ANP
NOS Nieuws•gisteren, 22:47
The strike at the three largest American car companies is spreading. Employees in 38 factories, spread across twenty states, stopped work today.
The strike started last week. On the first day of the strike, 13,000 employees left work out of dissatisfaction with wages and working conditions. Nearly 19,000 people are now participating.
The strike is organized by the UAW union. This represents almost 150,000 employees in the automotive industry, so 13 percent of them are now participating in the strike.
‘Big Three’
The strikers work at the ‘Big Three’: Ford, General Motors (GM) and Stellantis (Chrysler’s parent company).
The union demands a pay increase of at least 36 percent in four years. Other demands include automatic price compensation and a four-day work week.
Electric cars
Discussions with the car companies did not yield a breakthrough this week. “We recognize that Ford is serious about reaching an agreement,” said union leader Shawn Fain. “It’s a different story at GM and Stellantis.” He also said that he was “not ready yet at Ford”.
The companies say that they cannot meet the requirements because they will have to invest a lot in the transition to electric cars in the coming years. All three did offer a salary increase of around 20 percent, but without adjusted employment conditions as the employees demand. “As we have been saying for weeks, we are not going to wait forever for fair contracts at The Big Three,” says Fain.
Support from Biden
The strikes are already having economic and political consequences. For example, Ford fired 600 people this week as a result of the strike. According to Ford, this was necessary because there was no material and therefore not enough work.
US President Biden immediately sided with the strikers. He pointed to the record profits the companies are making and sent White House representatives to the factories to talk to employees.
The UAW union invited Biden to visit today. The president let up X will travel to Michigan next Tuesday, a state with a large car industry, to express its solidarity with the strikers. According to the AP news agency, no American president has done that in the past hundred years.
2023-09-22 20:47:13
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