The United Auto Workers union is officially on strike against the big three Detroit automakers Ford Motor Company (NYSE:F), General Motors Company (NYSE:GM) and Stellantis NV (NYSE:STLA, EPA:STLA).
After Thursday night’s deadline came and went without a deal, the UAW began what it called a “stand-up strike” targeting specific branches of each of the automakers.
The plants affected are Ford’s Ranger midsize pickup and Bronco SUV plant in Wayne, Michigan; GM’s midsize truck and full-size van plant in Wentzville, Missouri; and Stellantis’ Jeep Wrangler and Gladiator plant in Toledo, Ohio.
These plants employ about 12,700 UAW workers (3,300 at Ford, 3,600 at GM and 5,800 at Steallantis) of the union’s roughly 146,000 total members. The specific plants were chosen because they produce vehicles that are in high demand.
The UAW is negotiating with all three automakers at once for new contracts. It is calling for a 40% hourly pay increase, a 32-hour workweek, a return to traditional pensions, the end of compensation tiers and a renewal of cost-of-living adjustments (COLA), among other things.
“We got to do what we got to do to get our share of economic and social justice in this strike,” UAW president Shawn Fain said Thursday outside the Ford facility in Wayne. “We’re going to be out here until we get our share of economic justice. And it doesn’t matter how long it takes.”
“If they come to the pump and they take care of their workers, we’ll be back to work,” Fain added. “But if they don’t, we’ll keep amping it up.”
If negotiations don’t progress, the UAW is expected to call on other plants to “stand up” and join the strike. The stand-up name is a callback to the famous “sit-down” strikes by the UAW in the 1930s.
Ford, for its part, issued a statement Thursday night about a UAW’s counterproposal, but criticized it for showing “little movement from the union’s initial demands.”
“If implemented, the proposal would more than double Ford’s current UAW-related labor costs, which are already significantly higher than the labor costs of Tesla, Toyota and other foreign-owned automakers in the United States that utilize non-union-represented labor,” Ford said.
Meanwhile, GM CEO Mary Barra said she was “extremely frustrated and disappointed” about the strike on Friday morning.
Contact Andrew Kessel at andrew.kessel@proactiveinvestors.com
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