
of a trillion dollars the Big Three have made over the past decade,"
Fain said on a Wednesday livestream, referring to the Big Three.

Business analysts at the Anderson Economic Group have warned that a
ten-day strike

could reduce U.S. GDP by as much as $5.6 billion, with a particularly
devastating impact on the economy of Michigan. However, the

**Prospect**reported

earlier that AEG's listed clients include GM and Ford. (That figure
refers to a full strike, as opposed to the sit-down strike strategy the
union has adopted instead.)

The potential economic damage has caught the attention of the White
House. Yesterday,

**The Washington Post**reported

that behind closed doors, the administration was considering options to
extend "favorable loans" for small supplier firms in the industry that
serve the Big Three with auto parts and other materials, as well as
grants for workers.

Aside from the immediate negotiations, there's a bigger looming
concern: the future of American manufacturing jobs. As the

**Prospect**previously reported
,
the UAW is trying to avert a future in which the switch to electric
vehicles accelerates the demise of unionized auto work.

Former President Donald Trump has tried to capitalize on that threat,
saying
earlier this week, "There's no such thing as a 'fair transition'
to all electric cars. For the American Autoworker, that's a transition
to Hell. Nothing is more important than terminating this job-crushing
mandate."

The Big Three have set up electric-vehicle (EV) battery plants as joint
ventures (JVs), or partnerships with electronics manufacturers such as
South Korea's SK, rather than wholly owned plants. That setup allows
the companies to insist that the new plants are separate, non-union
entities, exempt from the UAW's agreement.

The UAW calls that a "legal fiction," but it is a fiction that still
sharply constrains how much the union can ask on behalf of EV workers.
It cannot seek commitments that JV battery plants will be unionized, for
example, in exchange for other items in the master agreement.

But there's precedent for folding JV workers into UAW master
agreements. As Fain told

the

**Prospect**last month, "When I worked for Chrysler, there was a joint
venture with ZF at the Marysville [Michigan] axle plant. They were
covered by the national agreement. The employees were leased to ZF but
they were Chrysler employees."

Still, the UAW has other points of leverage. It has expressed outrage as
the Department of Energy has sprayed federal funding at battery plants
without attaching labor standards. And-so far-it has withheld a
re-election endorsement for President Biden.

~ JAROD FACUNDO AND LEE HARRIS

Follow Jarod Facundo on Twitter

Follow Lee Harris on Twitter
or Bluesky Social

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