The United Auto Workers have shut down just three of Detroit carmakers’ roughly 70 factories or parts distribution centres across the US — a seemingly minimalist tactic the union believes will maximise its leverage at the bargaining table.
What the UAW is calling a “stand up strike”, where union members at individual facilities walk out while others stay on the job, is rooted in the rolling strikes of the early US labour movement. Experts say this approach threatens to revive the supply chain shortages that have bedevilled the auto industry in recent years, where a small disruption can cause rippling chaos in the wider system.
The UAW on Friday went on strike at plants in Michigan, Missouri and Ohio respectively owned by Ford, General Motors and Stellantis after months of contract talks. The union and carmakers remain far apart on pay terms.
Union president Shawn Fain warned more facilities could go on strike at noon on Friday unless there is “serious progress” at the bargaining table. The interconnected nature of automotive manufacturing, where parts arrive just in time to be used in production, makes it difficult for carmakers to plan when they do not know which plant or distribution centre will be targeted next.
“They don’t know which plants to keep shipping parts to, and which plants to stop shipping parts to,” said Erik Gordon, a professor at the University of Michigan business school. “It makes the supply chain planning more difficult.”
So far the UAW has opted to strike at assembly plants that manufacture popular products, such as the Ford Bronco and Stellantis’s Jeep Wrangler, creating a noticeable impact without crippling the companies.
That could change if the next round of strikes hits plants that manufacture more lucrative trucks such as Ford’s F-series, General Motors’ Chevrolet Silverado or Stellantis’s Ram, or if the union selects a facility that supplies key components used in many models.
The strategy is modelled after the UAW’s origins, when a targeted strike at a GM engine plant in Flint, Michigan in 1936 eventually led to workers occupying several plants, said Bob Bruno, director of the labour studies programme at the University of Illinois-Chicago. The tactic of a “rolling strike” was later used elsewhere in the auto industry, in rubber manufacturing, and in retail before it fell out of favour with unions as a way to influence employers.
The quality of the gains the UAW has been able to win has declined over time as the industry was battered by competition from overseas carmakers and the outsourcing of jobs to other countries. Even when they went on strike, their gains have been marginal, Bruno said.
Under Fain’s leadership, the union is breaking out the old playbook in the hope that it will significantly improve workers’ wages and working conditions.
“The UAW really hasn’t used these tactics in decades,” Bruno said. “Old school is sexy again.”
A longtime reformer in the UAW ranks, Fain campaigned for the union presidency after a corruption scandal that resulted in prison sentences for multiple union officials and personnel at Fiat Chrysler America, the predecessor of Stellantis. The carmaker pleaded guilty to conspiring to violate US labour law and was fined $30mn.
Fain won an election in March with just over 50 per cent of the vote. In July, he dispensed with the handshake traditionally staged for the news media between union leaders and auto executives, opting to visit several plants instead for a “member handshake”.
Ford chief executive Jim Farley said last week, shortly before the strike launched, that it had not received a counter-offer from the UAW, a situation the company had not seen in 80 years.
“I don’t know what Shawn Fain is doing, but he’s not negotiating this contract with us as it expires,” he said. “But I know he’s busy planning a strike.”
While the carmakers “should not have been surprised” at the union’s new, aggressive stance, they had become “too used to having too cozy a relationship with the UAW leadership”, Bruno said.
A rolling strike helps preserve the UAW’s $825mn strike fund — which partly covers the wages of workers who walk out — with only 13,000 drawing $500 in weekly strike pay rather than all 146,000 UAW members at the Detroit carmakers.
But the tactic challenges the union to keep members together when risks and hardships are shared unevenly. Fain told his membership on Monday that staying on the job was as important as walking out, because “that is the only way the strategy works”.
Still, on Friday Ford laid off about 600 workers who were not on strike in Michigan. GM has warned it may idle a plant in Kansas because of knock-on effects from workers striking at an assembly plant in Missouri, laying off about 2,000 workers. Strike pay typically only goes to workers on the picket line, while determining which laid-off workers qualify for unemployment benefits is a complicated matter of state law.
Some union members applauded Fain’s approach, comparing it to the board game “Battleship”. But as Fain addressed autoworkers on Facebook Live on Monday, others questioned if walking out en masse would put more pressure on the carmakers.
“Every plant should be on strike, not just selected plants,” Richard Davis, who works at a Ford assembly plant in Kansas City, Missouri, wrote on the Facebook Live feed. “Strike means strike. That’s the way I was brought up. No more deadlines, just do it.”
Jim Davis, from Detroit, said staying on the job feels like giving the Detroit Three carmakers an extension on the old contract. “I feel bad that only some of us are out there on the lines,” Davis wrote. “It makes us look weak in my opinion.”
The strike’s initial limited nature will save both sides from some of the costs, said Marick Masters, a labour relations professor at Michigan’s Wayne State University. Fain’s threat that it could grow “is intended to bring the companies to the table with a more favourable offer, but the question is, is it going to have that effect”?