Throughout its 5-week-old strikes against Detroit's automakers, the United Auto Workers union has cast an emphatically combative stance, reflecting the style of its pugnacious leader, Shawn Fain.
Throughout its 5-week-old strikes against Detroit’s automakers, the United Auto Workers union has cast an emphatically combative stance, reflecting the style of its pugnacious leader, Shawn Fain.
What began with 7,000 workers at one factory each of Ford, General Motors and Jeep maker Stellantis has grown to 34,000 at six plants and 38 parts warehouses across the country. Officials at all three companies note that they have sweetened pay offers and offered numerous other concessions. In one particularly notable move, GM agreed to bring its new electric vehicle battery factories into the national UAW contract, essentially guaranteeing that workers of the future will belong to the union.
Yet obstacles remain. The UAW has demanded 36% general raises; traditional defined-benefit pensions for workers hired after 2007; and pension increases for retirees. Fain has even sought 32-hour work weeks for 40 hours of pay — a demand that even many union workers call unrealistic.“If they can't come to terms, what happens then?” asked Dawn Krunzel, a team leader at Stellantis' Jeep complex in Toledo, Ohio, one of the first plants to walk out.
Doc Killian, who works at Ford's Michigan Assembly plant in Wayne near Detroit, said he thought it was insincere for Ford Executive Chairman Bill Ford to assert in a speech last week that Ford can't increase its contract offer because higher labor costs would limit its investments in electric vehicles and the factories to build them. Ford's speech, Killian noted, came a day before the company announced that it was paying out $600 million in dividends to shareholders.
With roots in small-town Indiana, Fain, now 54, was known as a straight-arrow young man who respected teachers and coaches at Taylor High School near Kokomo, from which he graduated in 1987. Paul Nicodemus, a childhood friend, said Fain derived his values from his father, who was Kokomo's police chief, and his mother, a nurse.
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