Culture

A Decade of Concessions at the Heart of the G.M. Strike


Roxanne Harper, a forty-eight-year-old assembly-line worker at the General Motors plant in Lake Orion, Michigan, was walking the picket line on September 16th when she found out that the company had abruptly terminated the health insurance of the more than forty-eight thousand G.M. workers on strike. Harper, who has two herniated disks and two bulging disks in her spine, had an appointment the next morning for an epidural, to relieve her pain. “I panicked,” she later told me. “I had to hurry up and call the hospital so I wouldn’t get charged a thousand dollars for cancelling.”

Harper started working at the plant in 2012 and now makes about twenty-two dollars an hour. Previously she had worked as a medical assistant, taking care of newborn babies, but earned only a little more than twelve dollars an hour. She’s glad for the higher wages, but she now commutes an hour and a half each way to work, and the job has taken a physical toll; in addition to her bad back, she has arthritis in her hands from bending two-inch-thick wire harnesses hundreds of times a day. “I never had any health problems as far as my back or my hands prior to coming to General Motors,” she said. “Everybody always talks about how we get paid too much money, but they don’t focus on how bad our bodies are beat down.”

Harper, who has long chestnut hair and matching rose tattoos on her forearms, was even more worried about her son, Matthew, who also works at the plant. Six years ago, he was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and soon after went temporarily blind in one eye and became paralyzed on his left side because of lesions on his brain and spine. Doctors began treating him with a succession of drugs. Matthew, who is thirty, was on medical leave for a year and had to move in with Harper. “They almost fired him,” Harper said. A representative from the United Automobile Workers successfully fought to save his job, and Matthew eventually recovered enough to return to work. “He still walks with a little bit of a limp,” Harper said. “But it’s not too bad.”

Harper now fears that Matthew’s health could deteriorate further if he does not receive his biannual intravenous treatment, which costs roughly forty-five thousand dollars and was scheduled for two days after he lost his insurance. The U.A.W. has accused G.M. of targeting the workers’ insurance to “leverage unfair concessions,” and promised to pay for COBRA health-care benefits, which it says will be retroactive, for every G.M. worker during the standoff. (The union also pays strikers two hundred and fifty dollars a week out of its strike fund.) Harper said that G.M.’s decision to cut off coverage had only strengthened her resolve to keep striking. “They just did it out of spite,” she said. “They’re hoping to cripple us and break the union.” (On Thursday, the company abruptly shifted course, and promised to keep all health-care benefits “fully in place” for striking employees.)

G.M.’s heavy-handed tactics appeared to have galvanized the other members of Harper’s local as well. When I visited last Friday, the hall was bustling with people passing out picket signs or grabbing a quick lunch of hot dogs and chips. On one wall hung six large sign-up sheets, filled with an alphabetical list of the plant’s workers, each of whom were assigned to picket a particular gate or entrance at the plant. Organized like the factory’s work schedule, the picketing lists divide the workers into three eight-hour shifts, with each worker required to picket for one shift every six days.

The strike officially began at 11:59 P.M. on September 14th, when the workers’ current contract expired, but its origins are in the concessions that the union has made over the past several decades, and especially since the last financial crisis. In 2007, G.M. eliminated pensions for new employees and introduced “Tier 2” workers, whose wages started at half those of traditional workers. Two years later, the U.S. government rescued G.M. from bankruptcy with a fifty-billion-dollar bailout. As part of its restructuring, G.M. won significant givebacks from the U.A.W., including the expanded use of temporary workers, who now represent seven per cent of G.M.’s hourly workforce; reduced medical benefits for retirees; and a moratorium on the right to strike through 2015.

At the Orion plant, the two-tiered system had become particularly contentious. “When I started, I made fourteen dollars and twelve cents an hour,” Ben Wells, Harper’s friend and co-worker, who had joined us at a long table in the hall, told me. “I worked directly across the line from a woman who made twenty-eight dollars. We did the exact same job—and she had a full pension.” The automotive-industry analyst Ron Harbour estimated, in Automotive News, that the lower wage only saved G.M. a hundred and twelve dollars per car at Orion. Although the two-tiered system was ostensibly eliminated in 2015, it still exists in practice: new workers start at roughly half the traditional wage and must work for eight years—“in progression,” as G.M. calls it—to reach the full wage of around thirty dollars an hour.

