The United Auto Workers (UAW) union will go on strike against all of Detroit’s big three automakers at the same time for the first time in the union’s history, after General Motors, Ford, and Stellantis failed to reach a labor agreement with the union before their contracts expired Thursday night.
“Tonight for the first time in our history we will strike all three of the big three at once,” UAW president Shawn Fain said on Thursday. They are prepared to strike at midnight, according to Fain.
They plan to strike at a General Motors assembly plant in Wentzville, Missouri; a Stellantis plant in Toledo, Ohio; and a Ford plant in Wayne, Michigan.
“If we need to go all out, we will,” Fain declared. “Everything is on the table.”
Roughly 150,000 American auto workers are represented by the UAW union. President Joe Biden’s green agenda is a major concern for autoworkers whose jobs are being eliminated by Biden’s rapid push for a transition to electric vehicles (EVs), which require less workers to produce than gas-powered vehicles. As Breitbart’s Senior Editor-at-Large Rebecca Mansour reported, “While autoworkers are seeing their wages slashed due to the EV adoption, the Big Three executives have enjoyed a windfall thanks to the EV tax credits in Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA).”
Breitbart’s John Binder reported:
“UAW members feel abandoned by the Democratic Party,” former UAW President Bob King told Politico this week, noting the Democrat majority’s continued support for job-killing free trade as well as Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) which is handing out billions in taxpayer subsidies to auto companies and their top line.
“I think there’s a segment of the Democratic Party that sees itself as serving corporations rather than the common good … we’ve had a lot of disappointments,” King said.
As Breitbart News’s Economics Editor John Carney put it, “the looming strike by the United Auto Workers is as much a protest against Bidenomics as it is the policies of General Motors, Ford Motor Company, and Stellantis.”
As Carney detailed:
While all Americans have been hard hit by the surge of inflation tied to Biden’s deficit spending, Detroit’s autoworkers have had it far worse than most of their fellow Americans. The place we once called the Arsenal of Democracy was ground zero for Bidenflation’s destructive explosion.
The promise of low inflation was broken by the bloated fiscal policies of the Biden administration and the loose money policies of the Federal Reserve.
It only made matters worse that the Democrats time and again sought to downplay inflation or pass the buck onto the greed of corporations or Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. As recently as this month, Democrat leftist stalwart Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York was circulating the idea that inflation was just “propaganda.” Even when Democrats admit inflation has been problematic and linked to excessive fiscal and monetary expansion, they act as if it were a sacrifice necessary because of the pandemic. Never have they mentioned that the sacrifice was borne more heavily by some than others, much less acknowledged the prices paid by our autoworkers.
However, Carney said the strike would not be a “catastrophe” for the economy, as other outlets have predicted.
Ford blamed the UAW for the lack of a deal, saying the union’s counteroffer “showed little movement from the union’s initial demands submitted Aug. 3.”
“We don’t want there to be a strike. We’re ready to work until the deadline,” Ford CEO Jim Farley told CNN Thursday. “We’d like to make history by making a historic deal, not having a historic strike,”
The UAW is asking a 36 percent boost in pay over four and a half years, but the automakers countered with offers that are roughly half of that increase, according to the Associated Press.
Jordan Dixon-Hamilton is a reporter for Breitbart News. Write to him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter.