Timothy D. Easley/AP Photo
Members of United Auto Workers Local 862 gather for a practice picket at their union hall in Louisville, Kentucky, August 24, 2023. The union has approved a strike authorization if no agreement with the Big Three automakers is reached by September 14.
Patricia Elliston, 54, was laid off two years ago after nearly a decade at the Stellantis auto assembly plant in Belvidere, Illinois, when the company cut the second shift. She took a transfer to Stellantis’s Mopar Parts Distribution Center in Michigan, where she rents a house and rooms with other autoworkers in the Detroit suburb of Warren. Elliston’s husband, a non-union Machinist on disability, remained in Belvidere, caring for his elderly mother. His father retired from what was then named Chrysler in 1999, after decades working as an electrician in the skills trade department.
“We were told that moving out here would only be temporary, and we’d have the option to come back to Belvidere,” Elliston said. “But now that they’ve idled the plant, we don’t know if we can come back.”
Last year, Stellantis indefinitely shuttered its assembly plant in Belvidere, laying off more than 1,300 workers. It moved production to a plant in Toluca, in central Mexico, upending the lives of generations of families dating back to the company’s 1965 roots in Illinois.
That plant, and others in the U.S., are being used as bargaining chips in Stellantis’s negotiations with the United Auto Workers (UAW), which has approved a strike authorization if no deal is reached by September 14. Workers involved with the plant believe that the company is holding the plant’s idle status as leverage. “They’re dangling that they can reopen the Belvidere plant if we give up this or that,” Elliston said. “And nobody wants to give up anything—we’ve given up enough!”
“In ongoing contract talks with the Big Three, the union has made Belvidere a centerpiece of its proposals to stop plant closures,” reads a UAW press release. “Those include the right to strike over shutdowns and a Working Family Protection Program that would keep product in the plants and workers on the job.”
The union has asked the Biden administration for investments that help the Big Three retool their plants to encourage electric vehicles. Last week, the Department of Energy announced $15.5 billion in grants and loans for that conversion, which could be used at plants like Belvidere. Higher consideration for the support will go to plants in Belvidere’s condition: where workers have collective-bargaining agreements and a history of experience in vehicle manufacturing.
“Between massive government subsidies for EVs and Stellantis’ record-breaking profits, the money is there to bring good jobs back to heartland towns like Belvidere,” the UAW’s statement concludes.
Stellantis’s goal is to undermine the UAW’s power as the union attacks two-tier employment, where long-term workers earn higher wages and better benefits.
Jeffery Hermanson, former organizing director at the AFL-CIO’s Solidarity Center in Mexico, among other union organizing and officer roles, interprets the shuttering of Belvidere as part of a long-term plan to relocate much of Stellantis’s production to Mexico and Canada. Its goal is to undermine the UAW’s power as the union attacks two-tier employment, where long-term workers earn higher wages and better benefits than new hires doing the same work.
Indeed, published reports have stated that Stellantis has threatened to shift production of its Ram 1500 pickup truck from Michigan to Mexico. Most of the company’s Ram engines are already produced in Mexico.
“The growth of Mexican trucks and truck engines is a bigger long-term threat than moving the Jeep Cherokee to Toluca, although the closing of Belvidere is a particularly painful event,” said Hermanson. “In effect, Mexico becomes the lower tier of employment, as the two-tier system comes under increasing pressure of the UAW.”
IN 1995, KIM MOODY AND MARY MCGINN published the Labor Notes book Unions and Free Trade: Solidarity vs. Competition, arguing how multi-tier wages pitted workers against each other in workplaces around the world. “Management would threaten to move work if the workers in one plant didn’t make their costs ‘competitive,’” Moody and McGinn wrote.
This led to concessions, while failing to prevent offshoring to Mexico. The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) eliminated 700,000 U.S. jobs, according to a 2013 estimate by the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute.
In their new book A Fabulous Failure: The Clinton Presidency and the Transformation of American Capitalism, the historians Nelson Lichtenstein and Judith Stein show the devastating consequences of the capital mobility afforded to businesses in the 1990s, with no guarantees from the Mexican government to raise wages and reform the country’s labor relations. “What divided US and Mexican negotiators was not just the Mexican government’s failure to enforce minimum-wage and health and safety laws, but also the extent to which the structure of Mexican trade unionism would conform to a standard that offered workers there a genuine chance of forming and running authentic unions,” write Lichtenstein and Stein.
These historical and structural shifts are best understood through the workers’ lives that have been changed by them.
Melissa Teubert started working for General Motors supplier Lear Corporation in 1994—the year NAFTA went into effect. She put in grueling 12-hour shifts on the assembly line, earning $8.50 an hour making car seats “just in time” to be bolted into cars at GM’s Janesville Assembly Plant in Wisconsin’s southeast corner.
In 1994, Teubert’s union job at Lear was safe. But by 2008, she was among the 9,000 people in Janesville who lost their jobs after GM closed its Wisconsin assembly plant—a sliver of the 8.8 million jobs that were lost during the Great Recession.
