Striking United Auto Staff members and supporters attend a speech by Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders outside General Motors’ Detroit-Hamtramck Assembly plant on Sept. 25, 2019 in Detroit.
Michael Wayland / CNBC
DETROIT – United Auto Staff members overwhelmingly granted union leaders authorization to call strikes during ongoing contract negotiations with General Motors, Ford Motor and Stellantis, if warranted.
The union on Friday said a median of 97% of combined members on the automakers approved the motion, nevertheless final votes are still being tallied. That is consistent with support during negotiations 4 years ago, when 96% of employees who voted supported authorization for a strike.
The “strike authorization vote” is a component of the union’s structure and viewed as a procedural step within the negotiations. The voting results are historically high in support of the authorization. The vote doesn’t mean there’ll or won’t be a strike.
“Our goal will not be to strike. I need to make that very clear. Our goal is to bargain good agreements for our members,” UAW President Shawn Fain said Friday during a Facebook Live. “But all we have tried to do with that is prepare everybody within the event that now we have to take motion to get a good and just contract.”
Nevertheless, Fain has been much more vocal than past union leaders about its ability to make use of striking as a weapon in its arsenal against the businesses through the negotiations.
“The Big Three is our strike goal. And whether or not there is a strike — it’s as much as Ford, General Motors and Stellantis, because they know what our priorities are. We have been clear,” Fain has said.
UAW President Shawn Fain (right) speaks with union member Jerome Buckley outside of General Motors’ Factory Zero plant on July 12, 2023, in Detroit.
Michael Wayland / CNBC
Those priorities are far richer than during prior contract negotiations between the 2 sides. The union’s demands include a 46% wage increase, restoration of traditional pensions, cost-of-living increases, reducing the workweek to 32 hours from 40 and increasing retiree advantages.
The UAW said 98% of hourly employees and 99% of salaried employees at Ford voted in favor of the strike authorization. GM passed by 96%, while the motion was approved at Stellantis by 95%. Voter turnout and what number of votes still needed to be counted was not immediately available.
Strikes could take various forms, including a national strike, where all employees under the contract stop working, or targeted work stoppages at certain plants over local contract issues. A strike against all three automakers, as Fain has alluded to, can be probably the most impactful but additionally the riskiest and costliest for the union.
The UAW has greater than $825 million in its strike fund, which it uses to pay eligible members who’re on strike. The strike pay is $500 per week for every member — up from $275 per week last 12 months.
Assuming 150,000 or so UAW members covered by the contracts, strike pay would cost the union about $75 million per week. A fund of $825 million, then, would cover about 11 weeks. One caveat: that does not include health-care costs that the union would cover, corresponding to temporary COBRA plans, that may likely drain the fund much more quickly.
National or targeted strikes at any of the automakers could possibly be detrimental to business. A 40-day strike against GM through the last round of negotiations in 2019 led to a production lack of 300,000 vehicles, the corporate said on the time. It also cost the automaker $3.6 billion in earnings, GM said.
