The United Auto Workers union has been taking victory laps since securing a big raise for its members in new contracts with the Big Three automakers—and according to UAW president Shawn Fain, it will be turning immediately to efforts to organize not just the foreign-owned vehicle manufacturing plants of the South but Elon Musk’s Tesla as well.
Have Fain and the union been reading too much of their own press? The new deals with Ford, General Motors, and Stellantis—struck after a 45-day series of selective “stand-up” strikes at individual plants—have been widely hailed as wins for workers and are expected to be officially ratified by members in voting this month. But every previous attempt to organize the southern plants owned by Toyota, Honda, and others has failed—as did initial moves in 2016 toward forming a union at Tesla, whose CEO has only grown more unpredictable and confrontational in the years since.
Slate spoke about the situation with Marick Masters, a professor of business at Wayne State University in Detroit who thinks Fain and the union have probably earned the praise they’re getting—and that their ambitious pivot may be a matter of necessity rather than hubris.
Ben Mathis-Lilley: There’s been a lot made of the UAW’s public relations strategy before and during the recent strike. Shawn Fain uses a lot of class-warfare rhetoric and was very transparent with both his members and the general public about what was going on in negotiations. Do you think the attention this approach has been getting is justified?
Marick Masters: I think the approach was a major success for the union. It was able to achieve a large part of what its original objectives were; it didn’t achieve everything, but some of the goals weren’t realistic possibilities under any circumstances. It was a sophisticated media campaign—they were able to use their political influence to apply pressure on the companies to make concessions that they would not have made otherwise. And their next task, organizing foreign plants and electric vehicle plants, is going to require that they be as savvy and unconventional as they were during this strike.
Is there a limit to the effect that public pressure can have during a strike, vis-à-vis the economic fundamentals—how long manufacturers believe they can afford to hold out?
I could picture someone making a case that a lot of this is window dressing, and what really matters is exactly what the company thinks they can bear as far as lost production and what they need going forward for investment. Certainly there has to be impact behind the voice, and if you’re just out there making your case and hoping for the best, that’s not going to be an effective approach. But what the union did was time things. It coordinated its public voice with the strike activity to put the companies on the defensive. It got public opinion behind it with the president coming out here and visiting, and the companies know that to a large extent they’re being subsidized by the government on this transition to electric vehicles. They’ve got to think about the consequences of whatever they do with respect to the labor movement when you have a president who said that he’s the most pro-union president in American history.
What do you mean by “time things”?
They didn’t just have spontaneous deadlines. They made their demands, they waited for the companies to make their first counteroffers, and then they said, “Well, we’re not changing our demands to meet those. We’re waiting for you to come back with another offer.” And another offer. And another offer. And then the strike deadline occurred and contracts expired, so they started to strike. They phased in the strikes to ratchet up the pressure, and at each deadline they waited for another concession. They forced the companies to make a series of concessions, then pocketed them and said, “We’re going to wait until you make another one.”
So it was a smart public strategy, but it wouldn’t have had any effect if the threat of the strike wasn’t real, and they ratcheted up the pressure until they convinced the employers that they could continue striking until they struck on a companywide basis.
How do you think the foreign automakers and Tesla will respond to being openly targeted like this?
The opposition won’t only be in the form of public resistance. If the UAW shows up and tries to organize, if it is able to get a showing of interest in holding a certification election, you can rest assured that the companies are going to fight that tooth and nail. But they’re also going to be proactive and do, for example, what Toyota did, raising wages 9 percent. They’ll be looking at things from wages to benefits to health and safety conditions, trying to keep themselves out of the news. They don’t want adverse publicity in terms of safety dangers or those kinds of things. They might be behind the scenes talking about the virtues of their company and doing lots of things to make workers feel better, things that don’t necessarily ever get a lot of public attention but nonetheless are taking place.
The union is also going to have to contend with the fact that it brings a lot of baggage. The nonunion automakers will use every conceivable means to convince people that if they’re in the union, they’re gonna have the same fate as the workers at the Detroit Three, where the workers are treated sort of like a yo-yo and they give things to them, then take them back, and that in the midst of all that, the continuing reality is downsizing.
Do you think Tesla will respond to this any differently than the others simply because Musk is so drawn to conflict?
I don’t think there’s any way to keep Elon Musk out of any major decision at his company. But he’s very smart, he’s very sophisticated. He wants what’s best for the business, and himself, and so I think that he will take stock of the situation, probably hire the team he needs to hire to help him convince the workers that it’s not in their interest to have a union, that they’re involved in an enterprise in which their long-term welfare will not be served by one.
Were you surprised that Fain went directly to talking about taking on the foreign and EV manufacturers? Could he be getting overconfident?
The UAW has been vocal about organizing them going back to at least 2010, but what’s different about this time is that they’ve got a contract with the Big Three which they believe they can use to their advantage. Fain also has a base within his union that’s pressuring him to organize these facilities, realizing that’s really the union’s key to the future. And perhaps even more fundamental is that this makes it known that they’re looking for opportunities to organize. They would hope that maybe this kind of public announcement would encourage people to come forward at the plants and say, “We’re interested in having your representation.”
