Can the UAW Strike Help It Expand to Non-Union Plants?

Today on TAP: Probably not directly, but a good contract is a good selling point to workers at those factories.

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What’s the most important thing the UAW could win in its contracts with General Motors, Ford, and Stellantis?

I’d argue it’s an agreement that the companies’ new electric-vehicle and battery factories be covered by the new contract, or at least that the companies pledge not to oppose the union’s organizing efforts at them.

That, unfortunately, may well be the proposal that the car companies are least likely to accept. It’s also not likely that the proposal tops the list of what rank-and-file UAW members want to see realized, because it doesn’t directly address their very real immediate needs.

And management—not just in the auto industry—generally understands that by conceding to address some of those immediate needs, it can undercut a union’s long-term concerns about its future position in the industry. Should the three legacy companies agree, say, to roughly 30 percent raises over the life of the contract, and to end or significantly reduce the two-tier status of many of its employees, it would make it difficult, though not impossible, for the UAW leadership—or any union leadership—to keep members off the job in pursuit of growing the union at factories where none of the current workforce is employed.

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Union contractual victories that encompass the unionization of an employer’s non-union facilities have certainly happened, but they’re hardly a common occurrence. UNITE HERE Culinary Local 226—the now nearly 60,000-member hotel worker union in Las Vegas—did strike a critically important deal once with the owner (Steve Wynn) of one hotel where they were negotiating a new contract that enabled them to unionize Wynn’s other Vegas hotels. In return, though, they did Wynn a favor by helping him lobby for taxation rules that enabled the big-time foreign gamblers who dropped a fortune in Wynn’s casinos to avoid certain federal taxes. (By keeping those mega-spenders flocking to Vegas, of course, the union was also increasing the hotels’ revenues, a share of which, thanks to its contracts, went to its members.)

Unfortunately, the Vegas story reads like the exception that proves the rule, as, in most cases, an employer isn’t desperately seeking the union’s help.

But the long-term future of the UAW truly hinges on its ability to unionize the Big Three’s non-union competitors and their own non-union EV factories springing up in the right-to-work South. As today’s Wall Street Journal points out, the SEC reports that total compensation (wages and benefits) for the median-paid worker at Tesla’s factories is a bare $34,084, while for the median worker at GM, it’s $80,034; at Ford, $74,691; and at Stellantis, $68,683. Total compensation at the Big Three and non–Big Three new EV and battery factories, as well as at the non-EV foreign-owned auto factories that are spread across the South, also falls well short of the levels that UAW members make at the Big Three.

In short, the union won’t long be able to realize the kind of gains its members need unless it can level up the standards at Tesla et al., lest it be compelled to face a long-term leveling-down to Elon Musk’s idea of what a proper division of revenue should be. For the UAW, that task begins with unionizing the Big Three’s own EV ventures.

I expect the UAW will emerge from the current strike with some signal victories, but I don’t expect they will include concessions on the status of the Big Three’s new non-union EV plants. The union has organized a GM joint-venture battery factory in Ohio, and although those workers won a significant wage increase, they’re not included in the UAW’s GM master contract and still lack that contract’s health and pension benefits. The rule changes on organizing recently promulgated by the National Labor Relations Board, however, may just make unionizing such facilities and other non-union auto plants in the South and Elonland and other less favorable terrains a less Herculean task than it’s been. And if the UAW does win major increases in compensation and the elimination or substantial reduction of the two-tier system, that also would give it a good calling card when it knocks on Tesla’s door.

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