Like the workers chronicled in Amy Goldstein’s Janesville: An American Story, Teubert was thrown off her moorings when GM closed the plant for good. “The whole world just came crashing down,” she said. Generations of her family had worked at GM, including her father, who caught a lucky break and retired in 2002. “I was depressed for a long time,” she said. “It was beyond sad.”
She enrolled in Blackhawk Technical College to earn a degree to become a medical assistant. Despite the skills-training charade the government has been selling to working-class people since the 1980s, she couldn’t adjust to the new line of work. After a string of low-wage jobs, she went back to non-union manufacturing, making plastic containers, until she got hired at the Belvidere plant in 2012.
Every day, Teubert made the 45-minute drive from Janesville to Illinois. She worked on the assembly line building doorframes for the Jeep Compass and Patriot. “It was assembly work,” she said. “That’s what I was used to, and I was very happy.” One model after another was sent to Mexico or discontinued. But new products still came, such as the Jeep Cherokee in 2017, on which she put weather stripping and brackets hooked up with wires.
She was a tier-two worker without any retiree health insurance or pension—an idea GM had floated in 1993, before it became standard after the automaker bailouts of 2008-2009. But by the time she was laid off from Belvidere in August 2021, she was earning the top rate, over $30 an hour. This time around, she was ready. She refinanced her home and paid off her car.
Last spring, Stellantis offered buyouts, and she took $47,000 before taxes. Now 52, she makes ends meet selling knickknacks at a farmers market in Janesville and working at a non-union plant manufacturing ice-cream machines for $17.56 an hour. She said she couldn’t have transferred to facilities in Toledo, Michigan, or even Milwaukee. She suffers from bouts of depression and is diabetic, so it wasn’t in the cards to abandon her family and plant roots somewhere else.
Charles Rex Arbogast/AP Photo
Weeds grow in the concrete of a driveway and parking lot at the former Fiat Chrysler auto plant now owned by Stellantis, July 10, 2023, in Belvidere, Illinois.
STELLANTIS, HEADQUARTERED IN AMSTERDAM, is the parent company of 14 car brands, including Jeep, Ram Trucks, and Chrysler. The company was formed in 2021 through a merger of Fiat Chrysler Automobiles and France’s PSA Group, whose brands included Peugeot and Opel. These mergers have made Stellantis one of the world’s most profitable automakers, with net profits rising 26 percent last year to nearly $18 billion.
The company employs 15,117 workers across eight plants in Mexico, where its workers earn as little as $2.54 an hour, according to a contract from 2022 I reviewed for the Saltillo Truck Assembly Plant in the northern state of Coahuila. An employer-friendly company union affiliated with the Confederation of Mexican Workers (CTM) holds the contract.
Mexican autoworkers are just as skilled as their U.S. counterparts. This past August, labor relations expert Harley Shaiken told the Detroit Free Press that low wages coupled with the highly skilled labor of Mexican workers and the high productivity of auto plants there have “resulted in a license to print money for the automakers, because the plants have been very successful.”
The CTM has gained notoriety for signing contracts behind workers’ backs, locking in low wages and poor working conditions, and preventing workers from forming genuine unions. Last year, as part of Mexican labor reforms and the 2020 U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) trade pact, workers at a General Motors plant challenged the stranglehold company unions maintain in Mexico’s auto sector, winning a landmark election.
But the CTM still controls a large share of the country’s union contracts, and to head off independent union-organizing efforts, it has adjusted some of its tactics. A CTM-affiliated union recently negotiated a 9 percent wage increase at Stellantis plants, a Mexican unit of Daimler Truck, and auto parts suppliers covering a total of 24,000 workers.
Hermanson saw the wage increase as a positive development, “a result of the pressure on the traditional corporatist unions from the independent union movement and the effective use of the Rapid Response Labor Mechanism of the USMCA to support independent union campaigns in the Mexican auto industry.” Because wages are negotiated annually in Mexico, continued efforts could pose a threat to Stellantis’s offshoring strategy. As Hermanson wrote recently for New Labor Forum, “It is time to fight the multinational corporations wherever they operate, so when U.S. and Canadian workers strike, they cannot fill the shelves with products made in Mexico.”
Border Workers’ Organizing Committee’s work in Coahuila could serve as a model for such an international solidarity effort between the UAW and independent unions, given its history of organizing workers in foreign-owned factories known as maquiladoras going back to the 1990s. But management has fought back. After workers won a union representation election at Michigan-based VU Manufacturing, the company stonewalled and shut down the plant, laying off 400 workers, despite labor enforcement mechanism filings under USMCA—in an affront to Mexican and U.S. governments.
IN PAST NEGOTIATION CYCLES, the UAW has singled out one of the Big Three—General Motors, Ford, or Stellantis—as a strike target, picking the company the union believed would agree to the best deal, in order to set a pattern for the remaining two. Stellantis is a major potential target of that strategy.
“The biggest leverage the UAW [has] is in the Jeep and Ram plants that make money,” wrote Arthur Wheaton, labor studies director at Cornell University and an expert in the auto sector, in an email to the Prospect. “Stellantis has plants all over the world but trucks are heavy and dominate the US market … Stellantis would face customer and political pressure/backlash if they moved all USA production out of the country.”