This past November, G.M.’s C.E.O., Mary Barra, further angered workers by announcing that the company would “unallocate” four plants in the U.S. (meaning they would no longer have a product to build) and close a Canadian facility, a move that cut six thousand hourly positions and eight thousand salaried positions from G.M.’s North American workforce. Though it is still the largest American automaker, G.M. now employs fewer U.A.W. members than either Ford or Chrysler. The company currently has assembly plants in just seven states, down from sixteen in 2005. Some of these losses are attributable to NAFTA. Since it went into effect, in 1994, the Mexican auto workforce has grown sevenfold, and G.M. is now the largest automaker in Mexico, where its workers earn an average of two dollars and thirty cents an hour and have no independent trade unions. Last year, when G.M. relaunched the Chevy Blazer, the decision to manufacture it in Mexico turned the car into a political emblem of outsourced jobs, at least in Michigan and other parts of the Rust Belt. Protests by the U.A.W. and its supporters pressured the company to replace a 2019 Blazer from its perch above the outfield in Comerica Park, the Detroit Tigers’ stadium, with a car made in America, the Chevy Traverse.

Yet since G.M.’s bailout, a decade ago, the company has done spectacularly well for its shareholders, earning thirty-five billion dollars in profit in North America over the past three years. Last Friday, shareholders received a third-quarter dividend of thirty-eight cents per share. As the New Hampshire Labor News noted, Barra, who owns more than a million shares of G.M. stock, received almost four hundred thousand dollars in dividends four days after she rescinded the health insurance of tens of thousands of her employees. Meanwhile, an analyst at the Center for Automotive Research, in Ann Arbor, estimated that the strike could cost G.M. as much as four hundred and fifty million dollars a week.

The U.A.W.’s underlying demands can be boiled down to getting workers a greater share of the company’s prosperity, including greater job security, increased pay, and a path to seniority for temporary workers. The U.A.W. is also fighting to restart work at currently unallocated plants, most notably the one in Lordstown, Ohio, which as recently as 2017 employed four thousand five hundred people. Many of its workers have since transferred to other G.M. plants across the country, in order to hold on to their health care and pensions. Since Barra’s announcement to unallocate the plant, Lordstown has also become a central political fault line, with Donald Trump tweeting insults at the union local’s president, and trying to arrange a deal with Barra to sell the six-million-square-foot plant to Workhorse, a small electric truck company that last year employed ninety-eight workers and had revenues of less than eight hundred thousand dollars. A year before Barra’s decision, Trump went to Youngstown, Ohio, fifteen miles from Lordstown, where he made one of many false promises to the workers of the Rust Belt. “Don’t move, don’t sell your house,” he said. “We’re going to get those jobs coming back, and we’re going to fill up those factories.”

The G.M. headquarters are in the Renaissance Center, an enormous seven-skyscraper complex in downtown Detroit. The lower level of the central tower contains more than a dozen G.M. floor models and a sluggish carousel holding a Hot Wheels edition Camaro and a black G.M.C. truck, among other vehicles. Solidarity House, the U.A.W.’s headquarters, is a few blocks away, but the union’s bargaining committee has taken over a suite of rooms at the Renaissance Center during the negotiations. Terry Dittes, the director of the U.A.W.’s General Motors department, met with me in a vacant conference room there. He was dressed in a gray suit, a pink shirt, and brown loafers. When he joined the union, as a nineteen-year-old line worker, at a G.M. plant in Trenton, New Jersey, in 1978, he said, after a three month probation period “my name went on the seniority list and I was a G.M. employee. Everybody was the same. We all made the same money, too.” But now, he added, “we have temporary employees, we have ‘in progression’ employees, we give them names for every little section.”

Hours before Dittes announced the strike, G.M. made a public offer—which Dittes considered a breach of bargaining protocol—to add or retain fifty-four hundred American workers and invest seven billion dollars in refurbishing its American plants or building new ones in the U.S. However, a serious divide remained over many issues, especially the fate of temporary workers and wages for entry-level employees. “No one foresees a strike,” Dittes told me. “We worked right up until 11:59. Then I gave my report and the executive board made a unanimous decision to take General Motors on strike.” Earlier this month, ninety-six per cent of the rank-and-file voted to authorize it. “It’s really simple,” Dittes said. “Our proposals are very serious issues that our members and their families felt compelled to submit. And they were not satisfied.”

