Crunch time looms for UAW talks
Labor experts called the UAW’s walkout against Chrysler in 2007 a “Hollywood strike” because it lasted just six hours and was more for show than to actually harm the automaker, which was less than two years away from bankruptcy. There have been baseball games and tennis matches that lasted longer than Chrysler workers spent on the picket lines.
My most lasting memory of covering that strike as a reporter for The New York Times was being yelled at by a worker who later found me and apologized, saying it was his first strike and he got too amped up. Then everyone went home before dinnertime.
In this year’s contract talks, the UAW is threatening to call a far more damaging strike — the kind that has actually shut down Hollywood for the past three and a half months. A study released this week estimated that a strike against the Detroit 3 simultaneously could cost the economy some $5 billion in just 10 days and push Michigan into a recession if it lasted long enough.
With a Sept. 14 deadline looming, the union’s first-year president, Shawn Fain, has accused the automakers of dragging their feet and stirred up anger among rank-and-file members through frequent social media livestreams.
If — when? — the UAW hits the picket lines next month, Automotive News will post all of the latest updates on a new page of our website dedicated to the negotiations. We have a special package of stories there exploring the main issues being discussed at the bargaining table and some of the dynamics in play.
This week’s stories include examinations of some recent deals the UAW and Teamsters union have made in other industries to see how the Detroit 3 talks might play out and of the campaign by the UAW’s new leadership to be more open and transparent with members.
With such uncertainty swirling around the bargaining table this year, there’s no telling where things are headed. But we’ll be there for all of it, well through dinnertime and beyond.
— Nick Bunkley, senior editor
“There’s been some criticism that we should have been faster with our EVs. We’re going as fast as we can, but we wanted to make sure we were leveraging a platform that’s going to give us efficiency with Ultium and that consumers weren’t going to have to compromise.” |
— GENERAL MOTORS CEO MARY BARRA ON THE ISSUES THE AUTOMAKER FACES AS IT PURSUES A PRODUCTION GOAL OF 400,000 ELECTRIC VEHICLES BY MID-2024 |
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Biden urges a deal as UAW, Detroit 3 seek contract: President Joe Biden last week called for “all sides to work together to forge a fair agreement” as the UAW continued contract talks with the Detroit 3. “The UAW helped create the American middle class, and as we move forward in this transition to new technologies, the UAW deserves a contract that sustains the middle class,” Biden said in a statement released by the White House.
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Aug. 26, 1872: Date of birth of James Couzens, an original investor in Ford Motor Co. in 1903, who served as general manager of the company. He later was a U.S. senator.