But Marick Masters, co-author with Frank Goeddeke of the book The UAW: An Iconic Union Falls Into Scandal, argues that competition from foreign transplants and the buildout of domestic electric-vehicle plants have constrained the union’s leverage. To appease investors, he said in an email to the Prospect, “the companies are increasingly willing to bargain for their own interests and depart from a pattern [agreement] which might put them at a competitive disadvantage.”
This time, the UAW has refused to single out one company, saying all three union automakers are the target. Still, Stellantis could end up being the target, given that, according to UAW sources, both Ford and GM are actually presenting counterproposals to the union.
The UAW filed unfair labor practice charges against GM and Stellantis last week for their failure to bargain in good faith. A Stellantis spokesperson characterized the charges as "frivolous" and said they would fight them. “Right now we are more focused on continuing to bargain in good faith for a new agreement,” the spokesperson said.
But the ULP charges appear to have had an effect; Stellantis said on Wednesday that they would make a counterproposal this week.
Asked about whether the Belvidere plant will be used as a bargaining chip, the Stellantis spokesperson said, “Product allocation for our U.S. plants will depend on the outcome of these negotiations as well as a plant’s ability to meet specific performance metrics including improving quality, reducing absenteeism and addressing overall cost. As these decisions are fluid and part of the discussions at the bargaining table, we will not comment further.”
Stellantis’s claims of absenteeism problems and quality issues were refuted by workers.
“As a team leader, I would see our quality hit 98 to 100 percent most days. We literally would just knock it out of the park,” said Chris Falzone, 34, who transferred from Belvidere to the Toledo, Ohio, Assembly Complex. “We had the least attendance issues of any Chrysler plant. So they want to talk about quality and attendance: Why did you close your best attendance and quality plant?”
The UAW has blamed the absenteeism on chronic understaffing and employees’ inability to get time off for family emergencies. In particular, the Belvidere plant was one of the top-performing in North America, earning silver and bronze awards for improvements in World Class Manufacturing.
Stellantis employs 15,117 workers across eight plants in Mexico, where its workers earn as little as $2.54 an hour.
Morningstar auto analyst David Whiston has suggested that the UAW members’ demands could blunt the competitive edge of the Big Three. However, despite the usual pro-management sentiments from Wall Street analysts, Whiston did tell the Detroit Free Press the automakers can afford “something in the range of 40%-plus pay increases over the new contract’s terms, with a 20% raise at ratification.” He added that other demands on shorter workweeks, pensions, and health care were “not feasible.”
UAW PRESIDENT SHAWN FAIN has said the Big Three automakers have closed or spun off 65 plants in the past 20 years. GM has closed the most, he said in an August 15 Facebook Live appearance. “GM has shipped thousands of jobs to Mexico and other countries where they can even further exploit the destitute and downtrodden, paying pennies on the dollar to work in horrific conditions.”
Fain mentioned Mexico’s National Auto Workers Union, or SINTTIA, an independent union that won a landslide election last year at GM’s plant in Silao, Guanajuato, and negotiated a contract with a big wage boost for 6,500 workers, outpacing wage hikes at other auto plants in the country.
Workers at the Silao plant “are making about $3 an hour,” said Fain. “They’d have to work full-time for nine years straight to earn enough money to buy the vehicle they produce. That’s criminal, and why we need to support those workers in Silao and everywhere in their fight against GM.”
Israel Cervantes, a Mexican GM autoworker fired for organizing against a corrupt union and the company, stood with U.S. GM workers when they went on strike in 2019. As the founder of an new organization, Generando Movimiento (“Generating Movement,” a wink at the name General Motors), he organized Mexican GM workers to refuse to work overtime to offset the production slowdown the strike caused.
Cervantes will be in Michigan in September to attend the Latino Workers Leadership Institute at the University of Michigan, and will walk picket lines alongside autoworkers should they go on strike. The UAW rank and file and leadership are forging stronger ties with Mexican autoworkers, hosting calls to share their common struggles.
“Our next step is to create solidarity with Mexico and Mexican autoworkers, especially with unions that are independent and militant and fighting for workers’ rights,” UAW Region 9A director Brandon Mancilla said on the podcast Unity Gains, hosted by autoworkers Sean Crawford and Jessie Kelly.
“The conglomerates abuse middle-class working people across the entire globe,” said Daniel Vicente, UAW regional director for western and central New York, New Jersey, and most of Pennsylvania. “If we don’t start trying to stand together internationally against this hegemony, this insane corporate greed that has encompassed the entire planet, there will be no more middle class.”
In the meantime, Patricia Elliston is worried about her future. She explained how workers at Belvidere have previously given up cost-of-living adjustments, a raise pegged to inflation, pensions, and retiree health care. “I’m in my mid-fifties. I would really like to retire with a pension and health care. I don’t want to work till I die in the plant.”
She says because she’s the sole breadwinner, the thought of a strike scares her, because she hasn’t built up enough savings. Questions run through her mind—“Can we still make rent?” “Can I make my car payment?” Then a resolve settles in. “But I’m willing to fight.”
