In This Article:
UAW President Shawn Fain used a Facebook Live session Wednesday to reflect on the wins in the tentative agreements with Ford Motor Co., General Motors and Stellantis that union members are now weighing as well as the impact of the union’s targeted strike strategy that helped bring about those agreements.
Fain, speaking from a teachers union hall in Chicago ahead of President Joe Biden's planned visit Thursday to meet with Illinois autoworkers, also described what this fight required of UAW members and how it offered a vision of a union energized for battles ahead. Fighting and winning, Fain said, are contagious.
“We needed to fight like we’ve never fought before and win like we’ve never won before. We had doubters, we had naysayers and we had enemies, but we also had champions, we had leaders and we had organizers, and I don’t mean people like me or people on TV or people who wear suits,” Fain said. “I mean you, the workers, the workers who really run these companies, the members who really run this union.”
The strike did something else, too.
“We won back our dignity as autoworkers, we won back our pride in being UAW and being able to wear this label on our chest,” he said, pointing to a union logo on his jacket. “We won back our strike muscle.”
More: UAW gains could rise tide for nonunion autoworkers; Fain calls Toyota boost union 'bump'
Fain, who noted that thousands of nonunion autoworkers have been “inspired by our victory and are starting to organize,” talked about the 25% general wage increases over the life of the contract, the reinstatement of cost-of-living adjustments, a formula which had been “stolen from us” and which the Detroit Three had wanted to “go extinct,” big boosts for long “abused” temporary workers and ways in which the contracts would be a “big first step” toward a just electric vehicle transition for workers. He also touted the ending of numerous wage tiers.
But Fain also described what the union wasn’t able to win in this round of bargaining, something he said amounted to one of the worst tiers — the way workers hired before 2007 could count on pensions and retiree health care and those hired later could not.
“We didn’t win on this issue. The fact is both of these issues are extremely difficult and expensive to fix,” Fain said, while circling retirement security as a key issue when contract talks resume in 2028.
Fain didn’t just leave it as an issue for the three automakers to solve, however, noting that the companies have been focused on Wall Street concerns in this area when it comes to taking on future liabilities.