A soft-spoken but unrelentingly blunt
midwesterner, Fain has met the moment in his role as the union’s newly
elected president. Having beaten the US’s big three automakers into a
landmark new union contract, Fain’s members have been courted by both
Joe Biden and Donald Trump. Fain has gone all in for the Democrats despite some reservations and the misgivings of some of his members.
Now he faces bigger tests. The UAW is taking its fight to states
that have long, successful records of seeing off union drives – and he
must hold his new coalition together as the US enters a fractious
election cycle that will pit worker against worker.
Omitting a bit - it's there for readers, the link's been given -
The general public was paying attention, the news
media paid attention. And I think it was really effective because when
it got time to go on strike, 75% of Americans supported us.”
The
big three were caught flat-footed by the fresh approach. “I think they
just thought that it was talk,” Fain said. “They’re used to hearing
talk. Companies were used to having their way, saying what they wanted
and getting it. I don’t think they really knew how to handle leadership
that wasn’t operating in that mode. I mean, our leaders in the past,
they’d stand up and beat the podium and say, ‘We’re gonna fight, we’re
gonna fight, fight, fight!’ and then when they got into negotiations,
they’d roll over. Obviously, I don’t think they expected this and, let’s
be honest, they didn’t expect me to be president.”
[...]
The 46-day “Stand Up Strike,” begun after contract negotiations with General Motors, Ford and Stellantis collapsed, ended in a resounding victory
for the UAW. Since then, with the wind at its back, the union has taken
the fight to the many non-union auto manufacturing plants dotting the
country, including many in southern, so-called “right to work” states.
News
last month that 96% of unionized workers at Daimler Trucks North
America plants in North Carolina, Georgia and Tennessee voted to authorize a strike should ongoing negotiations fail to yield a satisfactory replacement
for a contract expiring in April, brought fresh evidence that the record
gains in its 2023 campaign against the big three have drastically
altered the wider industry’s state of play.
[...] Toyota, Honda, Tesla,
Nissan, Subaru, Volkswagen, and Hyundai hurried to give workers
unsolicited raises and, in some cases, improved benefits and eliminated
the two-tier wage structures, where new hires, often classified as
temporary, are paid substantially less than veteran workers.
Fain
said he believes these companies all have more to give, as does Tesla,
which, despite recent share losses, has been one of the world’s most
profitable makers of electric vehicles. Elon Musk, the company’s CEO, is
a vociferous foe of unionization. Recently, following a complaint filed
against his SpaceX company, the rocket and satellite maker joined
Amazon, Starbucks and Trader Joe’s in suing the NLRB, challenging the constitutionality of the almost 90-year-old agency.
[...] We made a big deal in the big three contract fight that these companies
made a quarter trillion dollars in profits in the last decade. But the
Japanese and Korean six [with US factories] made $480bn.The German
three made $460bn in profits worldwide. Toyota alone made $256bn profit
in the last decade. Their profit margins are obscenely more gross than
they were at the big three, and yet their workers get less. I truly
believe we’re going to see a huge shift this year. I think we’re gonna
win in the south.” And Musk? A somewhat tougher nut to crack, Fain
concedes, adding: “He’s the epitome of everything that’s wrong with this world.”
Two things -- "win the south" means unionizing where UAW is not yet in power. Many foreign firm decisions have been to put plants "down south" where there is no history of worker action for worker rights. Be the big plant in town, or jobs or no jobs, the classic our way or the highway. In place now, their way, ripe for the UAW.
Second, Musk is unique. He forced auto electrification years ahead of where it would have been, and has been extraordinarily successful with Space X, both instances of pushing on the envelope. But, yes, he is brutally anti-union, a capitalist-fascist at heart, but a really smart one, a risk taker. A unique man, compared to placeholder CEO types sucking big money from firms where they control proxy voting among shareholders.
More highlighting - getting into political reality -
[Fain notes . . .] It’s corporate greed and a miniscule amount of
people, the billionaire class, who want to concentrate all the wealth in
their hands and screw everybody else to do it.”
Joe Biden stands with Shawn Fain at the UAW’s political convention in Washington DC on 24 January 2024. Photograph: Alex Brandon/AP
Fain
objects strongly to those who would place the blame for rising car
prices on union contracts. “Another myth. Five to 7% of the cost of a
car is labor. [Carmakers] could give us everything they gave us in that
contract and not raise the price of cars a penny and still make massive
profits. Why are they not saying what $20 billion in [additional]
corporate dividends and stock buybacks cost them? That affects the
bottom line more. That money somehow just disappears and doesn’t count,
right? All they want to talk about is our wages and our benefits. People
forget, over the last four years, the price of vehicles went up 35% on
average. But our wages didn’t go up. Our benefits didn’t get better.
Nothing changed for us. [Price hikes are] because of two things:
corporate greed and consumer price gouging. They just pile all those
costs on and then try to blame the workers for it.”
A
latter day rise in the union’s long-sagging fortunes – its membership
dwindled from 1.5m in the 1970s to its current 380,000 – has been seen
by some hopeful observers as early evidence of a burgeoning reversal of
the downward trend that began with the punishing defeat of the air
traffic controllers’ union early in the Reagan administration. In
hindsight, Fain, who was a teenager at the time, suggests “all labor,
not just union labor, should have come together then. I wish they would
have. Because what’s happened over the last 40 years? Reagan and the
‘greed is good’ idea and the new philosophy of the rich getting richer.
Forty years of going backwards for the working class … people understand
that they’ve been left behind. Workers are now scraping to get by,
while working multiple jobs, seven days a week, 12 hours a day and
living paycheck to paycheck. That’s not a life. When I was a kid it
didn’t matter if you worked at a grocery store, or if you worked at an
assembly plant, a one-person income could sustain a family. That’s not
the case anymore … workers, union and non-union, have to harness the
power that we have and take back our lives.”
Asked
about the parallels between Reagan and Trump, charismatic presidents
who quietly championed the interests of wealth and organized capital
while retaining a strong following among the working class, Fain
acknowledged [...] Trump, a
lifelong anti-union voice, has singled out the labor organization and
Fain, in particular, for derision. Calling the union corrupt and Fain “a
weapon of mass destruction” for jobs, Trump traveled to Detroit during
the high-profile strike to a staged rally purportedly in support of
auto workers but opposed to the union. Held at a non-union plant that
charged his campaign $20,000 for its use, the event featured a crowd
containing no actual auto workers, anti-union or otherwise.
In January, Fain, who has said Trump represents the billionaire class and “doesn’t give a damn about working-class people” endorsed Biden’s re-election
bid on the union’s behalf. “As I tell our members, ‘Look, this isn’t a
Democrat-Republican issue. This isn’t a party issue. This wasn’t my
opinion. Let’s look at their own words and their own actions.’” Fain
credits Biden and Democrats with the federal government’s rescue of the
domestic industry during the 2008-2009 recession, as the newly-installed
Obama administration pro-actively addressed the bankruptcies of GM and
Chrysler. “They worked on a path forward for [the US car business] to
come out of this and to live, they battled for the American worker.
Trump, at the same time, was blaming the workers for everything that was
wrong with these companies.”
[...]
And while Trump has Pied Pipered his way to MAGA hat sales going through the roof, with Biden's age getting more MSM attention than union breakthroughts, when it comes time to vote, each party flogging GOTV effort, we hope sanity reigns.
Four more years of Biden would be good years for everyone. Trump? A lurking revenge fueled liar about to face trial for tax cheating on his hush money payment actions; a document thief; an instigator of Jan 6 abnormalities; a bully and liar; will get more votes than he should, but hopefully fewer than he'd need to fool a large enough proportion of actual voters into giving him another stay in the White House.
And MSM being silent about the UAW marching on. Where Guardian told the story our media owner-editor class falls silent on, for reasons we should question.
Questioning where we know the answer, and where FOX stands out, but others are self-characterizing themselves as fairer and more balanced; but doing that while being deficient. Bottom line - when election day arrives, sanity should win the day.
Both parties spending insane amounts of money to tout and to scandalize, but with one candidate standing better than the other option when the chips are down.