What Dittes is fighting for is a far cry from the contracts negotiated by Walter Reuther, who was the U.A.W.’s legendary president from 1946 until his death, in an airplane crash, in 1970. The pinnacle of Reuther’s success came in 1950, when he negotiated the Treaty of Detroit, a five-year contract with G.M. that gave U.A.W. workers full pensions, better medical coverage, improved job security, a cost-of-living increase, an annual two per cent increase in real wages, and other gains for labor like pattern bargaining, whereby concessions won from negotiations with one company were used as a precedent for negotiations with the others. The contract ushered in the longest period of working-class prosperity in American history, and it became the standard for other industries that collectively employed millions of workers. Reuther, a socialist in the nineteen-thirties, believed that the U.A.W. was more than just a trade union; he saw it as part of a social movement that should work to improve society as a whole. In 1955, the U.A.W. supported the Montgomery Bus Boycott and paid the bail of Rosa Parks and eighty-seven other defendants. Reuther became one of Martin Luther King, Jr.,’s most important allies and let King use office space at Solidarity House to work on his speech for the March on Washington, at which Reuther was given a prominent speaking role. “More than anyone else in America, you stand out as the shining symbol of democratic trade unionism,” King wrote of him.

In Reuther’s time, G.M. sold half the cars in the United States, and the U.A.W. had more than a million members; now the company has a mere sixteen per cent market share in the U.S., and the U.A.W. has under four hundred thousand members, fewer than half of them autoworkers. The reputation of its leadership has recently suffered as well; though Dittes didn’t mention it, the negotiations were taking place against the backdrop of a multi-year federal probe into corruption within the U.A.W., which has led to eleven current or former U.A.W. officials being charged with or convicted of misusing money from members’ dues on such luxuries as bottles of Cristal champagne, sets of golf clubs, and expensive cigars.

But the current strike, Dittes says, is part of a larger pro-labor trend. A recent Gallup poll showed that sixty-four per cent of Americans now support labor unions, close to a fifty-year high, while last year nearly five hundred thousand workers went on strike, the highest number since 1986. “Workers in this country, in our industry and many industries, have continued to downgrade their standard of living,” Dittes said. “I think people are tired of it, because corporate profits are at an all-time high and corporate salaries are at an all-time high.” Dittes leaned in. “I think there’s something bigger brewing here,” he said.

Last Sunday, I returned to the union hall in Lake Orion. Beneath a giant picture of Reuther, someone had posted a handwritten sign breaking down Barra’s annual compensation last year—twenty-two million dollars—into monthly, daily, and hourly totals. Ben Wells took me to the main entrance, Gate No. 3, of the Orion plant. At a picket line I had visited in Pontiac, ten miles south of Lake Orion, management had allowed strikers to park their cars in the company lot. But the situation in Orion had been tenser with both management and the police, who had occasionally threatened to arrest picketers. On the short drive to the plant, Wells told me that he had heard a security guard encourage managers, who were in their cars trying to cross the picket line, to drive right through the strikers. “This would go a lot faster if you keep your foot on the gas,” the guard said, according to Wells.

In response, local union leaders issued a call for members to gather at Gate No. 3 at 4:30 A.M. More than two hundred and forty people showed up. “We pulled every member we could,” Wells said. “It was not a show of force—it was a show of solidarity.” Police officers soon arrived in two cars and tried to block the line of picketers. “We figure-eighted around the them,” Wells told me.

When we drove up, a dozen picketers were circling leisurely in front of the gate. A few strikers milled about on the grass to the side of the entrance. The sky was overcast, with rain expected later, and someone had set up a canopy and a few lawn chairs. The plant, a foreboding four-million-square-foot complex, loomed beyond a vast empty parking lot. There were no police present. Wells began reënacting scenes from the recent confrontation. A picketer named Jamal El-Chaer piped in. “It happened in a matter of seconds,” he said. “As soon as the cops pulled up, everyone that was standing on the grass joined in.” El-Chaer started working at G.M. seven years ago and has been coming to picket regularly. Like many other strikers I spoke to, he says that he’s picketing for other kinds of workers, too. “C.E.O.s are making three hundred times what a worker makes,” he said. “Is that really what’s so important to them?”

Aaron Fowlkes, who works in the Chevy Bolt’s chassis department with El-Chaer, saw the strike as part of a necessary correction.“The pendulum has to swing back,” he said. Fowlkes is from Pontiac, which in the seventies boasted thirty thousand G.M. jobs; today it has fewer than a thousand. “Since Reagan, they’ve been waging a war on middle-class workers,” he said. “You can talk to people in any industry—whether it be a school teacher, restaurant worker, or health-care professional—they all work more hours with less pay and less benefits. You can blame one party for initiating it, but the other party has not fought back.”

Fowlkes slung his blue “UAW On Strike” picket sign over his shoulder. Months earlier, he had told his wife that a strike was coming. It was a contract year and the accumulated grievances ran deep. He felt gratitude to be one of a dwindling number of ordinary workers who could make a collective stand against the country’s widening economic imbalance. “How much is enough for the executive class, how much is enough for the shareholders?” Fowlkes asked. He gazed out toward the vacant plant, before answering his own question. “There is no limit.”



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