United Auto Employees President Shawn Fain, middle, visits striking UAW Local 551 staff outside a Ford assembly center on South Burley Avenue on Saturday, Oct. 7, 2023, in Chicago.Â
John J. Kim | Tribune News Service | Getty Images
The United Auto Employees union is launching an unprecedented campaign to prepare 13 non-union automakers within the U.S. after securing record contracts with the Detroit automakers.
The union said Wednesday the drive will cover nearly 150,000 autoworkers across BMW, Honda, Hyundai, Lucid, Mazda, Mercedes-Benz, Nissan, Rivian, Subaru, Tesla, Toyota, Volkswagen and Volvo.
As a part of the campaign staff are signing electronic cards in support of union efforts to potentially organize U.S. plants from those automakers.
It shouldn’t be guaranteed that the union would push to prepare every plant or automaker that participates within the campaign. Overall, staff would wish to vote in support of UAW representation.
UAW President Shawn Fain has said the union’s next mission after ratifying record contracts with General Motors, Ford Motor and Stellantis was to expand its ranks. The contracts ratified by the “Big Three” Detroit automaker include a minimum of 25% hourly pay raises, the reinstatement of cost-of-living adjustments and enhanced profit-sharing payments, amongst other advantages.
“To all of the autoworkers on the market working without the advantages of a union: Now it is your turn,” Fain said in a video posted online.
Fain previously vowed to maneuver beyond the “Big Three” and expand to the “Big Five or Big Six” by the point its 4½-year contracts with the Detroit automakers expire in April 2028.
Launching major organizing campaigns concurrently breaks with tradition for the union. Typically, it might spend months, if not years, gaining support of staff inside factories to eventually vote on UAW representation.
But Fain has repeatedly rewritten the principles of engaging with automakers during his short time as UAW president — he negotiated deals with Ford, GM and Stellantis concurrently, relatively than identifying a lead company on which to focus efforts — and organizing non-union automakers would greatly assist the union’s bargaining efforts and scale.
UAW membership has been nearly halved from roughly 700,000 members in 2001 to 383,000 firstly of this yr. It peaked at 1.5 million in 1979.
Several non-union automakers comparable to Hyundai, Toyota and Honda announced plans to extend employee wages within the weeks following the UAW deals with Ford, GM and Stellantis.
Fain has called such increases the “UAW bump,” which he said further said stands for “U Are Welcome.”
Still, the UAW has a poor track record with trying to prepare non-Detroit automakers.
The UAW has previously failed to prepare foreign-based automakers within the U.S. Most recently, plants with Volkswagen and Nissan fell wanting the support needed to unionize. The UAW has previously discussed organizing Tesla’s Fremont plant in California, with little to no traction in those efforts.
On the 2023 DealBook Summit in Latest York afterward Wednesday, Musk was asked in regards to the UAW’s goals. He replied: “If Tesla gets unionized it should be because we deserve it and we failed in a roundabout way.”
The UAW said Wednesday certainly one of the “strongest campaigns” so far is Toyota’s assembly complex in Georgetown, Kentucky, where 7,800 staff make the corporate’s iconic Camry and highly profitable RAV4 and Lexus ES.
“Employees across the country, from the West to the Midwest and particularly within the South, are reaching out to affix our movement and to affix the UAW,” Fain said within the video. “The cash is there. The time is true. And the reply is straightforward. You haven’t got to live paycheck to paycheck. You haven’t got to fret about how you are going to pay your rent or feed your loved ones while the corporate makes billions.”
