What the UAW Wants From Its Fight With the Big Three

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1:16Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Joe Weisenthal. And I'm Tracy Alloway. Tracy, you know, a few episodes that we've done lately from different angles has suggested to me like we really need to talk more about, well, the sort of the labor aspect of building cars or the labor aspect of like sort of this renewed industrialization in the U.S. Right, because there is this whole discussion going on about whether or not the manufacturing process of EVs is significantly different to gas engine cars. And I think there's an ongoing debate about whether or not you need fewer workers in order to make an electrical vehicle rather than, say, a traditional combustion engine.

2:03Right. So, you know, this to my mind, so we just did this recently, did an episode with Corey Cantor of Bloomberg NEF where we talked about this. We talked about it back in April at the Econ Twitter event where there was a lot of talk about the sort of like pressure to drive down costs for batteries. But it also came up, you know, we talked to Jared Bernstein of the White House. And I think there's this tension because obviously the sort of organized labor is this really important pillar of the Democratic Party and for the White House. And at the same time, there's this question about whether this push that the administration is making is going to leave a lot of workers behind or cost a lot of jobs as part of this transition.

2:44Right. There is this ongoing tension between wanting to create a vibrant and competitive EV industry and battery making in the United States, but also attaching better work conditions to it for workers. Like, how do you actually compete against cheap labor in, say, China or Mexico when it comes to making EVs or batteries while sort of making sure that your workers have good wages, good living conditions and all of that? And then, of course, there's the fact that the UAW, their contract with the big three automakers, GM, Ford and Stellantis, I believe it expires September 14th. So that is a date that is fast approaching.

3:25And setting aside EVs and binomics and industrialization, all these things we talk about, this has been a sort of summer of intense labor action. It was a pretty intense contract negotiation at UPS with the Teamsters. Seems to have been resolved, averted without a strike. but there is a lot of labor activity that seems to be happening right now. Hot union summer. Can we say that? I'm sure it's been said. I guarantee it's been said. But this actually reminds me, I mean, one of the earlier episodes we did during the pandemic was about labor power in previous pandemics. I think we were talking about the Great Plague from the Middle Ages and what happened after that.

4:05But that was a big theme of that particular historical event, which is if you lose a big chunk of the workforce, well, suddenly all the remaining laborers are empowered and they can start asking for better conditions. And so to some extent, you know, fast forward to 2023, we are basically seeing the continued outcome of a lot of the disruptions from the pandemic, plus some of these new efforts from the Biden administration. And the unemployment rate is low. There's still a lot of jobs and inflation is high. So people rightfully expect to have wages that - Cost of living. Improve their cost of living.

4:43So they're not falling behind. All right, many things coming together at once. So we really need to do an episode on exactly this topic. And I believe we have two perfect guests. We are going to be speaking with Dan Vicente. He is the director of Region 9 at the UAW. And we are also going to be speaking with Alex Press, a staff writer at Jacobin Magazine, who's been covering labor action for a long time. I always talk to Alex when I want to understand something that's going on with the labor movement. So Dan and Alex, thank you so much for coming on the Odd Lots podcast. Yeah, thanks so much for having us.

5:15Yeah, thanks for having me, buddy. Dan, let me start with you. What do you do? What does it mean that you're the director of Region 9 at the UAW? So I am the chief executive for all of the United Auto Workers in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Central and Western New York. So we cover a wide range of sectors to include the auto sector, but higher education workers, cafeteria workers, casino dealers in Atlantic City, public defenders in Philadelphia County, Delaware County, Pennsylvania, all sorts of things. We represent all sorts of different workers throughout the three states. I want to get into some of the current goings on, I guess, with UAW.

5:55But before we do, maybe Alex, could you set the scene for us in terms of some of these disputes that we've seen this summer? Like what is generating, it feels like, more proactive union activity in 2023? I mean, big question. You know, there have been a handful of labor disputes that Joe mentioned in his introduction, where really in the past we would have seen unions and workers either accepting concessions or fairly divided over what to do in the face of employer pressure. And then this summer, we've really seen unity unions going on the offensive. I'm thinking here specifically, of course, of the UPS contract that the Teamsters have just negotiated.

6:40The rank and file haven't voted on it yet, but the details that are out thus far suggest that UPS basically blinked. Right. They they offered, you know, incredible advances, both in wages, working conditions. You know, as Sean O 'Brien, the new president, says no concessions. Right. Which is really different than how things used to be for labor. Obviously, similarly in Los Angeles with the actors and writers that are on strike here again, in all of these examples I'm giving, you hear a couple of things. One is that, you know, there's a tight labor market still. Unemployment is low. Inflation is high.

