Iran Press/ America: The auto industry is one of the most heavily unionized parts of the US economy — and United Auto Workers are striking in part to ensure that remains the case, even as the transition to electric vehicles threatens to shrink its workforce.
At midnight on Thursday, thousands of workers walked out of three plants, all of which make trucks or sport utility vehicles powered by petrol. The UAW is demanding higher wages for nearly 150,000 members who work at Ford, General Motors, and Stellantis.
Its campaign is part of a much broader battle: to protect workers through the transition to clean energy, which it estimates could cost 35,000 jobs. That is because the most successful new players in electric vehicles, such as Tesla and Rivian Automotive, do not have a unionized workforce. The striking plants are far from the Lordstown, Ohio factory operated by a joint venture between General Motors and LG Energy Solutions that makes batteries for GM’s EVs, whose workers are not covered by the same contracts.
The UAW has criticized pay and working conditions at the joint venture, known as Ultium Cells. Workers there make less than UAW workers at the Detroit carmakers, though last month, they won pay raises worth $3 to $4 an hour. “Jobs in the battery plants that will power this transition must be as good or better than current jobs building internal combustion engine vehicles and components,” the UAW said in a report.
The union wants factories such as Lordstown to be covered by the main contracts governing the workforce of the Detroit Three; the carmakers oppose this. Instead, workers at the plant had to vote in order to join the UAW, a more onerous process. UAW president Shawn Fain has repeatedly said the shift to electric vehicles, which currently comprise about 8 percent of new car sales, must be “a just transition” that “does not leave workers behind”. The US auto industry employs nearly 1mn workers to manufacture vehicles and parts.
Though considered the quintessential “good job” in the American imagination, auto jobs did not start that way. According to the Library of Congress, the average auto worker in 1935 took home about $900 a month — just over half the amount necessary to support a family of four.
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