By escalating the strike against the Detroit 3 to include 38 General Motors and Stellantis parts distribution centers across 20 states, UAW President Shawn Fain is elevating the plight of thousands of the union’s lowest-paid full-time auto workers who would benefit most from the record contracts he’s demanding.
He’s also threatening the service business at Chevrolet, GMC, Jeep and Ram dealerships around the U.S. that need shipments from those 38 facilities to repair customers’ vehicles. The largest of them fulfills 15,000 orders for GM Genuine and ACDelco parts a day.
Most parts depot employees start at around $16 an hour and top out at $24, vs. top pay of $32 at assembly and powertrain plants. If put on the same pay scale as most other workers — and given raises totaling 20 percent, as the automakers have proposed — some workers’ wages would nearly double by 2027 to about $40 per hour.
“It means everything to me,” said Eric Ray, a worker on the newly formed picket line Friday at GM’s Ypsilanti Processing Center west of Detroit. “We do just as much work as they do in the automotive plants. We do the same thing, we should be treated the same way.”
The issue has been key for Fain, whose campaign slogan promised “No Corruption. No Concessions. No Tiers.” He has vowed to eliminate all different wage rates and abolish what he says have become “second-class workers” across the Detroit 3.
“The PDCs in particular, they’ve been stepped on a lot in the past,” Fain said outside a Stellantis parts facility in Center Line, Mich. “They’re one of the tiers we’re talking about. This is one of our strongest aspects of our membership; they generate a lot of profits.”
The new strike sites not only highlight a key issue but also ratchet up pressure on two of the Detroit 3 in line with the UAW’s planned strategy that was leaked in private messages written by its communications director, Jonah Furman. The union, Furman said in the messages obtained last week by Automotive News, wants to cause “recurring reputations damage and operational chaos” to keep the Detroit 3 “wounded for months.”
Already, the strike that began Sept. 15 at three Midwestern assembly plants has had an economic toll of more than $1.6 billion, including at least $400 million lost by the automakers, according to an estimate by the Anderson Economic Group. Adding the parts depots that supply dealerships from coast to coast raised the number of employees on strike to nearly 19,000, or 13 percent of the automakers’ hourly work force.
“It hits pretty hard in terms of the impact not on just one or two states,” Art Wheaton, a labor relations expert at Cornell University, said on Automotive News‘ “Daily Drive” podcast. “It definitely hits across the country, and it also hits at a very important constituency for GM and Stellantis: their dealership network.”
Notably, Fain said the UAW made “real progress” with Ford Motor Co. last week. Although they remained far from a deal, he chose not to add Ford plants to the targeted strike.
Ford’s willingness to end a lower wage tier at two plants, to give the union the right to strike over plant closures and to provide “income security” to workers indefinitely laid off — key union priorities — moved the needle on talks and avoided further work stoppages, according to a person familiar with the talks.
The source said negotiations “intensified” after the strike began, though eliminating the lower wage tier already had been on the table.
“Ford is working diligently with the UAW to reach a deal that rewards our work force and enables Ford to invest in a vibrant and growing future,” the company said in a statement. “Although we are making progress in some areas, we still have significant gaps to close on the key economic issues. In the end, the issues are interconnected and must work within an overall agreement that supports our mutual success.”
GM and Stellantis, which said they offered to eliminate the parts depot wage tier before the strike began, criticized the union’s decision to order more workers off the job.
“We question whether the union’s leadership has ever had an interest in reaching an agreement in a timely manner,” Stellantis said in a statement. “They seem more concerned about pursuing their own political agendas than negotiating in the best interests of our employees and the sustainability of our U.S. operations given the market’s fierce competition.”
GM made a similar argument.
“The decision to strike an additional 18 of our facilities, affecting more than 3,000 team members plus their families and communities, adds validity to the blueprint identified in [Thursday, Sept. 21’s] leaked texts — that the UAW leadership is manipulating the bargaining process for their own personal agendas,” the company said.
Furman’s messages indicated that the union’s goal is to extract gains from the automakers by pitting them against one another instead of using the pattern bargaining approach of past negotiations.
They were viewed by top executives at the companies and added to concerns among them that the union — after filing unfair labor practice charges against GM and Stellantis in August — was not bargaining in good faith, according to two sources with knowledge of the negotiations.
In one message, Furman explained that the unpredictability of the union’s strategy was its strength.
“They can basically price in an all-out” strike, he wrote. “But if we can keep them wounded for months they don’t know what to do. And creating compression points of national attention for them to do the right thing is way different than just waiting for a month for the next offer. Plus we’re breaking pattern and they’re bargaining against each other for the first time in 70 years.”
Fain defended the union’s stance Friday as he visited workers in their first hour on the picket lines.
“Shame on the corporations for putting that BS out there,” he said. “The message may be true, whoever said it, but the point is this: Our mission has been to get an agreement before bargaining started.”
When the clock struck noon Friday, Stellantis workers filed out of the Center Line facility shouting “Save Mopar now,” a reference to the company’s plans to close some Mopar facilities and modernize its parts distribution network. Stellantis has said the moves would not result in job losses. Workers held signs and chanted “no pay, no parts.”
The decision to call on parts distribution centers came as “a total surprise” to Craig Baxter, who has worked at GM’s Customer Care and Aftersales site in Lansing, Mich., for 10 years.
Baxter said he hoped the expanded strike would bring GM to the table to offer bigger raises, adding that he supports putting the parts depots on equal footing with manufacturing plants.
“We’re General Motors and we do labor work, so we should be in the same wage pool together,” he said.
At GM’s Davison Road Processing Center outside Flint, Mich., Ira Bradley is one of about 1,200 employees. He’s been working there for only three months, but this isn’t his first strike. He was at interior supplier Faurecia in Saline, Mich., when UAW called a walkout in 2019.
Bradley said he wasn’t scheduled to be on the picket line yet but came out anyway to show support.
“This is for a cause, this is for the movement,” Bradley said. “It’s bigger than us.”
Back in Lansing, Jean Duchemin, vice president of UAW Local 1753, said what he most wants in a new contract is the end of different wages for different roles, including new hires.
“Give us a proposal that does not exclude anybody,” Duchemin said. “Everybody must be included.”
Vince Bond Jr., Jamie Butters, Marisa Marcinkowski, Tierra Riddick, Rudy Schork and Lindsay VanHulle contributed to this report.
