The United Auto Workers are on strike. For the first time in the union’s long and storied history, workers are on strike simultaneously against all of the “Big Three” automakers — Ford, GM and Stellantis (the maker of Chrysler). The labor action could affect nearly 150,000 workers and, if it drags on, bring a meaningful slice of the American economy to a standstill. Dark warnings that this might cause a recession are being thrown around. But, in reality, this strike is a reason to rejoice if you are a working person in America. It is a sign of an ongoing power shift that may be strong enough to heal wounds sustained by the entire working class for decades.
The UAW is led by Shawn Fain, a reformer elected earlier this year to pull the union out of its days of stasis and corruption, and return it to its crusading, democratic roots. Fain is plainspoken, middle-aged and unflashy, but he holds forth on the rights of labor with the fervor of a preacher. He entered into negotiations with the automakers declining to shake hands at the bargaining table and holding tight to his vow of “No concessions.”
“Record corporate profits should be shared by record contracts for the UAW,” Biden said Friday.
Tactically, this strike has started small, with a shifting roster of representative plants and scaling up as necessary. This strategy has the twin benefits of inflicting paralyzing uncertainty on the industry’s logistics and operations while conserving the union’s strike fund. But though the strike has started relatively small in number, do not imagine that it has small stakes. It is an industrial-scale attempt to find out whether the post-pandemic surge of enthusiasm for organized labor can produce the kind of material gains that change people’s lives forever.
Fain and the UAW’s members are calculating that the balance of power between capital and labor, which has tilted deeply toward capital ever since the Reagan era, is swinging hard back the other way. There are reasons to think that this is true. Tight labor markets since Covid began have given workers more bargaining power; polls show that public enthusiasm for unions is at its highest point since 1965; and President Joe Biden’s pro-union bona fides have created a rare period of active support for labor inside the White House and at regulatory agencies. (“Record corporate profits should be shared by record contracts for the UAW,” Biden said Friday.)
This is set against a longer-term backdrop of rising economic inequality. Generations of workers are rightly furious that their pay has remained stagnant for decades as executives and investors reaped the gains of their increasing productivity. Autoworkers have been exposed to the full force of these trends. They and their unions made grand concessions after the 2008 financial crisis to save their industry. When the companies’ fortunes improved, they forgot the workers’ sacrifice. An Economic Policy Institute analysis found that in the past decade, the Big Three have made $250 billion in profits, sent $66 billion of that to investors and raised CEO pay by 40%. Meanwhile, the average auto manufacturing worker is earning almost 20% less today than they did in 2008.
In this, the auto industry is a perfect microcosm of the American economy writ large. This bifurcation between the top and everyone else — the trend that has eroded the middle class, destroyed the classic “American dream” of supporting a family on a blue collar income, and fed the blanket disgust in our system that helped fuel the rise of Donald Trump — cannot continue forever. Something has to give.
So the UAW is going big. Their demands for this contract are not incremental. The union is asking for not just a 36% wage increase over four years — similar to the increase in executive pay — but also a defined benefit pension (something that corporate America is determined to make extinct) and a 32-hour workweek. The latter demands may be somewhat aspirational, but if there was ever a time to be aspirational, it is now.
Unless the labor movement can leap up and seize this moment, it may well slip away.
In fact, this brash showing of aspiration — this willingness to force the gears of iconic companies to stop turning in order to address the fact that the lives of working people are not sustainable — will likely go down as the strike’s most important quality of all. American unions have been in a defensive crouch for a half-century. After World War II, 1 in 3 American workers was a union member; today, that number is barely 1 in 10. Business interests, their Republican allies and a Democratic Party that made the poisonous decision to embrace neoliberalism for a generation all conspired successfully to make it hard to join unions, sustain unions or exercise union power.
Today, as unions look up at the parting clouds and see some unfamiliar rays of sunshine, the question becomes whether the labor movement can rouse itself to act with the urgency necessary. Accepting small losses and compromises in the name of political necessity becomes a habit. Unless the labor movement can leap up and seize this moment, it may well slip away. And that is why everyone should be encouraged by this strike. It is not just a story about the auto industry, nor about one particular contract. It is a story about another major labor union proving that it understands the opportunity at hand. Already this year, we have seen tens of thousands of striking workers shut down Hollywood, and hundreds of thousands of determined Teamsters who were ready to strike win a historically strong contract for UPS workers. Every time that organized labor demonstrates that it can stand up to and defeat organized capital, it sends a message to the 90% of workers without a union that a better life is possible. Organizing those workers is the ultimate task of the labor movement, the end point of the quest to put this long era of runaway inequality to bed forever. Getting there will mean showing everyone what unions can do. It will mean undertaking, and winning, a lot of big strikes. “It’s time to decide what kind of a world we want to live in,” Fain declared earlier this week. “And it’s time to decide what we are willing to do to get it.” The auto workers have taken their place on the front line of the class war. They will make themselves a world worth living in, or the CEOs will have to go make all the cars themselves.
Hamilton Nolan
Hamilton Nolan is a journalist who writes about labor and politics. 
