What do the UAW deals mean for labor in America?

The United Auto Workers won big with their strikes against Detroit’s “Big Three” automakers. That victory might ripple beyond the car industry, to the workforce at large. The New York Times reported that the UAW’s gain of the “largest wage and benefit increases in decades” could “reverberate well beyond the workers that the union represented.” After decades of regarding strikes “warily,” unions may once again see work stoppages as a key negotiating tool with employers.

Indeed, NPR reported that this year has already seen “the largest number of strikes since 2011.” Strikes were common during the years after World War II, “but the early 1980s ushered in an era of crackdowns” on strikers. But 2023 has been a “watershed year.” So far there have been 22 major work stoppages in the United States, each involving 1,000 workers or more. That includes writers and actors in Hollywood, but also more than 75,000 workers for the Kaiser Permanente health system. The writers and Kaiser workers also got a pay bump, and the actors are probably close to resolving their strike. "Collective bargaining works,” acting U.S. Labor Secretary Julie Su. “It may not always look pretty.”

“Call it the Great Reset,” The Guardian pronounced. The wave of union victories “reflects a reset in expectations and wage norms for workers and for employers,” said MIT’s Thomas Kochan. Part of that reset is the result of worker anger about big profits as well as skyrocketing pay for CEOs and other executives while their own wages failed to keep up with inflation. The result? Corporations have “been surprised by the level of labor militancy they are encountering.” Expect to see more of this. Said one labor expert: “Victories inspire other victories.”

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What the commentators said

The anti-union era began in 1981 with President Ronald Reagan’s decision to fire striking air traffic controllers, Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling wrote in The New Republic. That decision ended up “turning the tide against American labor relations for decades to come.” The UAW victory means that era is finally, officially over: “And in the process, it has ushered in a brand new era for unions.”

All that union activity “will also be a victory for the American middle class,” Robert Reich argued at The Guardian. Those postwar years when labor strikes were common saw big gains for unionized workers — but non-union workers also benefitted. Those non-union companies gave out big raises because they “knew they’d be targets of union organizing if they didn’t.” The big question after UAW’s successful strikes: “Is the pendulum now swinging back?”

The effects could be political as well as economic. Greg Sargent at The Washington Post pointed out that Donald Trump bypassed the UAW strikes to give a speech to workers as a non-union shop “bashing the strike as useless given that electric vehicles will inevitably destroy their jobs.” But the new agreement with automakers has exposed “the absurdity of Trump’s populism.” Some right-wing populists do support unionized workers. For Trump himself, though, the “pro-worker posturing” has been shown to be meaningless.

What next?

“Can the UAW unionize Tesla?” Ronald Brownstein asked at The Atlantic. The union’s victory over the Big Three “will prove hollow” if it puts those carmakers at a disadvantage against non-union shops like Tesla and Toyota. (Indeed, there’s plenty of speculation that worker wins will lead to more expensive cars for Americans.) UAW leader Shawn Fain aims to fix that issue. “When we return to the bargaining table in 2028,” he said, “it won’t just be with the Big Three, but with the Big Five or Big Six.” Again, there will be political ramifications: The breakthroughs would provide President Joe Biden with evidence that his climate push for electric vehicles “can also generate meaningful numbers of good-paying union jobs.”

In the meantime, the Big Three worker deals “have turned up the pressure on big corporations to put better deals on the table,” Reuters reported. Worker gains “could spur more organizing and motivate non-unionized companies to try to stave off those efforts.”