Photograph by Zara Pfeifer / Connected Archives
WORDS BY ASHLEY BISHOP
As the clock struck midnight heading into September 15, the United Auto Workers (UAW) began Stand Up Strikes at three assembly plants in Ohio, Missouri, and Michigan after their contract with the Big Three automakers—Stellantis, Ford, and General Motors—expired. Newly elected President Shawn Fain has called the list of “members’ demands” sent to the automakers in early August, “the most audacious and ambitious list of proposals they’ve seen in decades.”
The strike occurs amidst a historic transition in the transportation sector: a move from gas-guzzling internal combustion engines to fully electric vehicles. Earlier this year, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency proposed new automobile pollution standards that seeks to have two-thirds of new vehicle sales be electric by 2032. President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act invested billions of dollars to support the transition, passed with much fanfare last year. But, as made clear by the UAW’s strike, workers in the auto industry worry that they’ll be left behind as public investment is siphoned instead into the wallets of executives and the billionaire class.
“Why would we spend money on bad jobs that don’t pay enough?” asked Christopher Viola, a UAW member and auto worker at the GM Factory Zero in Detroit. “If we’re doing any kind of subsidizing this transition, we have to make sure these jobs are good because we want to be able to afford the transition itself.”
According to Megan Biven, founder of True Transition, a company that promotes a just transition for oil and gas workers, the Inflation Reduction Act, even when adjusted for inflation, spends significantly more than the New Deal in terms of investment, but concerningly, it pales in jobs created.
“The New Deal, between 1933 and 1942, created 20 million direct jobs versus the Inflation Reduction Act, which is to maybe create 170,000 jobs… where’s that money going to?” she said. “That money is going to capital. It’s going to the owners. It’s going to shareholders. Are we going to allow the looting of the commons?… These are public dollars, they should benefit the public.”
The continued onslaught of record temperatures and natural disasters makes abundantly clear the need for a rapid green transition—and electric vehicles will play a critical role. But the new green economy needs to work for working people, not just the wealthy few. The growing coalition between labor unions and environmental movements just might well be the best vehicle we have to ensure a life of abundance, not concessions, as we work to build a new sustainable world.
The new green economy needs to work for working people, not just the wealthy few.
The case of Ultium Cells highlights the magnitude of what’s at stake. Ultium Cells opened its doors in Lordstown, Ohio in 2022. A joint venture between GM and LG Energy Solution, the company produces battery cells for electric vehicles. But, a year into operations, workers report that the conditions are decidedly unjust.
Ultium workers are not covered by UAW’s master agreement with GM. Despite the company being eligible for $1 billion worth of tax credits, wages for Ultium workers opened at a paltry $16.50 an hour, with little room for growth due to the wage and benefit tiers that have become standard in the auto industry. After seven years, workers’ pay would top out at only $20 an hour.
To make matters worse, in a report compiled by UAW, dozens of workers detailed repeated exposure to toxic chemicals, fires and explosions, health issues, and a lack of expected safety provisions. In just the first five months that Ultium was in operation, OSHA logs recorded an alarming 22 worker injuries.
With low wages, grueling schedules and no benefits, these unjust green jobs are precisely the conditions that UAW wants to prevent from becoming endemic to this industry.
In an effort to secure better working conditions at their plant, Ultium workers initiated a union drive in June 2022 and filed for an election with the National Labor Relations Board. In December 2022, Ultium workers voted 710 to 16 to join UAW Local 1112.
Last month, the union was able to reach an interim agreement with Ultium, brokered by UAW, which immediately increased wages by $3 or $4 an hour for all workers and raised starting pay to $20—a win for workers and for the environment.
Throughout these high profile contract negotiations, the UAW has pushed back against the Big Three’s attempts at using environmentalism as a scapegoat for inaction. The automakers have asserted that EVs simply aren’t profitable enough to allow them to meet the union’s demands, claiming that the companies would go bankrupt. UAW President Fain has responded clearly: “When the Big Three say the future is uncertain and the EV transition is expensive, remember that they’ve made a quarter of a trillion in North American profits over the last decade and have poured billions of it into special dividends, stock buybacks, and supersized executive compensation.”
The companies have also appropriated the language of climate justice groups in an attempt to bring a hasty end to negotiations, suggesting that the union’s unwillingness to concede on things like a wage increase (which CEOs at the Big Three generously gave themselves over the last four years) and a 32-hour work week (which would account for the fact that electric vehicles require fewer workers to build), is delaying the very transition that they are calling for.
“When the Big Three say the future is uncertain and the EV transition is expensive, remember that they’ve made a quarter of a trillion in North American profits over the last decade…”
“I don’t think we should let the CEOs or the more mainstream policy establishment claim the mantle of speed, when in fact, they’ve been the ones to delay and deny for decades,” said Thea Riofrancos, author of Resource Radicals: From Petro-Nationalism to Post-Extractivism in Ecuador and co-author of A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal. “It’s less about speed and more about who’s making the decisions and who pays the costs and who gets the benefits.”
“If you do things quickly, without including people, they are rightfully annoyed and they may protest, they may sue, they may strike. They may use other means of contentious politics to make their voices heard,” she added.
If UAW loses the fight over terms for a just transition at the negotiating table, it would be a devastating loss. Being locked into multiyear contracts with the Big Three would set industry standards and usher the EV rollout on a hellacious path. But let’s be clear, auto workers did not push us into the nearly unwinnable situation we find ourselves in—one in which the fate of both working people and the continued habitability of our planet feels inextricably linked to the outcome of their strike. The fossil fuel industry did; the billionaire class did; the global governance that acquiesced to their demands did; Ford, GM, and Stellantis did.
With newly elected leadership within the UAW backed by a reform movement, a fired up membership fed up with the scraps of concessionary bargaining, the tangible effects of the climate collapse making itself known, contracts with the Big Three expiring all at once, and UAW auto worker members standing at the vanguard of industry ready for change, the conditions needed to set off incendiary transformation have coalesced around them.
We can’t change the environmental harms already set in motion, but we can still have a just and rapid transition designed to help us hang onto every fraction of a degree. And the United Auto Workers are uniquely positioned to lead us there.
On the Ford picket line just after midnight on September 15, Fain was filmed surrounded by jubilant auto workers, supporters, and journalists. Pointing around at the workers, Fain addressed reporters: “This is what it’s all about. You need to be taking their pictures. You need to be asking these guys what it’s about. This is what we’re fighting for.”
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A UAW Win is a Win for Working People and the Climate
