Union Reaches Agreement With Three Automakers To Tentatively End Strikes

The United Auto Workers (UAW) union reached a tentative labor deal with Ford on last Wednesday, six weeks after the UAW launched a strike against the United States’ top three automakers. That agreement includes:

• A 25 percent wage increase over four years that will bring the top pay for assembly workers to $40 an hour;
• Revival of cost-of-living adjustments that had been previously suspended; and
• A quicker timeline for new workers to reach the highest wage.

A few days later, the UAW reached a tentative agreement with Stellantis to end the union’s strike against that automaker. The deal reportedly is a mirror of the agreement reached between UAW and Ford.

UAW workers at Ford and Stellantis now have preliminarily ended their strikes against their employers.

Finally, after expanding strikes targeted at General Motors (GM) on Saturday, the UAW also has reportedly reached a deal with GM — though details about that agreement were not available by the time Connecting the Dots went to publication Monday.

The agreements with Ford and Stellantis followed back-to-back walkouts last week. On October 23, the union expanded its unprecedented strike when 6,800 union members walked out at a Michigan Chrysler Stellantis factory that the UAW called the “largest plant and biggest moneymaker” for the company. A day later, as Bloomberg reported, 5,000 union members walked out of GM’s biggest plant. The company said it was “disappointed by the escalation of this unnecessary and irresponsible strike” because it had just made a “comprehensive” new offer to workers that increased the total value of its proposed agreement by 25 percent.

The economic impact of these strikes has been significant. As of Monday, October 23, the Anderson Economic Group estimated the auto industry had lost approximately $9.3 billion as a result of the strike, which began September 15.