Fain: UAW members 'won back our dignity' in strike against Ford, GM, Stellantis

UAW President Shawn Fain used a Facebook Live session Wednesday to reflect on the wins in the tentative agreements with Ford Motor Co., General Motors and Stellantis that union members are now weighing as well as the impact of the union’s targeted strike strategy that helped bring about those agreements.

Fain, speaking from a teachers union hall in Chicago ahead of President Joe Biden's planned visit Thursday to meet with Illinois autoworkers, also described what this fight required of UAW members and how it offered a vision of a union energized for battles ahead. Fighting and winning, Fain said, are contagious.

“We needed to fight like we’ve never fought before and win like we’ve never won before. We had doubters, we had naysayers and we had enemies, but we also had champions, we had leaders and we had organizers, and I don’t mean people like me or people on TV or people who wear suits,” Fain said. “I mean you, the workers, the workers who really run these companies, the members who really run this union.”

The strike did something else, too.

“We won back our dignity as autoworkers, we won back our pride in being UAW and being able to wear this label on our chest,” he said, pointing to a union logo on his jacket. “We won back our strike muscle.”

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Fain, who noted that thousands of nonunion autoworkers have been “inspired by our victory and are starting to organize,” talked about the 25% general wage increases over the life of the contract, the reinstatement of cost-of-living adjustments, a formula which had been “stolen from us” and which the Detroit Three had wanted to “go extinct,” big boosts for long “abused” temporary workers and ways in which the contracts would be a “big first step” toward a just electric vehicle transition for workers. He also touted the ending of numerous wage tiers.

But Fain also described what the union wasn’t able to win in this round of bargaining, something he said amounted to one of the worst tiers — the way workers hired before 2007 could count on pensions and retiree health care and those hired later could not.

“We didn’t win on this issue. The fact is both of these issues are extremely difficult and expensive to fix,” Fain said, while circling retirement security as a key issue when contract talks resume in 2028.

Fain didn’t just leave it as an issue for the three automakers to solve, however, noting that the companies have been focused on Wall Street concerns in this area when it comes to taking on future liabilities.

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“The Big Three, Wall Street and the federal government are officially on notice,” Fain said, although he did note the current agreements provide improvements for pension benefits and 401(k) contributions.

Fain gave a recap of how talks went, how the strategy allowed the union to play one company against another and how the threat of a strike against the big moneymaker truck plants proved effective. The Detroit Three didn’t understand the strategy and even when they thought they had it down, the union opted to change the rules. He pointed to, for example, the strike at Ford’s Kentucky Truck Plant that came without notice, a move that Fain said “supercharged” the bargaining.

The automakers had “whipsawed” the union, plants and even countries against one another for decades, Fain said, and the union gave them a taste of their own medicine.

“It turns out they couldn’t stomach it,” he said.

The strike strategy took the initial wage offer from 9% to 25% and led to 30 contract offers across the three companies, he said.

More:The big win for salaried UAW members at GM and Stellantis in the tentative agreements

Fain did work in a few references to extreme wealth inequality, a theme he has highlighted often in painting the UAW’s fight for a “fair contract” as a fight of the working class, but that wasn’t his main point here. He pushed back against assumptions that the union was too focused on other agendas, noting that “we were laser-focused on getting the best deal possible for our membership.”

Looking ahead, “the 2028 bargaining," he says, "starts at the conclusion of this round of bargaining. … The fight never stops.”

Contact Eric D. Lawrence: elawrence@freepress.com. Become a subscriber.