7:18People have reasons to both sort of stand up and fight, as they often put it, or leave if a job is no good. Right. I mean, during the pandemic, we saw high quit rates. And in part, that was about workers feeling confident that they could find better jobs elsewhere. And so the sort of the way people often phrase it is that they used to be quitting and going other places and now they're staying and making their jobs better. And so we're seeing those, you know, going on the offensive, fighting for strong contracts where you do have a union, you know, fighting for a new union where you don't have one.

7:50And so I often attribute it to, you know, a couple factors here just to make it kind of a in brief. I usually say that a lot of these workers, especially the younger ones, you know, have kind of been radicalized in certain ways over the past 10 years. Bernie Sanders here is a big part of the story. When you talk to the young unionists rather than the leadership, they'll often point to Bernie Sanders' presidential campaigns as when they first sort of encountered class politics and this idea of, you know, the labor movement. What is a union? They didn't know. And then you get them going through the pandemic where things are sort of clarified as far as the lines and the risk, the amount of risk that workers face versus their employer.

8:33And you get people saying that they felt they had nothing left to lose. And so that's, you know, the interesting thing about the labor movement is that runs on a slightly slower timeline than, say, electoral politics. So you kind of have to wait a couple of years to see what's going to happen. Right. It's based on contracts. It's based on an extremely slow process of organizing a union. And so I would always tell people as the Sanders campaign was kind of coming to an end in 2020, just wait a few years and we will see what becomes of this. And I think I think all of those factors together, you get the picture of what we've seen this summer.

9:06Long and variable lags in neighbor politics. Yeah, very, very, very well put. So, I mean, as you say, OK, so the Sanders campaign sort of awakened people, maybe radicalized people. Dan, can you talk to us a little bit about how you got in your role? So I believe you were elected in March of this year, the same time that the new UAW president, Sean Fain, was also elected. And I guess one of the words that like, are there parties? Are there tickets? Can you talk a little bit about that process? A word that I keep seeing is like more militant is a word that comes up. But can you describe like a little bit about like how that electoral process worked and what the people, your allies sort of pitched to as the UAW members?

9:51Like, what was your pitch to the members that said, OK, elect me instead of whoever else? So, yeah, we just had an internal election. A lot of the big unions across the country have had recent elections. And we've seen in pretty much all of the unions that there is new leadership being elected to these positions. I started in 2017 in a union shop and now I sit on the international executive. And the only reason that I am here being so new to the game is because there is a general feeling primarily from the younger workforce that the path into the middle class that used to exist for our grandparents and parents generation no longer exists.

10:32Like Alex was saying, it used to be pre-pandemic that these companies could tell our employees, listen, we can replace you in a minute. after the pandemic, where we're all deemed essential, where we all had to work through the pandemic. We were deemed essential workers. And coming out of the pandemic, we know the reality is you can't replace us. And we are the essential workers. You need us to make the products that make you money. We don't need you as much as you need us. And so there's been an awakening in the labor movement. And the other part of that is, you know, there has been more radical political movements over the last 10 years, as Alice was saying with the Bernie Sanders left and stuff.

11:12But there's also a huge part of our workforce that aren't really politically partisan one way or the other. What they do know is that their standard of living has gone down, their lives are harder, and the companies we work for are making record profits. It's not a sustainable system for not just a union or a company, but for a society. So there is a new generation coming up and we are more militant or more militant because we've been waiting for politicians one party other to come and save us and they have done nothing for us so we are angry and we feel like we're going to have to do it ourselves so just real quickly specifically when you ran for in region nine or when the president your president sean feign ran like what was your message specifically to the rank and file that you would deliver that in your view prior union leadership did not?

12:02It was a simple message. It was, I'm from the shop floor. Just four months ago, I was working two plastic extruders in Pennsylvania. I was a committee man elected in my local, but I never had a position in the international. And my message to our membership within the region was the previous incumbents have become too comfortable with management. They've been around too long. The union leadership has been around so long, they've cozied up the management. They've negotiated its concessionary contracts, and they forget what life and the struggles are of working men and women on these floors. And we have to run against the incumbency because it's easy to say that management has made your life harder in getting you crappy contracts.

12:46It's harder to say that the union owns a part of that. We're responsible for that as well. And it's tough to look in the mirror and say our institution has failed, but the new leadership ran on a platform, we're not going to continue to fail. If anything, the COVID-19 laid bare the inequities in our society, and we're not going to continue to just, I don't know if I can curse in this podcast or not, but we're not going to continue to eat shit. That's fine. That's fine. You wouldn't be the first person to curse. You know, you mentioned dissatisfaction with previous union leadership a couple of times now, particularly from the sort of younger generation of workers.

