Taking Orders from the Living Room Not Sitting Well on the Factory Floor

UAW Talks Show Deepening WFH Divide Needs to be Addressed

While office workers slow-walk their return, the other half of the workforce that didn’t spend the pandemic in their living rooms is rightly starting to demand fair treatment in the changing workscape.

Watching workers who are STILL phoning it in, multi-tasking childcare, spending more time with their families and getting some extra sleep is infuriating to those on the factory floor “busting their asses” grinding out 12 hour days, long commutes and no extra time for life.

Around 146,000 United Auto Workers (UAW) could go on strike as early as next week against all three major U.S. automakers. Their demands sound outrageous:  a 32-hour work week for 40 hours of pay, restored defined pensions, more paid holidays and leaves, 46% pay raises commensurate with executives”, and technology training to bring them up to speed for the era of electric vehicles.

But are they as outrageous as they may seem? Our deepening relationship with digital technology through systems like artificial intelligence, as well as the widening wage gap, is at the core of  autoworkers’ dissatisfaction. Although too early to know how the talks between the Big Three automakers and the UAW will work out, they are testing the tipping point where the insensitive and lavish lifestyles of billionaires — and now the merely educated who work remotely — meets the average working Joe or Josephine.

 “We are fed up with the billionaire class and the corporate class taking everything and leaving us with scraps,” UAW President Shawn Fain told a cheering Labor Day crowd in Detroit. "Billionaires, in my opinion, don't have a right to exist.The very existence of billionaires shows us that we have an economy that is working for the benefit of the few and not the many. It feels like we've gone so far backwards that we have to fight just to have the 40-hour workweek back. Why is that, so another asshole can make enough money to shoot himself to the moon?"

The UAW has set Sept. 14 as a strike deadline for the Big Three to meet its “audacious” (Fain’s wording) demands.  He has “thrown out the playbook” notes the Wall Street Journal. His refusal to shake hands at the beginning of the talks with the CEOs, as is the tradition, has rattled leadership.  As has his argument that it’s only fair to share the $164 billion in net profits that have boosted auto CEO’s pay 40 percent over the last ten years.

CNBC host James Cramer deems the demands “so aggressive as to potentially weaken the whole industry.” He adds,“This man has studied Trotsky.”

Steve Rattner, who oversaw the Obama rescue of the auto industry in 2009, says the demands are a “long list of stuff that is beyond the pale of any auto company’s ability to meet,” but he said he most worries that falling productivity from fewer work hours, as well as higher U.S. wages, will drive auto manufacturing to Mexico.

 The gap separating the two sides, Rattner said, is “something the size of the Pacific Ocean.”

Here’s the ocean, as the UAW sees it:  In 2022, Mary Barra, CEO of GM, pay last year of $28.97 million, Ford Motor Co. CEO Jim Farley $21 million and Carlos Tavares, 64, CEO of Stellantis NV — maker of Jeep SUVs, Ram pickup trucks and other vehicles — $24.8 million.

The average automotive worker base wage before benefits is $30 an hour.

The UAW cheered the U.S. Energy Department's announcement last week that it will offer $15.5 billion in grants and loans to support a "just transition" to electric vehicles by rewarding investment projects with unionized or highly paid workforces, But the autoworkers argue that should just be the beginning as an estimated 140,000 jobs are expected to be lost in the transition. (The estimate of job loss has a big range — but it is tens of thousands)

President Biden’s election campaign badly needs the UAW — which has traditionally supported Democrats — to get on board. He took the unusual step last month of commenting on the negotiations in a statement. “The middle class built America, and unions built the middle class. Companies should use this process to make sure they enlist their workers in the next chapter of the industry by offering them good paying jobs and a say in the future of their workplace.”

The stakes are higher than ever, not just for Biden, but for the whole country. Can the playing field be leveled as technology continues to drive what some are calling a Fourth Industrial Revolution? Or will we continue to divide the country between workers who get to stay home,  often making significantly more than blue collar workers, and those on the front line facing job losses as executive salaries continue to soar?

Paying attention to the sea-change of the working world would be a good start. Also try onsite daycare, exercise facilities, early retirement pensions.