UAW seeks Washington backing to pressure Detroit 3 in labor talks
“It’s a very uneven playing field right now,” Fain told Reuters on Wednesday after one meeting. “Our workers have regressed. We’ve got to do better.”
The Detroit 3 have said they want to compensate fairly their hourly workers, but also have stressed a need for greater cost competitiveness as the industry shifts to EVs, a market dominated by Tesla Inc.
“The best way to provide job security for our 50,000 manufacturing employees is by keeping General Motors financially strong,” GM manufacturing chief Gerald Johnson said in a video the automaker released on Wednesday on a website dedicated to the UAW talks.
The Detroit 3 rely on representatives in Washington to lobby for their positions.
Biden also faces pressure from former President Donald Trump, who is seeking the Republican presidential nomination in 2024. On Thursday, Trump said Biden was “waging war on the U.S. auto industry” through “crippling” EV mandates and urged the UAW to endorse him.
Biden’s campaign responded by saying Trump was “the most anti-union president in modern history, stacking his cabinet with anti-union officials.” It added that under Biden, “more than 120,000 auto manufacturing jobs have come back to the U.S., and new auto factories are popping up across the country.”
Meanwhile, Fain has not ruled out striking all three Detroit automakers. A strike of all three could have major economic impacts and Washington could come under heavy pressure to intervene.
In 2019, GM’s fourth-quarter profit took a $3.6 billion hit from a 40-day UAW strike that shut down U.S. operations.
“Some of the slides really show how much workers have back-slid while compensation for the top executives is continuing to increase,” said U.S. Representative Pramila Jayapal, a Democrat who took part in a labor caucus meeting with Fain.
She said automakers cannot use an old formula to win labor deals by simply promising a new plant or employment.
“It can’t just be more jobs in America. They need to be union jobs,” Jayapal said.
