UAW calls strike against all Big Three automakers

The United Auto Workers (UAW) called a strike yesterday (September 15) as contracts at the three largest automakers expired.

The UAW strike begins

The UAW announced their strike call two minutes after midnight EDT yesterday:

As the post indicates, the strike began at:

• Wentzville Assembly plant, General Motors, Wentzville, Missouri,
• Michigan Final Assembly and Paint, Ford, Wayne, Michigan, and
• Toledo Assembly, Stellantis, Toledo, Ohio.

Stellantis is a worldwide mega-conglomerate that currently owns the original brands of the Chrysler Corporation. These currently include Chrysler, Dodge, and Ram, plus Jeep, a brand Chrysler acquired long ago when it bought American Motors. Stellantis owns ten other brands, including luzury and performance brands like Alfa Romeo and Maserati. (The Plymouth brand is dead. Either Stellantis retired it, or Fiat Chrysler did before the merger that created Stellantis.)

The strike resulted when the three automakers, who decided to negotiate together, could not meet the UAW’s demands. Shawn Fein, head of the union, demanded a 40 percent raise for members over four years. GM offered 10 percent, an offer Fein rejected out-of-hand.

“The clock is ticking,” Fein said in a statement. “Stop wasting our members’ time. Tick tock.”

At first the strike involved only 13,000 workers. But it has been growing all day, and now involves workers in other UAW-contracted businesses, and other unions.

The real issues

Two issues seem to have driven the UAW to make such demands, demands the leader called the “most audacious and ambitious list of proposals they’ve seen in decades.” First, the Big Three reported record profits this year. Rumor has it that they’ve accomplished this mainly through stock buy-backs. That the CEOs’ salaries have increased almost 40 percent over the past four years, doesn’t help union members’ moods.

The union is getting sympathy from all over the political map. Of course Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and her Squad give their own sympathy.

But so did Donald J. Trump, who pointed out the second driving issue: the push for electric vehicles.

The all Electric Car is a disaster for both the United Auto Workers and the American Consumer. They will all be built in China and, they are too expensive, don’t go far enough, take too long to charge, and pose various dangers under certain atmospheric conditions. If this happens, the United Auto workers will be wiped out, along with all other auto workers in the United States. The all Electric Car policy is about as dumb as Open Borders and No Voter I.D. IT IS A COMPLETE AND TOTAL DISASTER!

President Joe Biden, on Labor Day, had predicted that this strike would not happen. Within four days the union head was disputing that. In fact the UAW has withheld its endorsement from Biden, and wants some assurances that the planned (or vaunted) electrification of the American auto fleet will not permanently idle their members.

CNN points out that never before has the UAW struck all Big Three companies at once.

Commentator Dick Morris suggested yesterday that the strike exposes a “political risk” to Biden of a proposed electric-vehicle shift. The main issue is the very high unit cost of electric cars, as opposed to conventional cars. But no one seems to be asking whether recent assays of a motherlode of lithium in the Pacific Northwest might change that calculus.