Will the UAW Strike Go Global?
At the stroke of midnight, employees at three plants owned by General Motors, Ford, and Jeep walked off the job. None of those plants make electric vehicles, unless you count the plug-in hybrid Jeep Wrangler. But make no mistake — the strike by the United Auto Workers union, its most aggressive labor actions since the 1930s, plays directly into a larger fight over the battery-driven future of the car industry. And that fight has already gone global; you may have just not noticed it yet.
There are a lot of complicated, interwoven issues driving the UAW’s strike, which will start with those three plants but may include more if negotiations deteriorate. First and foremost is pay and benefits at America’s existing UAW plants. Like everyone who’s not fortunate enough to be in the top tax bracket, the UAW’s workers have been stung by inflation and higher costs of living. What was once a well-defined path to middle-class life has been hammered in the last decade as carmaking jobs got sent to Mexico and China. This, after those auto workers made tremendous concessions to keep their employers afloat during the Great Recession and subsequent auto industry bailouts, only to see some of their top leaders go to prison for taking bribes while also failing to increase their ranks at companies like Nissan and Tesla. They’re pissed, and they have every right to be pissed.
But that’s only part of the challenge here. The other issue that looms over this showdown has to do with electric vehicles. Take the battery plants springing up all over America, spurred in large part by incentives from the Biden Administration’s Inflation Reduction Act. Nowhere does this pro-EV legislation say that the green jobs coming soon have to be union jobs, even if they’re building batteries for tomorrow’s EVs. Meanwhile, EVs generally require far less labor and parts to build than their gasoline-powered counterparts; they’re essentially batteries, bodies, software and an assortment of other components. Engines and transmissions are complicated things, but they’re simply not necessary for what’s coming. It’s often believed that the transition to EVs will mean fewer auto industry jobs, period; that’s actually very hard to gauge, but it’s no stretch to think this transition won’t be easy, seamless, or provide a comparable job for every single worker — including those at the many related companies that supply various parts and components.
