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75 Percent of Americans Side With Striking UAW Members [1]
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Date: 2023-09-15 12:14:32+00:00
Politics / 75 Percent of Americans Side With Striking UAW Members Polling shows exceptionally wide support for the union’s bold demands.
Demonstrators during a United Auto Workers practice picket outside the Stellantis Mack Assembly Plant in Detroit, Mich., on August 23, 2023. (Photo: Jeff Kowalsky / Bloomberg)
The United Auto Workers went into negotiations with the Big Three automakers and delivered what is arguably the boldest set of demands from a major industrial union in modern times. The union asked for a 46 percent pay hike, improved health care and retirement benefits, the renewal of cost-of-living pay raises, an end to different tiers of wages for older and newer workers, the restoration of defined pension benefits, and a 32-hour week with 40 hours of pay.
In any serious labor negotiation, the union asks for a lot, with the understanding that the final agreement will be at least somewhat more modest. And the union has moderated some of its demands in the course of collective bargaining with General Motors, Ford, and Stellantis—the international consortium of carmakers that now owns Chrysler.
But the automakers—which made a combined $21 billion in profits in the first six months of 2023 alone—claimed, as the Thursday expiration deadline for existing UAW contracts approached, that they could not afford to meet even the most reasonable, most basic demands of the workers. So, at midnight, UAW members joined picket lines outside selected GM, Ford, and Stellantis plants.
“Tonight, for the first time in our history, we will strike all three of the Big Three at once,” announced UAW President Shawn Fain shortly before the walkout began.
That’s one reason this is an epic moment in the history of American trade unions. And here’s another one: This strike enjoys an extraordinary level of support from the American people.
It’s no surprise that the workers were “strike ready.” As Fain explained, “Our union’s membership is clearly fed up with living paycheck to paycheck while the corporate elite and billionaire class continue to make out like bandits.” But the great mass of Americans appear to be every bit as “strike ready” as UAW members.
When Gallup pollsters asked voters just before Labor Day which side of the dispute between the UAW and the Big Three they sympathized with, 75 percent said they were with the union. Just 19 percent lined up with the corporations. A Morning Consult survey conducted last week found 2-1 support for the UAW, and noted that even the union’s boldest proposals—such as the demand for a 32-hour workweek—attracted significantly more support than opposition.
That’s a big deal. It confirms data showing that the general popularity of unions is rising, and that the American people have come to believe that unions benefit both their members and those who aren’t in unions, that labor organizations improve the standing of unionized companies, and that strong unions are good for the US economy. Indeed, on that last measure, Gallup found: “A record-high 61 percent say unions help rather than hurt the U.S. economy, eclipsing the prior high from 1999 by six points.”
Importantly, these numbers also tell us that when unions make big demands, and when they aggressively advance those demands in order to counter corporate spin (as the UAW has done with a savvy social media campaign and unity-building op-eds written by Fain with allies such as US Representative Ro Khanna), the American people will recognize organized labor’s “asks” as fair and necessary.
That’s a point Senator Bernie Sanders made when he argued in a statement ahead of the UAW strike: “Despite what you might hear in the corporate media, what the UAW is fighting for is not radical. It is the reasonable demand that autoworkers, who have made enormous sacrifices over the past 40 years, finally receive a fair share of the enormous profits their labor has generated.”
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[1] Url:
https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/americans-side-with-striking-uaw/
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