Stephen Rattner wants us to believe that the United Auto Workers is overplaying its hand in its strike against the big three American automakers. Rattner, a former adviser to the Obama administration, argues in an essay in The New York Times (), that the UAW is asking for too much and that the automakers will not and cannot give in because it will rob them of the flexibility they will need to compete with non-union workplaces as the industry transitions to cleaner vehicles.
If the argument sounds familiar, it is because we have been hearing versions of it for decades. Unions, the arguments go, are necessary but need to understand reality, which is always defined as a need for flexibility in the face of competition. During the 1990s, we heard from politicians and mainstream economists that the North American Free Trade Agreement and other international trade pacts had to be passed as is, without protections for workers or the environment, because we would be left behind.
The UAW represents about 150,000 workers at Big Three auto plants around the country. Most of the plants are in the Midwest, but they are sprinkled throughout most regions of the country. About 13,000 members at three factories walked out in what the UAW is calling a targeted strike, which is expected to expand beginning tomorrow.
The union wants a 36% pay hike over the next four years, a 32-hour work week, and clawbacks on pensions, health benefits, and cost-of-living adjustments, and a right to strike over proposed layoffs or relocations. These demands may seem lavish, but only if you compare them to the limited vision offered by earlier union leadership. There is a new vision for unionism that is more militant and less acquiescent to capital, willing to strike and willing to make it clear that corporate capitalism has to share its bounty with the people who do the work.
Rattner wants us to frame the current strike within earlier parameters, though a lens of mainstream economic “realism” that has been mobilized to defend the perquisites of capital for the corporate class. He raises the specter of factory relocations and threats to jobs and the economy as a way to tamp down the more militant approach the union is using — even as he acknowledges, mostly rhetorically, that workers need to be paid more. He wants the auto workers to be more realistic, which is his way of saying he wants them to be more conscious of the needs of management. His realism leaves workers out of the discussion.
He said they should be paid more, but undermines his support by listing what he sees as the numerous ways in which higher pay will doom the auto industry or hurt auto workers. It is a contradiction he cannot paper over by proclaiming limited support. In a conflict like this, between a striking union and its employers, you have to take a side. Either the workers’ demands are legitimate or they are not.
The UAW is asking a lot, and its members deserve a lot. The car companies are profitable, their CEOs are lavishly compensated, and the workers on the assembly lines and performing other factory jobs have seen their wages stagnate, their benefits cut, and their bodies brutalized. This is the context in which the UAW’s demands should be viewed and why they should be judged as realistic.
Essays like Rattner’s carry a broader subtext than the UAW. The strike is a show of force by workers against an economy that has been growing more and more unequal and more and more precarious for whole classes of jobs. The UAW’s demands attempt to address this by ending the tiered wage and benefit system put in place two decades ago, declaring that all workers in the auto industry — and all workers, in general — should receive equal and dignified treatment.
Auston Gore, a striking assembly line worker at the Stellantis Toledo Assembly Complex, told the Working People podcast on Wednesday that this strike is “not just to benefit the members. It’s to benefit the working class as a whole.”
This points to a very different model than Rattner’s, which assumes that the UAW needs to conceded to market pressures created by non-union shops so that the Big Three can remain competitive furthering the race to the bottom that has generated the obscene wealth disparities in the first place. The UAW should be concerned about workers in the south and at Elon Musk’s Tesla, but not because they are threats to their jobs. They need to turn their focus there to ensure that these non-union shops turn union. This will not be easy, given the rhetoric pushed by both parties for the last five decades or so.
Southern factories have a history of voting down unions, which has left the region with weaker workplace rules and lower wages in their factories. Tesla also remains non-union — and “has been found guilty of illegal union-busting tactics, including firing workers who were trying to organize.” Because of this, Harrison Nolan notes in The Guardian, "the grotesque specter of Elon Musk looms like a silent villain over the entire proceedings.”
Rattner seems to think Musk’s presence — and the presence of southern anti-union states and Mexico as a low-wage haven to the south, makes the union more vulnerable. We shouldn’t dismiss this. As Nolan writes,
When the large majority of an industry is unionized, big strikes can raise standards for everyone, raising the floor for union and non-union workers alike. When only part of an industry is unionized, though, the non-union companies will always feel like they have an economic advantage – and, as a consequence, the unionized companies will fight harder against union demands, because they fear being undercut by their non-union competitors.
The solution, he says, is more organizing, not less. More activism. More militancy. More union members. Including at Musk’s company. The “straightforward solution” is “unionize Tesla.” As long as Tesla — and the foreign car makers — can remain non-union, the more damage they will do to the union movement.
Rattner is right about the potential threat. He’s just wrong about how to address it.
An interesting essay....well thought out and presented. That said, we all have our perspective depending upon if we were in management or labor or both.
I read somewhere this morning that the 36% raise asked for, translates into roughly 70% when the hours are reduced to 32 weekly, i.e. the same pay, plus a 36% raise, over fewer hours.
To the extent that it may just be a bargaining position on the UAW's behalf, I understand the need for negotiation and compromise from both sides.
The automakers will have to make concessions as will the union, in my opinion. We just hope the strike is settled soon, with flexibility on both sides, before the economic damage to the companies, the employees and the overall economy, is too great.