“Timidity,” said the military strategist Von Clausewitz, “will do a thousand times more damage than audacity.” The United Auto Workers strike of 2023, which is now all wrapped up pending contract ratification votes by members, will go down as a testament to the truth of that phrase. Its material gains alone were impressive, but it is the audacity that will echo for years to come.
Monday’s announcement that the UAW had reached a tentative agreement with General Motors — following similar agreements with Ford and Stellantis — marks the likely conclusion of a strike that will be studied in the labor history books of the future. It was the first time that the UAW struck all of the “Big Three” automakers at once. The union leavened the enormity of that task with a “Stand Up” strategy that struck only selected plants, rather than everywhere at once — preserving union resources, easing the burden on workers, and retaining flexibility to crank up the strike strategically in response to delays at the bargaining table.
The contracts are models of solidarity, legal embraces of the idea that the labor movement’s collective power exists to help everyone.
The new contracts secure major wins, including 25% wage gains, the elimination of divisive wage tiers, the right to strike over future plant closures, and a path to unionize the companies’ electric vehicle plants. These victories amount to a comprehensive reset of the balance of power in the auto industry, where workers have been struggling to participate in the industry’s resurgence since the 2008 recession. The contracts are models of solidarity, legal embraces of the idea that the labor movement’s collective power exists to help everyone. In all cases, the biggest beneficiaries of the union’s leverage were the workers with the greatest needs: lower earners, new hires, temps, and all of the auto industry’s employees who are not unionized — yet.
Throughout the six-week strike, much of the mainstream commentary argued that the UAW might be demanding too much. In the end, the union’s decision to boldly ask for what its members actually needed was vindicated. Aspirational demands like a 32-hour work week and the return of defined benefit pensions, predictably, were not won, but the very act of putting them on the table represented the broadening of a vision that has too long been constricted.
Shawn Fain, the reform-minded UAW president elected earlier this year, has grown during the course of this strike into a full-fledged hero to the labor movement’s most fervent believers. Fain is the rare union president who speaks in a direct, unvarnished way about the fact that unions are engaged in a class war. Recognizing the natural antagonism between workers and capital, not acting like “we’re all on the same team here,” is the proper orientation for a labor leader. At the UAW’s convention in April, Fain told members that “we’re here to come together to ready ourselves for the war against our only one and only true enemy, multibillion-dollar corporations.” And this week, he called the contracts that the union just secured “a turning point in the class war that’s been raging in this country for the past 40 years.” If corporate America was hoping that all of that was just bluster as a negotiating tactic, they have been bitterly surprised.
The gains won in this strike will secure a place in the middle class for hundreds of thousands of American families. Consider the deep significance of that achievement, and then consider that the UAW’s next steps will be far more important for America. The same day that the union announced its deal with GM, news also broke that the union is in the midst of organizing Tesla’s huge factory in Fremont, California. Unionizing Tesla is essential to the UAW’s long-term strength. Giving working people power at industrial scales requires unionizing entire industries, so that companies can’t turn their nonunion status into a competitive advantage against their peers who are obligated to treat employees fairly. Otherwise, Elon Musk can continue to pay his workers salaries far below those at the Big Three and stick the savings into his own swollen pockets. If the UAW succeeds in organizing Tesla — and the many other nonunion auto plants that litter the South — it can legitimately begin to turn the clock in America back to a time when prosperity was shared, before our ongoing age of inequality began sucking all the wealth upward in earnest. The pendulum can only swing away from inequality if it gets a solid push. The fundamental orientation toward class war is the difference between the beleaguered and beaten down labor movement of the past 40 years, and what Shawn Fain and his ideological compatriots are planning to build. The gains that the UAW just secured — like the recent gains that the Teamsters won for UPS drivers, and the Writers Guild won for screenwriters — will have little meaning as long as 90% of American workers remain without a union of their own. Encouragingly, 2023’s surge of labor activism appears to be accompanied by a genuine resolve to spread the power of unions to all the nonunion workers who need it. The UAW, which has been as diligent about organizing grad students as it has about autoworkers, can be one of the leaders of a newly unionized generation of Americans. The pendulum can only swing away from inequality if it gets a solid push. The UAW’s victory in this strike was inspiring on its own, but more thrilling is the conviction it carries with it: that this strike is just the beginning of a much, much bigger battle.
Hamilton Nolan
Hamilton Nolan is a journalist who writes about labor and politics. 
