Paul Sancya/AP Photo
United Auto Workers members hold picket signs near a General Motors assembly plant in Delta Township, Michigan, September 29, 2023.
In a major announcement for the future of the electric-vehicle transition, General Motors has agreed in writing to place workers at joint-venture battery plants under the national master agreement with the United Auto Workers, UAW President Shawn Fain said in a live broadcast on Friday.
The agreement would ensure that new hires building electric-vehicle parts are included in the union, an outcome the automaker had sought to avoid as it has built new facilities in harder-to-organize states in the South.
While joint-venture plants are not covered by the labor agreement at issue in the three-week-long strike, the fate of future electric-vehicle negotiations has loomed over negotiations.
“Their hope was to bring us all down as they moved into the new phase of electrification of vehicles,” said Scott Houldieson, a worker at a Ford Explorer assembly plant in Chicago. “Environmentalists have been touting a just transition for a long time, but now we’re putting the force of the union behind that just transition.”
Houldieson hopes similar concessions from Ford and Stellantis could come soon.
“Our [Explorer] plant was second in the moneymaking category. Explorers are very profitable for Ford, and they’re hurting from not being able to produce more of them right now. But their real bread and butter is the F-150. And, if they don’t come across with this concession that they’ve gotten out of GM, that’s what’s next for them.”
In the near term, this puts around 720 workers at Ultium Cells, a joint venture between GM and LG Energy Solution based in Lordstown, Ohio, into the GM master agreement. Those workers, who overwhelmingly voted to unionize last December, recently won a tentative agreement to raise wages by 20 percent, but has not completed a first contract. That contract will now be whatever is bargained in the master agremeent.
But that’s just one of several battery plants GM will need as they convert their gas-powered engines to electric vehicles. And this sets a precedent within the industry, particularly at Ford and Stellantis, both of which have their own joint-venture EV battery plants. Thousands of workers could ultimately be covered by those union contracts, rather than in a second tier of lower-paid battery workers.
According to Fain, the union found out about GM’s concession just moments before a scheduled announcement about future workplace stoppages as a result of the strike. “We were about to shut down GM’s largest money maker, in Arlington Texas,” Fain said in the announcement. “The company knew those members were ready to walk immediately. Just that threat provided a transformative win.”
Bloomberg New Energy Finance analyst Corey Cantor told the Prospect that General Motors committing to the reclassification signals how the automaker has acknowledged EVs as part of its core business. For a long time, charging networks and battery production were kept separate, with lower-paid employees. Now, Cantor said, GM is conceding that “the battery is a core part of the EV. You can’t sell a gas car without its motor.”
GM’s shifting position on the joint venture question now puts pressure on Ford and Stellantis to fold their joint ventures into their respective master agreements. “I always thought GM would be the most likely to make this move out because of the fact that GM already had a plant up and running and had agreed to recognize the UAW… it was a more natural fit for them to make this type of concession.”
Despite the UAW’s gains, Cantor warned that, even as EVs reach nearly a million in sales for this year plus a critical 10 percent market share threshold in several states, GM’s sales are far behind predictions the company made last year. GM had a goal of 150,000 EV sales by the end of this year. So far, they’ve delivered 56,000. The majority of those models are the Chevy Bolt, which is on its way out of production later this year. The Ultium facility accounted for almost 7,000 of those units.
“If the [Ultium] battery plant scales up in a way that maintains safety standards,” Cantor said. “It’s a potential competitive advantage of getting the best labor force.”
