Labour, Unions, Skills and the Manufacturing Workforce

A factory's workforce is three things at once: a cost line, a source of process capability and a party that can stop the plant. In the US those three roles collided in 2023–26. The UAW's "stand-up strike" began on 15 Sep 2023 at one plant of each Detroit Three company and ended with agreements worth a 25% base wage increase over the contract (11% at ratification), restored cost-of-living adjustments and compounded raises of at least 33% including COLA on the UAW's count, in contracts running to 30 Apr 2028. A year later about 33,000 IAM machinists struck Boeing's Puget Sound plants from 13 Sep 2024 and accepted, on 4 Nov 2024 with 59% in favour, a four-year contract reported as a ~38% raise (over 43% compounded on other reports), without restoring the pension Boeing froze in 2014. In the South, the UAW won the Volkswagen Chattanooga vote in Apr 2024 and a first contract, ratified by 96% on 19 Feb 2026, while losing at Mercedes-Benz in Alabama (May 2024, Companies table). On 4 Sep 2025 an immigration raid detained ~475 people at the Hyundai–LG Energy Solution battery plant under construction in Georgia, more than 300 of them Korean (reported), and delayed its opening by months. Meanwhile US manufacturing employment drifted down, with ~103,000 jobs lost between Jan 2025 and Jan 2026 on revised BLS data (Manufacturing Dive) and employment near ~12.6m in early 2026 (secondary summary of BLS, verify), even as tariffs were justified as job creators. This section explains the factory workforce from the plant manager's side: labour as fixed cost and as capability; the UAW and pattern bargaining; the IAM at Boeing; steel and the USW; Germany's IG Metall and codetermination; non-union transplants and Southern organising; skills, apprenticeships and the "skills gap"; immigration; pensions and retiree health as balance-sheet risk; wages against productivity; and safety. Logistics labour (Teamsters, dockworkers, rail) is in Supply chain 21; this section takes the factory angle.