It’s been about a year since the UAW went on strike against Detroit’s “Big Three” automakers. Are UAW members better off than they were before?
At Stellantis, the answer is a resounding “no.”
While the union’s new contract with Stellantis did raise wages, the company had to offset those increased labor costs by reducing hours for employees. Today, some UAW members at the automaker now report taking home smaller paychecks than they did before last year’s strike and “record contract.”
But those workers might be the lucky ones. Since the new contract, Stellantis has been rocked by a massive number of layoffs. Thousands of employees have missed paychecks due to temporary layoffs, and over one thousand temporary Stellantis employees were permanently laid off over the past year. Currently, Stellantis is considering laying off over two thousand employees indefinitely at its assembly plant in Warren, Michigan.
Notably, jobs at facilities like Warren could be saved if overflow work from other Stellantis plants gets sent there. However, this overflow work is being sent to places with lower labor costs, like Mexico. Reportedly, the UAW’s “record contract” with Stellantis included language allowing overflow work to be sent outside of the country.
The UAW’s promises of higher paychecks and job security aren’t panning out, and some of the union’s other high-profile promises aren’t doing much better.
The union made a big show of getting an agreement to reopen the shuttered Belvidere Assembly Plant in its contract. That was almost a year ago.
Today, Belvidere remains unopened. In fact, the company is now saying that operations won’t restart at Belvidere until 2025, and won’t be at full capacity until 2027. The UAW criticized this decision, but Stellantis simply pointed to a clause in the “record contract” that allows the company to modify its product commitments depending on market conditions.
The UAW-Stellantis department is currently being directly overseen by UAW President Shawn Fain. His response to the long list of issues hitting his members at Stellantis has been to give a few speeches and threaten (another) strike.
Fain seems to have a gift for making noise, but his ability to write a good contract isn’t breaking any records.
