With UAW, another high-profile strike hits Philly as labor continues ‘feeling its oats’ in 2023

After thousands of auto manufacturing workers went on strike last week, they were joined Friday by thousands more, including a group from Bucks County who belong to United Auto Workers Local 2177.

The UAW strikes expanded amid contentious contract negotiations between the union and the Big Three automobile makers based in Detroit. Among other benefits, the union wants wage increases of 36% over four years, arguing that their employers’ profits and executive pay have grown considerably in recent years.

Villanova University sociology professor Rick Eckstein said the fight at these famous car-making companies is in line with the labor movement Philadelphia is feeling right now. Eckstein spoke with The Inquirer about recent strikes in the region, the UAW negotiations, and how it all fits together. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

No, there shouldn’t be at this point. UAW [even] represents graduate students in certain universities. A lot of unions are branching out that way. I don’t think [the strike] will have any impact beyond just the UAW locals that work directly in the auto industry.

Part of it is just organizational survival — like when you’re investing, you like to diversify your portfolio. The automakers have [also] diversified by investing in things besides car manufacturing. So this is just a way for unions to have a broader reach. They don’t have all their organizational eggs in one basket. So if [U.S.] car manufacturing shrivels up more — which is not likely to but if it did — then the UAW would have other ways to stay involved in organizing workers.

Usually there are pressure points on each side. The union is able to provide benefits for its striking workers up to a point, and the automakers are able to go about doing business until inventory starts running low. In these labor stoppages, there’s usually a lot of posturing on both sides. Both management and labor need to represent their interests, and that adversarial relationship hopefully results in something that approaches a compromise.

Labor has been on the upswing lately. It has been feeling its oats because of a variety of factors, including the pandemic, including the continued increase in executive salaries and corporate profits. And wages, while increasing, are not increasing as fast as inflation. That’s why the [UAW] union is really pressing on that issue [of executive salaries].

They all have different pressure points. So for the Temple strike and for similar strikes of graduate students in Michigan and California ... final grades have to be turned in, [and that is a] pressure point. You’ve got thousands and thousands of students who want to see their grades and who haven’t been taught in a couple of weeks, and then learn that someone who’s never met them and doesn’t know them is going to be assigning them a grade. For Coca-Cola, [the pressures start when] Coca-Cola is not available on the shelves and in the vending machines. There are those moments that can’t be avoided, and when you hit them, that’s kind of when the rubber hits the road. Things start moving much faster when you reach those inflection points.

We’re at that point now in the fall season. This is when new shows and new episodes start rolling out and they’re not gonna roll out. In the next couple of months, I think something’s gonna move, even the next couple of weeks.

It’s somewhat similar to what we saw in the late 1930s, when labor first received the legal right to organize and then again in the early to mid-1950s, post-World War II. It hasn’t reached that level yet, in terms of a swell, but it has the makings of it.

The problem now is that there’s been so much legislation passed, both nationally and locally, that kind of took the wind out of the National Labor Relations Act from the 1930s. It’s harder to organize now. It’s harder to successfully represent a group of workers and bargain collectively. The deck is stacked, has been increasingly stacked against labor as history has progressed, but you get these waves every now and then. This time, the catalyst was the pandemic itself. Interestingly, it’s been the low-wage workers who have really led this charge. [And when] workers see others being successful, they think maybe they can be successful, too. You see Amazon successfully organized in New York, and that sends a charge to the labor movement [because workers figure] if you can organize an Amazon workplace, you can organize almost anywhere.

It could. A lot of it — and again, this is the evolution of labor law — is that whoever is the president [of the United States] can appoint the majority members of the NLRB [which governs] private sector unions. That’s key, because they can make all sorts of decisions, especially on whether a group of workers actually has the legal right to unionize under the National Labor Relations Act. Whoever wins the 2024 presidential election is going to make a big [difference in] whether this continues to be an organizing wave, or if it gets the wind taken out of its sails.