13:20And one thing that I keep hearing coming up in context is the word tiering. Can you explain what tiering is in this context? Yeah. So tiered wages were introduced in the big three auto manufacturing contracts during the recession. They've existed in other unions contracts for some time, but basically what it is, if you're hired past a certain date, whatever that X date is, you could be paid 10, 12 13 15 dollars less an hour than the person working right next to you that was hired on why date so depending on when you were hired it takes your wages so you'll never make the maximum amount of money as people hired before you you'll never get to the same benefit level as the people before you and you could be in a tiered progression you could be what's called an in progression wage for up to seven years.

14:13What was the rationale for that? I struggle to understand how that would ever really be accepted as fair. But what were people saying? What were the reasons? It was introduced during the recession. So during the recession, we were both forced and willfully took concessions basically to save the big three, legacy auto manufacturers from um not ceasing to exist they were in such a bad financial position that they could have collapsed entirely so we you know we understand that the relationship's symbiotic so we need them and they need us so we we agreed to the concessions and that's when tiered wages were introduced that's when cost of living adjustments were suspended uh well the pensions were firms all sorts of things and as an institution we were under the assumption that yes we have to make these concessions now to save our employers.

15:05We get that. But over time, we will build back over multiple contracts. We'll get back inch by inch what we were giving up to get back to a level of wages and benefits that we had had pre-recession. And it just turns out that in the 15 years since then, they haven't given us. So it was inevitable that we were going to get to this point.

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17:01discover how at mastercard.com slash commercial acceptance. Alex, how corrosive, you know, when you talk to people across the different unions, UAW, but also other words, how corrosive, and I believe that UPS also had a tiered system, but how corrosive is that in terms of, okay, here's two members of the same union at the same company, very different sort of lifestyle and career trajectories due to this, pay trajectories due to this. And just generally, this sort of like, I guess the way Dan described it almost felt like a sort of like union leadership capture in which the leaders, the past leaders of the union feel like they may have just as much responsibility to the management, to the company as the members of the union.

17:47Like, how consistent are some of these things across the sort of multiple labor actions we're seeing these days? Yeah, I mean, I think you got to it a little bit in your question about tears as far as the corrosiveness, but it's very easy to imagine, right? Like you are on the assembly line or say for maybe your listeners, you are at the desk looking at your computer. At the keyboard line, clicking furiously or quotas of clicks. Okay, keep going. Sorry. Yes. And your coworkers on either side are doing the same thing, right? Assembly line or office job, whatever. But they're making double the amount you make, right?

18:24I mean, it's very hard not only to make sense of that, but also it's very hard to build any kind of trust and organizing relationship with those co-workers, right? It builds this resentment. It really corrodes a union from the inside out, right? I mean, Dan was speaking to this, that a union needs the rank and file to actually, one, view the union as something that they can trust and that is them that they lead. but also as something that is going to, you know, sort of fight for equal pay, fight against sort of arbitrary boss discrimination. And a lot of workers will tell me whether it's at UPS, whether it's at the big three, whether it's anywhere with a tier, that this just feels like unequal pay for equal work.

19:09And obviously that has a long history of being unacceptable. Also, it is often then racialized in that the workers who are in the earlier, the more recently hired tiers with lower pay are often more, you know, less white, more women. And so this really creates all kinds of problems within the workplace. And just one little example here is that, you know, UPS, when the Teamsters, we don't have to go into all the machinations here, but the Teamsters ended up accepting a UPS contract during the last negotiations that's created a new tier of driver called 22-4s. That's the name of the clause in the contract that creates them.

19:49Is this the ones driving like in their own cars? Is that right? No, no, that's something that's entirely different. 22-4s, though, were so they had worse benefits, lower pay. You know, they topped out way lower than the permanent driver, the regular tier. And there was a huge uproar when this tenant of agreement came out during the last negotiating cycle. And the members, in fact, voted it down. Numerically, the majority rejected this UPS contract last negotiation rounds. But the younger Hoffa, James Hoffa Jr., forced this contract through using a very arcane clause in the Teamsters Constitution, one that even, you know, when I would speak with very longtime kind of militant rank and file like Teamster reformers, they hadn't even been aware that this clause existed.

20:39And it was about, you know, if you don't have X percentage of the workers voting and voting by Y amount, then you can kind of force a contract through. And that's what Hoffa did. He forced this contract in. And that is what leads to the next several years where his successor loses to Sean O 'Brien, who had broken from Hoffa's regime during these negotiations. And Sean O 'Brien had said, you know, I'm sick of these concessionary contracts. He ends up allying with a number of reformers within the union. And he runs to take over the presidency of the Teamsters on several messages, but one being that he is going to negotiate the strongest UPS contract ever and get rid of this tier.

