Mary Jack
Striking UAW workers picket outside the Mopar Los Angeles Parts Distribution Center, in Ontario, California, this past Sunday. Union members have been denying entrance to non-union truckers hired to move auto parts from the facility to dealers.
ONTARIO, CALIFORNIA – The yellow-and-white big-rig truck approached slowly, maneuvering to turn into the Mopar Los Angeles Parts Distribution Center, owned by Stellantis. A half dozen striking members with UAW Local 230 formed a wall along the driveway, refusing to allow the truck entry.
Trucks come to this Mopar site to engage in “cross-docking,” where they exchange parts that then go out to dealerships. Unionized Teamster drivers have refused to cross the picket lines; some have even joined UAW workers as they strike. So the trucking companies have been hiring non-union replacements to try to get parts moving. “We call them scabs,” said Mike Lacey, the strike captain on this past Sunday morning.
On two occasions during the first two days of the strike at this site, one of 38 parts facilities where workers walked out last Friday in an escalation of the UAW’s Stand Up Strike, a scene like this one became more dangerous when the truck driver pulled a gun on the strikers. In the incident that occurred when I was there, the UAW members seemed rather unfazed by this, holding their ground. After a short standoff, the truck reversed and pulled up the road toward another entrance. The workers told me they had locked that entrance with a new lock. But just to be sure, a few members piled into a van and took off toward that entrance.
The workers here take four-hour shifts four days a week, and get $500 a week in strike pay. Most of the ones I spoke with have been working here for 25 years or more. “We’re doing this for the next generation,” said Cheryl Sprinkle, a front-office worker with 29 years at the facility, who has enough seniority to retire in October. Her husband, who was also at the picket lines, retired in 2009 from the plant, and was involved in the last strike here, an independent walkout in 1991 that lasted three months and cost the couple a house they had just moved into. Cheryl moved back with her kids to the family’s house in Wisconsin until the strike settled.
Sprinkle and others explained the pay scale at the facility, which picks and distributes parts to dealers across Southern California. The starting salary for new hires is $15.76 an hour, the workers told me, and while it accrues with experience, there’s a cap at $25 an hour, which can only be reached after eight years. That’s what comes with being stranded on the second tier of lower-wage workers, which has affected all new hires since 2009, when the union agreed to a deal saving the auto companies from bankruptcy.
Mary Jack
But the more senior workers on the top tier haven’t been benefiting much either. Lacey, who has 25 years with the company, said that workers at Mopar Los Angeles have seen a cumulative raise of just 6 percent over the past 16 years.
At one time, this was a solid middle-class job. “I started in 1994, I walked in and bought me a new car,” said Mike Carter, a Gulf War veteran and standup forklift driver. “Not much has changed for me, especially on wages. The Dodge Ram was $20,000 in 1994 and it’s $100,000 today.” The cost-of-living adjustment, which the UAW first won in 1950 and which was then rolled into successive contracts, was stripped after the government rescue of Stellantis (then Chrysler) in 2009. Those concessions were supposed to be given back when the company returned to profitability. They never were. “They took five minutes of our break,” Carter said. “A five-minute wash-up.”
Carter, who has a disability from his service in Iraq, is eligible to retire in February. He said that his defined-benefit pension payout was worth $3,170 per month in 2000, and is worth the same amount today, 23 years later. He was 270th in seniority when he got to this facility 29 years ago; today, he’s 15th among only about 130 workers. The workforce has been cut in half, with the same workload, “if not more,” he said.
There were about 15 UAW strikers on this shift. Everyone seemed pretty enthusiastic about this unique Stand Up Strike, where only certain facilities walk out while others continue to maintain operations without a contract. “I love it. It’s something the UAW has never done before,” said Daniel Morin, a picker at the facility, who also had almost 30 years with the company. “It keeps the company guessing.” Indeed, the auto companies reacted to false information about where the first strike would be held, mispositioning parts and resources.
Praise for Shawn Fain, the union’s new president who toppled the incumbent in the UAW’s first rank-and-file election, was universal. “It’s been a long time since we’ve heard a [union] president talk like that, about corporate greed,” Morin said. “This is the first time in 29 years like I felt someone has my back,” Carter added. While some workers didn’t believe they’d get the 40 percent increase Fain initially called for, they recognized it as the opening round of a negotiation where you start high. Lacey, the strike captain, hoped that the cost-of-living adjustment would be restored. “[Stellantis] wants to give us a one-time bonus. After tax it’s $700, what’s that get you around here?”
The second round of the strike has included parts facilities like Mopar, which service dealers with parts needed for repairs. In theory, shutting down warehouses like this means that customers cannot get their cars serviced, which will increase anger over the strike. In practice, there are rumors that the auto companies stocked up on parts at other sites, to ensure that they could make repairs. But if the cross-docking stations are also closed by the strikers, as they’ve been at Mopar, the logistics of getting parts to dealers could break down.
“The strike is for my future, to give me the opportunity to have a career,” said Jacob May, a backup team leader for the Maserati parts at the facility and one of the younger workers on the picket lines on Sunday. He spent two and a half years as a temp before getting a full-time job at Mopar, and has now been there five years. Other workers described this to me as normal; one said that some temps have had to take as long as seven years to secure permanent work. “Temps do a lot of the work,” May said. While some workers at understaffed facilities across the Big Three automakers refuse overtime to slow down operations, temps do not have that option, and are forced to put in extra hours. When May was a temp, he worked seven days a week.
Mary Jack
(L-R) UAW Local 509 chair Romeo Torres, second from left, joins picketers Mike Carter, Daniel Morin, and Cheryl Sprinkle, all striking union members and employees at the Mopar Los Angeles Parts Distribution Center.
President Biden will appear on a picket line in Detroit today, something workers here appreciated. UAW’s Region 6, which serves the West Coast, will have a solidarity rally outside the Mopar facility today as well, featuring elected officials. A General Motors parts center, in nearby Rancho Cucamonga, also went on strike last Friday. Labor Notes has reported that GM may deploy salaried workers at the parts centers to keep dealers stocked.
Workers acknowledged that striking would be tough, especially for the younger workers who don’t make that much to begin with. “The people with extra income have to help out,” said Carter, who does receive a small amount of veterans benefits. “It’s been strong out here, I’ve been bringing out coffee and doughnuts, water, energy bars … [we’ve been] helping out each other with gas.”
There is a Ford parts center in the area as well, but Fain declined to put Ford facilities on strike in this new round, citing good progress in negotiations. Romeo Torres, the chairperson of the union local at the Ford facility (Local 509), was out that morning anyway to walk the line at Mopar and show his support. “Fain’s putting us on the map,” Torres said. “He’s showing how important parts depots are. It’s part of customer service.”
I asked Torres if he felt good about Ford being left out of the second round of strikes. “I feel good but I also feel guilty,” he said. “I’m telling our membership that we will still show up for our brothers and sisters. In 2015, GM was the target [of the strike] and we still came over to support.”
Carter, who was nearby, told him not to feel guilty, that everyone was doing their part. He and Torres bonded over their past military service. “My family migrated here, I joined the military and now I’m a union member,” Torres said. “I am part of the American dream.”
