Starting in 2007, workers gave up cost-of-living raises and defined benefit pensions for new hires. Wage tiers were created as the UAW tried to help the companies avoid financial trouble ahead of and during the Great Recession. Even so, only Ford avoided government-funded bankruptcy protection.
Many say it’s time to get the concessions back because the companies are making huge profits and CEOs are raking in millions.
That’s the problem with agreements like this - workers concede because it’s an emergency type of situation, but when things get back to normal it’s never revisited. As a result, the workers have suffered the repercussions of their “emergency time concessions” for 16 years while the companies reap the benefits of their employees’ sacrifice.
This has to be successful…I feel like it will set a precedent going forward regardless of the outcome. Let’s hope it’s positive. Solidarity!
I don’t know, but the US auto industry mostly assembles the final vehicle from my understanding. The parts are frequently made elsewhere and shipped in. They can say it’s made in the US because the assembly is completed here.
Won’t automakers be moving their production lines aboard as result ? There are companies that moved production abroad to reduce costs or/and not have to care about working conditions. Just saying.
Considering less than a sixth of a vehicle’s input cost is labor, they could double their pay and still make 25% more profit than what it would cost for truck import taxes…
They could but they are after maximizing profit. Why else would be corporates moving their factories to the other end of the world? To give poor people a job? Or to reduce costs because domestic labour is much more expensive?
If we’re still talking about trucks, you would need to find some place where not only do you pay them less than what someone would make in a Chinese vehicle manufacturing plant, you also need to make sure that shipping and getting the right materials doesn’t eat into that savings. It just isn’t really economical anymore, unless you find more and more obscure countries with more instability and less infrastructure.
Managers of these companies are good at doing that and are richly rewarded for doing so. Instead of China it might be other cheap labor place like Vietnam, India or even eastern Europe.
Just take Ford as example, they made trucks in Turkey, imported trucks as passenger vehicles to get around chicken tax, de-mounted passengers seats in states to sell it as protected trucks.
Eventually they got caught. But do you think they would to this gray business if it wasn’t profitable ?
Even if we look at it as having $1.3 billion USD “loan” without a mortgage, because they eventually had to pay back these taxes, it’s still profitable because these $$$ allowed them to build more and sell more in less time + they saved costs on cheap labor.
They kinda already did, the big automakers fighting unions are arguably what caused Detroit’s current situation. I wonder if they can outsource even more or if they’re stuck for some reason.
It’s not a case of being “stuck” per se. It’s just not cost effective to move production on this kind of stuff overseas. Shipping goes by volume, and cars have an absolutely atrocious cost to volume ratio (think about how many dollars worth of iPhones you could stuff into the space occupied by a single car). It makes a lot more sense to build them where you plan to sell them (broadly speaking). That’s why a lot of car manufacturing still happens in countries like the US, Canada, and the UK.
Not disagreeing, but isn’t there also protectionist incentives to at least assembly them in the US too? Benn a while since I remember reading it, but seem to remember there are many tarrifs, tax incentives, and etc that make it a complex situation for auto makers.
This isn’t the most substantive of your comments in this chain, but I think it deserves some attention. It’s perfectly worded and it’s a concept more people need to embrace: you don’t have to speak in absolutes and it’s okay to express the limits of your knowledge.
It’s what they are good at, comparing costs and maximizing profits.
They will find the way to get around it at least partially even if they have to invest into fully automatic production with limited human labor.
The limited strikes will help to preserve the union’s $825 million strike fund, which would run dry in about 11 weeks if all workers walked out. But Fain said more plants could be added if the companies don’t make better offers.
Even Fain has called the union’s demands audacious, but he maintains the automakers are raking in billions and can afford them. He scoffed at company statements that costly settlements would force them to raise vehicle prices, saying labor accounts for only 4% to 5% of vehicle costs.
Smart idea: ask for a lot and strike immediately. Don’t wait and strike all at once. Pull more workers off the job if they refuse to negotiate, but start out slow.
That allows time for the board to ask management wtf is going on, because they are slowly losing money.
Those “20%” raises are spread over 4 years which averages to ~5%/year, barely keeping ahead of inflation. The media throwing that out without quantifying it is a blatant attempt by the corporate press to breed animosity towards the unions and paint them as greedy.
If the strikes drag on, shortages could push vehicle prices higher and strain an economy already bruised by inflation.
Cue the “but I was thinking about maybe potentially kind of buying a new car next year, and this will either make it more expensive or force me to wait” BS
Note: I’m not referring to underprivileged folks whose current vehicle craps out/is stolen and they’re in desperate need of a new method of transportation. I’m talking about folks who are either in no danger of losing their only vehicle &/or can easily obtain a new one and are whining about nothing more than minor inconvenience.
And let’s not forget how embarrassing the state of public transportation is in the US. We basically pretend it doesn’t exist and is impossible to achieve, thus forcing those who live here to have access to some sort of private automobile.
I think part of the reason UAW is starting with a rotating strike plan is to call bullshit on the prepared narratives that parts will imminently be unavailable unless the union settles.
Yup. All Republicans and exactly enough Democrats. And complicit anti-union centrists will be like “don’t blame Manchin! Look at all the other people we agree with who he voted with!”
Manchin is probably providing cover for a few corporate Dems. If it wasn’t him, it would be one of them, I’m sure. We just really need to get corporate money out of politics.
I used to work at Electronic Arts for 13 years. Doesn’t sound very different. Large public corporations will do anything to make profit, including layoffs.
And to help keep GM from going bankrupt they took concessions a decade ago or whatever that they never got back. Now they want back what they had and some more to account for the ridiculous inflation and corporate greed we’ve seen since then across all of corporate America. I don’t see why that’s so unreasonable.
GM did go bankrupt. The concessions they took were also significantly lesser than what it could have been without the Obama administration structuring a more union friendly bankruptcy.
“The automakers, however, say they’re facing unprecedented demands on capital as they develop and build new electric vehicles while at the same time making gas-powered cars, SUVs and trucks to pay the bills.“
GM’s full-year 2022 revenue was $156.7 billion.
Keep clutching your pearls, automakers. You disingenuous fucks.
General Motors Co. booked $9.9 billion in net income last year, down from 2021’s $10 billion despite chronic supply chain woes, rising interest rates and a slowing economy.
GM’s comparatively strong financial performance enabled the Detroit automaker to deliver profit-sharing bonuses of $12,750 to approximately 42,300 hourly employees (total number of employees in 2022 was 167,000) - GM’s highest such profit-sharing payout. The bonuses total $500 million for the year, the company said.
How well do you sleep well at night after shilling for large corporations online?
“GM’s full-year 2022 revenue was $156.7 billion, net income attributable to stockholders was $9.9 billion and EBIT-adjusted was a record $14.5 billion. Results were at the high-end of the company’s revised EBIT-adjusted guidance range.”
We have so much capital demand that we did almost 3 billion in stock buybacks the last two years… yeah that makes sense. They just bought back shares 3 months ago.
Some people want(need?) control in a different sense than others, I don’t think you can stamp out capitalism, at least in a micro sense. If you provided people with everything they could possibly ever need, some would still hustle for more. Some people just don’t understand hobbies, its certainly gotten much worse as current culture seems to revere the attitude, but I think its also just an innate trend that will always exist in a subset of the population.
There is a word for that… greed. Greedy people don’t have hobbies, they explore opportunities.
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