21:27And he has done that. That is in the TA. But that really becomes the defining kind of story for the Teamsters reform as well. And Dan didn't mention it, but his slate when they ran for the UAW and won all of their seats, I believe, all seven leadership seats, their slogan was no corruption, no concession, no tears. So, I mean, it is a big issue. That is correct. And I just want to say, if I can, what Alex was talking about, about previous union leaders jamming agreements down the throats of their members, that's not just unique to the teamsters. That has been a longstanding issue in a lot of traditional legacy unions is that the top leadership feels like they have the authority to force agreements on the rank and file members.

22:15And a huge part of our platform is that we will not do that under any circumstances, because the institutions exist to serve the members, not, you know, perpetuate itself. You know, Joe, I worked in a unionized labor force once. I didn't know that. Yeah. The Financial Times had a very active journalism union. And this discussion reminds me that one time the union accidentally, I think it was accidentally, published everyone's salaries in the newsroom. I bet that was fun. Yeah, it was anonymized, but they divided it by gender and age. And I think they were trying to make a point about how women were sort of systematically underpaid.

22:58But you can imagine all hell broke loose. Everyone was upset with literally everyone else. Which columnist? I found out I was one of the two lowest paid women at the FT at that time. So that was fun. But this story does have a point, which is, you know, when you're leading these types of discussions, it seems like you are representing lots of different types of workers. And some of those workers might have a good deal and others might not. And Alex mentioned at the beginning of this conversation that it feels like in 2023, a lot of workers are coalescing. They're coming together. They're sort of uniting, obviously, being in a union.

23:40How are you getting that kind of consensus when it feels like, you know, some people still have it a lot better than others? so there are certainly some union members regardless of which sector you work in that have you know quote unquote better agreements than other ones or better situations but it doesn't at this point it really doesn't matter what sector you work and where you work even if you have it better than a fellow union member say say you represent a boeing facility their wage wise they make very good wages they make better wages than general motors but as far as like the day-to-day and securing of work and what does the future look like there's no security here so there are issues that are universal regardless and at this point particularly since coming out of the the pandemic whether you're making more than a general motors or a ford worker at this point is irrelevant because we're seeing these companies that we've worked for across every sector, making record profits.

24:41And yet our standard of living is going down, not going up. I have people right now coming into my facilities that are working 40 hours a week in big three auto manufacturers and have to get EBT cards to feed their families. But yet Ford and General Motors and Stellantis want to tell me we're a family, we're one team. And it's just bullshit. It is not an equitable situation. Our contracts no longer meet the needs of working families and cannot allow us to remain in the working middle class. And in the past, we've negotiated from a place of trying to preserve jobs. Where we're at now is we are trying to preserve the American middle class, and we're not asking.

25:21What we're putting forward are demands. Alex, do you want to take that as well? Just because I'm thinking, you know, you brought up that point earlier that it seems like people are able to coalesce around issues a bit more. How are they actually achieving that unity within their own ranks? Yeah, I mean, I'll give an example that might feel out of left field, but just to illustrate how sort of cross sector, cross industry this moment is. So I was just in Los Angeles reporting on the SAG, AFTRA and WGA strikes. and you know i was speaking to a lot of people on the picket lines and you know much more visibly than any other unionized workforce actors and writers have you know some of the most successful members that are outliers right and then they have the majority of the membership who are not household names not people we would know you know tom cruise is a member of sag after right and so talk about like some members are doing very well while others aren't and you know the writers guild gets around this problem by, for one, they try to involve the sort of leading members, the folks who are doing very well in the negotiation process, you know.

26:32And so I thought of this example while Dan was talking, because one of the people I spoke to at length is Mike Schur, who wrote The Good Place. He created, you know, the Parks and Rec. He was a key writer on The Office. This is about as successful of a television showrunner as there is in this country, Right. You know, it's rare that a writer is a household name, but a lot of people know who Mike Schur is. And, you know, when I was speaking to him on the picket line, I was asking him, you know, why he had decided to kind of get involved in the fight. Like he's on the negotiating committee for the Writers Guild of America.

27:07He is very actively present in this strike, even though he's a very successful guy. And, you know, he said that it had been made clear to him that, you know, the studios, much like Dan said of Big Three, you know, these are massive corporations that have quite a bit of money, if not sort of the level of profit that their investors want, that they aren't sharing it with the younger members, the people who are far less successful than Mike. And he told me, I wouldn't have the career at all that I have now if the system that exists now were the system that existed when I started. And he went through the exact kind of process, which, you know, might seem absurd compared to talking about auto workers.

27:49But, you know, writers are a production line like anyone else. And he talked about how when he started on The Office, the creator, Greg Daniels, had walked him through how to do the job, how to write long form television, how to get to know the different types of work done on set, how to understand rewriting scripts versus throwing them out. all of these very technical job details like any other job. And they did that because they had the sort of budget and the time and the income for that sort of kind of mentorship and cross-generational kind of learning and teaching of the work. And he says, you know, now that can't happen with these younger writers.