But, unlike with rail and airline workers, the president doesn’t have the authority to order autoworkers to stay on the job. The union, he said, knows its initial proposals weren’t realistic for any of the companies, but the companies know they’re going to have to make a very expensive settlement, including addressing tiered wages for people doing the same jobs.īiden faced criticism from labor groups last year when he urged Congress to approve legislation preventing rail workers from going on strike, fearing an upending of supply chains still struggling to recover from the pandemic. “It’ll go down to the wire, and there won’t be an agreement until the final moment, if there is one at all,” he said. Thomas Kochan, a professor of work and employment at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said both sides are going to have to make big compromises quickly in order to settle the disputes before the Thursday deadline. Top pay for an assembly plant worker is now $32 per hour.Īll three companies’ offers on cost-of-living adjustments were deficient, Fain said, providing little or no protection against inflation.įarley said Ford has raised its wage offer, eliminated wage tiers and shortened from eight years to four years the time it would take hourly workers to reach top scale, and added more time off. In a 2019 agreement the union got 6% pay raises over four years with lump sums in some years as well as profit-sharing checks. The raises barely make up for what he described as minimal raises of the past. Ford offered 20% over 4½ years, while GM was at 18% for four years and Stellantis was at 17.5%. On Wednesday, Fain said the companies upped their wage offers, but he still called them inadequate. In addition to general wage increases, the union is seeking restoration of cost-of-living pay raises, an end to varying tiers of wages for factory jobs, a 32-hour week with 40 hours of pay, the restoration of traditional defined-benefit pensions for new hires who now receive only 401(k)-style retirement plans, pension increases for retirees and other items. The UAW later lowered its demand to around 36%. Initial offers from the companies fell far short of those figures. The UAW started out demanding 40% raises over the life of a four-year contract, or 46% when compounded annually. If there’s no deal by the end of Thursday, union officials will not bargain on Friday and instead will join workers on picket lines, he said. He said the targeted strikes, with the threat of escalation, “will keep the companies guessing.” “If the companies continue to bargain in bad faith or continue to stall or continue to give us insulting offers, then our strike is going to continue to grow,” Fain said. The union president said it is still possible that all 146,000 UAW members could walk out, but the union will begin by striking at a limited number of plants. And they say they have made fair proposals to the union.įain said the final decision on which plants to strike won’t be announced until 10 p.m. They say an expensive labor agreement could saddle them with costs that would force them to raise prices above their non-union foreign competitors.
Automakers contend that they need to make huge investments to develop and build electric vehicles while still building and engineering internal combustion vehicles.
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