The United Auto Employees union is ramping up its strike towards Common Motors and Stellantis – the worldwide firm that makes Chrysler, Jeep and Dodge autos – and getting nearer to a cope with Ford.

About 5,600 UAW members at 38 Common Motors and Stellantis distribution facilities for auto components in 20 states walked off the job on Sept. 22, 2023, after an announcement by UAW President Shawn Fain.

Employees on the solely Ford plant affected by the strike because it started on Sept. 15 will stay off the job. The entire variety of UAW members concerned within the strike stands at about 18,300.

Beneath Fain’s management, the union is taking an adversarial method: It’s railing towards what it describes because the “poverty wages” UAW members earn whereas denouncing the automakers’ CEOs as “grasping” and vowing to “wreck their financial system.”

As a scholar of employment relations, I feel this strike is just too narrowly targeted on making up for the wages and advantages autoworkers have misplaced in recent times. However one other large goal is making certain that autoworkers can have good jobs as soon as most U.S.-made autos are electric-powered.

This dispute alone is not going to resolve this bigger goal. Relatively, I imagine administration and labor might want to swiftly transfer on following the strike and work collectively constructively to satisfy that purpose.

UAW’s calls for

The union is demanding an finish to the concessions it made to the three firms throughout the monetary disaster that started in 2007. Its members employed by Ford, GM and Stellantis have skilled a 19% decline of their wages, after accounting for inflation, since 2008.

The union additionally desires the automakers – generally referred to as the Detroit Three – to abolish the tiered wage system, which pays new workers far lower than extra skilled staff, even for a similar work. The UAW initially mentioned it was in search of a wage improve of 40% over 4 years and the restoration of a cost-of-living allowance that may hyperlink wages to inflation.

Along with these calls for, the UAW desires defined-benefit pensions for all staff restored, company-paid well being advantages for retirees reestablished and the correct to strike over plant closures assured. Different calls for embrace extra paid day off and seeing all momentary staff made everlasting. It has additionally referred to as for a 32-hour work week and not using a pay lower.

Precedents for working collectively

Though the strike has emphasised the purpose of boosting future autoworker pay and advantages, I imagine that staff and administration can look to the previous for concepts which may assist them transfer ahead.

GM’s Saturn partnership affords one potential mannequin.

The corporate’s method to its Saturn model of compact autos, launched in 1985, was distinctive in lots of respects. Its governance construction was characterised by shared decision-making at totally different ranges all through the plant. The native union was a full associate in nearly all enterprise selections.

GM invested billions of {dollars} on this enterprise, by way of which it tried to compete with Japanese imports and transplants that had been rapidly eroding GM’s market share. Saturns had been designed in a different way than different U.S. autos, however what made these autos particular was the extent to which labor shared the duty for working Saturn’s principal manufacturing unit.

The Saturn partnership was arduous to take care of, particularly following the departure of Roger B. Smith, the Common Motors CEO who had pushed arduous for it. The corporate stopped making Saturns in 2009, however the former subsidiary’s general method of involving staff in selections about their jobs and the manufacturing course of stays as essential at this time because it was in its heyday.

I’d encourage the auto trade to once more invoke the spirit of the Saturn enterprise, which emphasised the collaboration and partnership of labor and administration within the manufacturing of high-quality, world-class autos. Solely this time, the autos shall be EVs.

GM affords one other mannequin for constructive union-management relations.

About 20 years in the past, its Lansing-Grand River meeting plant in Michigan started to have interaction in an analogous instance of what I name joint duty unionism. Administration and the native UAW union established a contractual dedication to work collectively to repeatedly enhance manufacturing by systematically fixing issues and rising productiveness.

Administration and the native UAW union established a contractual dedication to work collectively to repeatedly enhance manufacturing by systematically fixing issues and rising productiveness.

The native union and administration maintain one another accountable for protecting prices down and high quality excessive. The plant, which assembles Cadillacs and Chevy Camaros, continues this method efficiently at this time.

Shift the main target to the longer term

The UAW is pointing to the billions of {dollars} in earnings auto firms are at present getting when it calls for a much bigger piece of the pie. The businesses counter that quickly rising EV manufacturing is expensive.

GM, Ford and Stellantis already plan to take a position greater than US$100 billion in electrical car manufacturing. As manufacturing shifts away from autos with inner combustion engines that burn gasoline or diesel gasoline, the variety of autoworkers wanted to construct them will decline. EVs have fewer components.

Ford and Volkswagen, for instance, have estimated that they’ll ultimately want 30% much less labor as a result of EV transition.

Present process this transformation with labor and administration at loggerheads can’t probably profit the UAW or the auto firms.

As an alternative, they’ll must concentrate on discovering options collectively that improve productiveness, construct a talented workforce and effectively convert crops that make standard autos at this time to EV factories tomorrow. In so doing, the UAW is extra prone to meet its purpose of seeing these EV factories make use of its members.