United Auto Workers union president is setting high expectations and assured union members they can achieve significant gains if they walk the picket line
– demands that even the UAW’s own president calls “audacious” – are edging it closer to a strike when its contract ends Sept. 14.
In a speech to a Labour Day parade crowd in Detroit on Monday, Fain said that if the companies don’t come up with a fair contract, “come Sept. 14, we’re going to take action to get it by any means necessary.” “They get out-of-control salaries,” he said. “They get pensions they don’t even need. They get top-rate health care. They work whatever schedule they want. The majority of our members do not get a pension nowadays. It’s crazy. We get substandard health care. We don’t get to work remotely.”
Last week, the union filed charges of unfair labour practices against Stellantis and GM, which it said have yet to offer counterproposals. As for Ford, Fain asserted that its response, by rejecting most of the union’s demands, “insults our very worth.” Currently, UAW workers who were hired after 2007 don’t receive defined-benefit pensions. Their health benefits are less generous, too. For years, the union gave up general pay raises and lost cost-of-living wage increases to help the companies control costs. Though top-scale assembly workers earn $32.32 an hour, temporary workers start at just under $17. Still, full-time workers have received profit-sharing checks ranging this year from $9,716 at Ford to $14,760 at Stellantis.
Fain, a 54-year-old electrician who came out of a Chrysler factory in Kokomo, Indiana, is among several labour leaders across the economy who have been escalating their demands and flexing their muscles. So far this year, 247 strikes have occurred involving 341,000 workers – the most since Cornell University began tracking strikes in 2021, though still well below the numbers during the 1970s and 1980s.
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