UAW expands strike against Big Three again

Last Friday the UAW widened its strike, adding 38 more locations to the three existing plants they had already shut down. Since then, the union got a big boost from Joe Biden who visited a picket line Tuesday and told striking workers “You deserve what you’ve earned and you’ve earned a hell of a lot more than what you’re getting paid right now.”

So today, the UAW announce it was expanding the strike once again and unlike last week when Ford was passed over for having made the best offer to the union, Ford is no longer getting a pass. This week, Stellantis is getting a pass instead.

United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain called for 7,000 more employees of Ford and General Motors to go on strike at noon ET Friday.

He said union members at Ford’s Chicago assembly plant and GM’s Lansing Delta Township assembly plant will walk off the job.

“Sadly, despite our willingness to bargain, Ford and GM have refused to make meaningful progress at the table,” Fain said Friday.

Stellantis, the third member of Detroit’s Big Three, was spared additional strikes this week. Fain said that reflected recent progress in contract talks between the UAW and the company that builds Jeep, Chrysler and Dodge vehicles.

The shuttering of the two plants will stop assembly for several vehicles but it still hasn’t touched the vehicles that are most profitable for the automakers.

Ford’s Chicago plant builds the Ford Explorer, the Lincoln Aviator and police vehicles, while GM’s Lansing-Delta plant assembles the Buick Enclave and Chevrolet Traverse. A stamping plant at Lansing will not be shut down…

The automakers’ most profitable vehicles, full-size pickup trucks, continue to be unaffected, and the plants that would have the biggest ripple effects on supply chains are also not yet targets for work stoppages.

Today’s additions bring the total number of UAW members on strike to about 25,000 which is still a fraction of the UAW’s total of 146,000 members. The union is paying striking workers $500 a week out of a strike fund. Assuming all of these workers are getting that money, the union will spend about $12.5 million in the coming week. That’s a lot of money but it will barely put a dent in the fund which started at more than $800 million.

The targeted strike strategy allows the UAW to “create chaos” for the automakers, since they don’t know where the strike will take hold next, Wheaton said. But the move also helps the union preserve its strike fund, he noted.

The union held $825 million in its strike fund before workers joined the picket line, allowing it to carry out a work stoppage among all of the workers that it represents at the Big 3 automakers for about 12 weeks, according to analysts at Evercore ISI. By narrowing the strike, the union can draw down the fund over a longer period of time.

My back-of-the-envelope guess is that over the first two weeks, the UAW spent about $15.5 million. Add another $12.5 million for the coming week and that’s about $28 million total. So the UAW probably has almost $800 million left which means it can drag this out, expanding a little each week, for quite a while. By contrast, if all 146,000 members had gone on strike at once, the union would be spending $73 million a week, which would give them about 11 weeks before members were forced to rely on their own personal savings.

I’ve heard several people wonder why the automakers are playing along with this strategy. Could they shutter factories and force everyone on strike at once, limiting the amount of time the union could drag this out? I’m actually not sure if the automakers can do that, though they certainly can shut down plants for a lack of work to do. In fact they have done that already in some cases. At some point, the strike will expand to enough places that manufacturers won’t be able to get parts they need to keep anything going, but we’re not there yet and probably won’t be for several more weeks.

The bottom line is that the UAW can keep this piecemeal strike going through Christmas and beyond. What we don’t know is how long the automakers are willing to keep going.

Here’s UAW leader Shawn Fain sounding a lot like Bernie Sanders and claiming this is “the war of the working class against corporate greed.” “Our anger is righteous and our struggle is just,” he added.