United Auto Staff President Shawn Fain, middle, visits striking UAW Local 551 staff outside a Ford assembly center on South Burley Avenue on Saturday, Oct. 7, 2023, in Chicago.
John J. Kim | Tribune News Service | Getty Images
The United Auto Staff union is launching an unprecedented campaign to prepare 13 non-union automakers in the U.S. after securing record contracts with the Detroit automakers.
The union said Wednesday the drive will cover nearly 150,000 autoworkers across BMW, Honda, (*12*)Hyundai, Lucid, Mazda, Mercedes-Benz, Nissan, Rivian, Subaru, Tesla, Toyota, Volkswagen and Volvo.
As a part of the campaign staff are signing electronic cards in support of union efforts to potentially organize U.S. plants from those automakers.
It will not be guaranteed that the union would push to prepare every plant or automaker that participates in the campaign. Overall, staff would want to vote in support of UAW representation.
UAW President Shawn Fain has said the union’s next mission after ratifying record contracts with General Motors, Ford Motor and Stellantis was to expand its ranks. The contracts ratified by the “Big Three” Detroit automaker include at least 25% hourly pay raises, the reinstatement of cost-of-living adjustments and enhanced profit-sharing payments, amongst other advantages.
“To all the autoworkers on the market working without the advantages of a union: Now it is your turn,” Fain said in a video posted online.
Fain previously vowed to maneuver beyond the “Big Three” and expand to the “Big Five or Big Six” by the time its 4½-year contracts with the Detroit automakers expire in April 2028.
Launching major organizing campaigns concurrently breaks with tradition for the union. Typically, it will spend months, if not years, gaining support of staff inside factories to eventually vote on UAW representation.
But Fain has repeatedly rewritten the rules of engaging with automakers during his short time as UAW president — he negotiated deals with Ford, GM and Stellantis concurrently, slightly than identifying a lead company on which to focus efforts — and organizing non-union automakers would greatly assist the union’s bargaining efforts and scale.
UAW membership has been nearly halved from roughly 700,000 members in 2001 to 383,000 at the starting of this yr. It peaked at 1.5 million in 1979.
Several non-union automakers equivalent to Hyundai, Toyota and Honda announced plans to extend employee wages in the weeks following the UAW deals with Ford, GM and Stellantis.
Fain has called such increases the “UAW bump,” which he said further said stands for “U Are Welcome.”
Still, the UAW has a poor track record with trying to prepare non-Detroit automakers.
The UAW has previously failed to prepare foreign-based automakers in the U.S. Most recently, plants with Volkswagen and Nissan fell wanting the support needed to unionize. The UAW has previously discussed organizing Tesla’s Fremont plant in California, with little to no traction in those efforts.
At the 2023 DealBook Summit in Latest York afterward Wednesday, Musk was asked about the UAW’s goals. He replied: “If Tesla gets unionized it should be because we deserve it and we failed in a way.”
The UAW said Wednesday certainly one of the “strongest campaigns” so far is Toyota’s assembly complex in Georgetown, Kentucky, where 7,800 staff make the company’s iconic Camry and highly profitable RAV4 and Lexus ES.
“Staff across the country, from the West to the Midwest and particularly in the South, are reaching out to hitch our movement and to hitch the UAW,” Fain said in the video. “The cash is there. The time is true. And the answer is straightforward. You do not have to live paycheck to paycheck. You do not have to fret about how you are going to pay your rent or feed your loved ones while the company makes billions.”