Carlos Osorio/AP Photo
United Auto Workers assemblymen work on Ford F-150 trucks being assembled at the Ford Rouge assembly plant in Dearborn, Michigan, September 27, 2018.
We’re five days into the United Auto Workers strike of Ford, GM, and Stellantis, and two days from a second round. UAW president Shawn Fain has announced that workers at more plants will “stand up” and walk out if substantial progress is not made in negotiations by noon on Friday. But workers who are still on the job have found their own way to put pressure on the Big Three, by exploiting their long-standing worker shortages.
Labor Notes reports on autoworkers’ strategy of “Eight and Skate,” which means working their shifts and then refusing voluntary overtime, which is routinely offered by the Big Three. Working your shift and then leaving work (in other words, doing exactly what it is you were hired to do) shouldn’t really be debilitating to the employer. In this case, it is.
The reason is understaffing: There are simply not enough workers at many auto plants to meet production goals. As a result, the companies turn to existing workers, paying them time and a half, or even double and triple time, to stay on the job. Management at some facilities consistently asks workers to work through their breaks or even lunch.
By only working eight hours a day, then, autoworkers can reduce output at the plants. It comes at a cost to these employees, but it’s their way to contribute to the labor effort. And it’s been successful in shutting down some plants over the past weekend, when they would normally be open.
The auto companies could counter by making overtime mandatory, though workers would have to be notified well in advance. But the other thing the companies could do—what they could have done for years, more precisely—is simply hire more autoworkers. If your company is relying on overtime work, the problem is a lack of staff. This is not a new issue bound up with the labor shortages post-pandemic; it’s been this way for many years.
As UAW leadership has explained, these companies have enjoyed record profits in recent years and ramped up pay packages to top executives. For which reason, they should have no problem increasing staff levels, or increasing pay to their workers. The companies have cried poverty, but if they are paying double-time rates for extra hours because demand is so high, it’s hard to square that claim. It would be far cheaper to pay a new employee at the base hourly rate than to pay an established worker for an hour of overtime.
So why don’t the companies want to hire more staff? Simply put, the benefits workers get on health care and retirement and paid time off add costs to the business. This is partially a function of the United States being the only major industrialized nation to not provide health care for workers. When employers bear that burden, they want to minimize the expense. But at some point, so much overtime is being paid out that the company isn’t avoiding costs at all.
The heavy use of overtime work also calls into question the idea that the switch to electric vehicles will wipe out the automotive labor market. Under this theory, because EVs have fewer parts, fewer workers will be needed to produce and assemble them—about 30 percent fewer by one account. And if having fewer car parts leads to less wearing out of those parts, auto mechanics could go out of business; and if people mostly charge at home, gas stations could gradually close up shop.
The heavy use of overtime work calls into question the idea that the switch to electric vehicles will wipe out the automotive labor market.
Of course, this is a long-range projection; there will still be hundreds of millions of gas-powered vehicles on the road for the foreseeable future. More important, the theory doesn’t take into account that EVs require new battery facilities, new charging stations, new transmission lines to support the additional electricity needs, and new mining locations for the minerals that go into the batteries. It’s hard to actually get a handle on how many jobs on net would be lost by the EV transition, if any; some analyses even project an increase.
But if there aren’t enough workers to make cars now, then fewer workers would actually have to be laid off. Reducing overtime could also limit, not exacerbate, the gap in labor cost per vehicle between the Big Three and Tesla. A properly staffed facility would save between 50 and 200 percent on every overtime hour. Even if more money goes to UAW members, the cost per vehicle could dip down.
That puts a different spin on the claims that the strike represents a struggle for the industry’s future. A future that transitions to electric vehicles is unavoidable, given the federal mandates, the continual driving down of costs for battery power, and the Big Three’s shrinking share of EV sales. That future could relieve a persistent worker shortage, while building jobs in related business lines.
Stellantis’s latest offer hinges on potentially closing 18 facilities (including office space for salaried workers and the company’s old Chrysler headquarters). According to the company, however, no workers would be laid off under that scenario, which reveals a striking example of the depths of the labor shortage. The UAW has not looked favorably on that idea, given the uprooting of families that would be entailed, though they haven’t outright rejected the concept either. The point is that the companies resisting paying workers for their productivity don’t have nearly enough workers to reach projected production levels.
None of this is to minimize the stress on unionized auto companies needing to invest in an EV transition when non-union companies with more in-house control of their assembly lines are making cars cheaper—and in Tesla’s case, finally passing that on to consumers. But the consistent understaffing shows that a lighter EV footprint can be an opportunity for the Big Three rather than a burden. Add to that the tremendous profits the Big Three have made under the inefficient older system, and there’s headroom for higher pay.
It also represents an opportunity for a UAW that has been unsuccessful at unionizing U.S. factories outside of the Big Three. Subsidies for EVs—which were detached from unionization in the final Inflation Reduction Act compromise—won’t be of much help here, but unionized plants running properly and giving workers a decent life could.
The knee-jerk reliance on overtime isn’t limited to auto production facilities. As someone with many years as an editor in film and TV, I know that extended, irregular hours are endemic to that production business as well. It’s not necessarily an issue in the writers and actors’ strikes, where the basic scale is above that which would qualify for overtime on a daily basis. But it’s part of the same understaffing imperative, with the studios creating smaller writers’ rooms and putting more pressure on workers to do more with less help.
What this pervasive understaffing reveals is that workers get squeezed when a government lacks a coherent way to provide health care and retirement benefits for its citizens. That’s what leads to abuses like this. But transitions—whether to EVs or streaming video—can force companies off of these tactics, and allow increased productivity to be broadly shared.
