Will the U.A.W. Strike Turn the Rust Belt Green?

The 2007-08 financial crisis was followed by a government bailout and a supervised restructuring of Chrysler and G.M., which forced U.A.W. workers across the Big Three to make major concessions to keep their jobs—and to keep the companies solvent. Gone was the annual cost-of-living adjustment and the health insurance for retirees, many of whom are not old enough to qualify for Medicare. Even break time was reduced from six minutes to five. Most significant was the introduction of a two-tiered pay system, under which new hires would start at half of what existing workers made. New hires also would not receive a pension.

Since the crash, average hourly wages for workers in vehicle manufacturing, adjusted for inflation, have fallen by nearly twenty per cent, according to a recent study by the Economic Policy Institute. The automakers, meanwhile, have seen enormous financial success. By 2013, the Treasury Department had sold its last stakes in Chrysler and G.M. and lifted restrictions on executive compensation. In the past decade, profits at the Big Three have almost doubled. The companies have spent billions on stock buybacks, and C.E.O. pay has gone up by forty per cent; Mary Barra, the C.E.O. of G.M., earned twenty-nine million dollars last year.

The Big Three aren’t a monolith. Last Wednesday, Ford, which is reputed to have the best relationship with its workers, reached a tentative agreement to end the strike at its factories. The terms included a twenty-five-per-cent raise over a four-and-a-half-year contract, an end to wage tiers, and a right-to-strike provision over plant closures, a first for the U.A.W. An agreement with one company generally pressures the other two to settle along similar lines.

The strike comes amid a wider revival of labor. Though union membership is at a historic low, in the past few years the number of striking workers has reached its highest level in decades. Recent walkouts by members of SAG–AFTRA and the Writers Guild and by workers at Kaiser Permanente have enjoyed broad public approval. According to a Gallup poll, sixty-seven per cent of Americans now support labor unions, nineteen points higher than in 2009. Moreover, the poll showed that seventy-five per cent sided with the U.A.W. in its battle with the auto companies. Still, there have been pockets of antipathy. Jim Cramer, an analyst at CNBC, implied that Fain was a Trotskyite and encouraged the auto companies to move their entire production process to Mexico.

Recently, at Baumhower’s striking Jeep plant, a group of workers from the Wrangler paint line were marching in front of one of the main entrances of the three-and-a-half-million-square-foot complex. The mood was defiant. They chanted, “No justice, no Jeeps!” and shouted as drivers on Interstate 75 zipped past, honking. Earlier, someone had incinerated a copy of the old U.A.W. contract in a burn barrel. Todd Gibson, the strike captain on duty, kept the workers walking, back and forth, for six hours. Semi trucks were still making deliveries to the plant, slowly nosing forward through the picket.

“Thirty-eight years in jail,” Gibson said with a laugh, when I asked how long he’d worked at the plant. “Not everybody is molded to be a factory worker. You have to be able to handle the long-term, repetitive nature, let your mind go into a different place.” This was the first time during his tenure that the plant had been on strike. What changed? He pointed to Amy Jo Luedtke, a middle-aged woman with bleached-blond hair. Luedtke was in elementary school when she decided that she wanted to work at the plant one day, after driving in a friend’s parents’ “naked” Jeep (no doors, no top). She’d been on the paint line for four years, as a supplemental. “I’m here doing the same thing they’re doing,” she said, glancing at her co-workers. “I should get the same thing they’re getting.” Gibson told me, “See, I’m on the end of this show, right? These guys are just starting it. I want to make it good for them.”

On Halloween night, 2021, Jennifer Fultz went trick-or-treating with her seven-year-old daughter, Aria, and her ten-year-old son, Jordan, in her home town of Rockford, Illinois. The kids were both dressed as Pikachu. Fultz, who has long chestnut hair, hazel eyes, and thick glasses, had to finish the rounds early. She brought the kids home, hugged and kissed them goodbye, packed up her car, and, with her mother and her two cats, began the six-hour drive to Toledo. The next day, she was starting a new job at the Jeep plant there. Though the children would soon join her, she was nervous and heartsick. “I worried that, if something were to go wrong, it was just me and my mom in a brand-new city,” she said. “I was praying to God that I had made the right decision.”

For years, Fultz had worked at a Stellantis plant outside Rockford, building Jeep Cherokees. The company laid people off in waves, then idled the plant completely, eliminating the remaining thirteen hundred jobs. The next line of Cherokees would reportedly be built in Toluca, Mexico, making the plant another casualty of the North American Free Trade Agreement. Since NAFTA went into effect, in 1994, it has cost the United States nearly a million jobs, a significant percentage of them in vehicle and parts manufacturing, according to a study by Robert Scott, a recently retired economist at the Economic Policy Institute. NAFTA paved the way for other similar agreements, most notably one that established permanent normal trade relations with China, facilitating its entry into the World Trade Organization, in 2001. Scott estimates that the ensuing trade deficit cost the United States nearly four million jobs, most of them in manufacturing, which tended to be more heavily unionized than other industries. Even the spectre of outsourcing has provided corporations with a powerful cudgel: Stellantis recently threatened to move production of its Ram 1500 to Mexico, too, according to one of the U.A.W.’s lead negotiators. (In a statement, Stellantis said, “We are not commenting on production sites for future products.”)

In the past twenty years, the Big Three have closed more than sixty American plants. Fultz told me that her previous plant had been a “melting pot” of autoworkers from shuttered factories in New York, Maryland, and Missouri. Before getting hired by Stellantis, she had worked three other jobs—at Kohl’s, at Papa John’s, and at Subway, as a supervisor—and still could not afford to move out of her mother’s house. “There are not a lot of good jobs back home,” she said. “Once Stellantis pulled the plug, that was it for the whole community.”

Fultz works ten-hour shifts, six or seven days a week. The long hours have taken a toll on her physical health. A “little gremlin,” she said, lives on her shoulder. (Fultz spent a year and a half in the body shop, where she lifted and pulled heavy parts all day.) “I can’t hold my daughter, who is light as a feather, for more than five seconds, because my hands go numb,” she told me. Last year, her mother was diagnosed with lung cancer. Fultz takes care of her but is guilt-stricken that the rest of her mother’s family and friends are so far away. “I know that my family is suffering because I brought them here,” Fultz told me, as tears started to stream down her face.

Her career in the auto industry has been marked by a sense of delayed recompense for the bailout concessions. “We were promised that future generations would be able to get back what was given up,” she said. “And that never came. I don’t have a pension. I don’t have health care when I retire. I’m thirty-three, and my body is broken down already. That’s not the American dream. The American dream isn’t to work sixty, seventy hours a week in a factory, making a billionaire more billions, while I neglect time with my kids, time with my mother, time with my mister—just time. Then for the billionaires to say, ‘You’re being greedy’—am I?”

In late September, President Joe Biden announced that he would visit a picket line in Michigan. Fultz met him there. “We fist-bumped,” she recalled. “I told him, ‘Please keep jobs in America, Mr. Biden.’ His response was ‘That is why we need E.V.s.’ ” Biden wants electric vehicles to make up two-thirds of the domestic market for passenger cars by 2032. He has also declared his intention to be the “most pro-union President in American history.” The U.A.W.’s strike, in part, aims to push him to fulfill both promises, to enact what the union calls a “just transition.”