Half-seriously now: The combative UAW strike

September 29, 2023 at 10:15PM

On the surface, it seems easy to fault striking United Auto Workers employees at the Big Three automakers for demanding a hefty 36% bump in wages, along with sweetened benefits. But everything's relative, including compensation.

I was working in Detroit back when the American auto industry came dangerously close to doing a Thelma-and-Louise off a cliff. At the time, UAW employees made sacrifices to keep the industry afloat, as former President Barack Obama's "auto czar" Steven Rattner notes in a recent New York Times column. Since then, the domestic auto industry has bounced back, posting a record $37 billion profit in 2022. In fact, profits at the Big Three almost doubled between 2013 and 2022. Yet autoworkers have seen relatively little of that windfall in the years since they made concessions to help avoid a domestic auto industry crash-and-burn. And Bloomberg Law's database identifies 23 collective bargaining agreements just in the last year that increased employee pay by more than what the UAW is demanding, Bloomberg Law legal analyst Robert Combs writes.

Talk about extreme.

An oldie, but a goodie:

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