Leadership, Labour and Culture

On 15 September 2023, as the United Auto Workers' contracts with Ford, General Motors and Stellantis expired together, the union did something it had never done. It struck all three Detroit carmakers at once, but not all of their plants. Workers walked out of one assembly plant at each company, about 12,700 people by early accounts (reported), while the other members kept working. Each week the union's president, Shawn Fain, announced on a live video which plants would join next. Companies that moved in bargaining were spared; companies that did not saw more plants struck, and the later targets included plants that built the most profitable trucks and SUVs (reported). The union called it a "stand-up strike". It cost the union a fraction of what a national walkout would have drawn from its strike fund, reported at about $825 million before the strike, and it made each company guess where the next stoppage would land.

Fain was new to the job. He had won a narrow run-off against the incumbent, Ray Curry, in March 2023, in the union's first direct election of its officers (reported). The election was itself a product of scandal: a federal corruption investigation had sent two former UAW presidents to prison and produced a consent decree, approved in January 2021, that put the union under a court-appointed monitor and required a referendum on direct elections (Justice Department; reported). Fain had campaigned against the concessions of 2007–09, the lower wage tier for new hires and the suspended cost-of-living adjustment, and against the companies' plan to build their electric-vehicle battery plants as joint ventures outside the master agreements.

Ford settled on 25 October, Stellantis on 28 October and GM on 30 October. The contracts raised base wages by 25% over their term, 11% at ratification, restored cost-of-living adjustments, which the UAW counted as compounded raises of at least 33%, took the top production rate to about $42.60 an hour by 2028, ended most wage tiers and ran to 30 April 2028 (UAW; reported). Members ratified them in November with about 64% overall; GM's production workers approved by only about 55% (UAW). Within weeks Toyota, Honda and Hyundai announced pay rises at their non-union US plants (reported). The companies said the agreements would add up to about $900 a vehicle (company claim; estimates vary). Two years later, when Ford, GM and Stellantis wrote down their electric-vehicle programmes (Chapter 5), they argued that labour costs had contributed; the union blamed management's bets and changes in policy (reported).