The UAW union’s Stellantis Council met yesterday to discuss the beleaguered carmaker’s “ongoing failure” to honor the agreement that ended the 2023 labor strike, and their latest union memo doesn’t pull many punches.
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The GM Ultium battery plant in Spring Hill, Tennessee, has voted to unionize. This is the 2nd GM battery plant to unionize – but this one is different because it’s in Tennessee, where unions are less popular.
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Workers at GM’s Ultium battery plant in Lordstown, Ohio have voted to ratify their UAW contract deal with GM, earning big pay increases as they are brought under the national UAW/GM master agreement.
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Hot on the heels of a historic victory where VW workers in Tennessee voted to join the United Auto Workers union, Mercedes workers in Vance, Alabama have narrowly voted against joining UAW themselves. The plant makes several cars, among which are the electric EQS and EQE SUVs.
The vote comes a day after another union victory in Alabama, where the New Flyer bus plant, which makes some EV buses, joined UAW.
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VW’s Chattanooga Assembly Plant has voted to join UAW, in a historic move on the back of several recent union wins in the US.
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Tesla has announced that it will raise factory worker pay for some workers at its Nevada Gigafactory by 10% or more. The news comes not long after UAW’s historic strike wins, in which it earned 25% pay increases at all of the Big Three American automakers.
After VW, Hyundai, Toyota, and Honda did the same recently, this shows how union wins tend to affect entire industries, raising conditions for even nonunionized companies who have to compete for workers.
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The UAW has launched an unprecedented campaign to unionize the entire US auto sector at once, with thousands of auto workers at 13 companies announcing simultaneous unionization campaigns.
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Hot on the heels of the United Auto Workers’ strike victory against the “Big Three” US automakers, President Joe Biden said he would support UAW’s push to unionize Tesla and Toyota ahead of a planned meeting with UAW president Shawn Fain.
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The last domino has fallen, with UAW and GM reaching a deal to end the auto industry strike. Now, tentative deals have been met with all three auto companies, which means the strike is over.
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UAW has announced that it has come to a tentative agreement with Stellantis to end the six-week strike, including job gains from the reopening of a plant in Belvidere, Illinois and addition of a new battery plant in that location.
Soon after, UAW announced that workers at GM’s plant which makes the all-electric Cadillac Lyriq will go on strike.
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The UAW has announced (and Ford has confirmed) that a tentative agreement has been reached with Ford to end the UAW strike that started six weeks ago. Ford workers will immediately return to work now that this tentative agreement has been met, though the strike will continue at affected GM and Stellantis facilities.
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United Auto Workers president Shawn Fain announced today that GM has “leapfrogged” other automakers in strike negotiations by agreeing to place all EV battery plant workers under the union’s national master agreement.
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In the midst of the United Auto Workers’ strike, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was asked on Face The Nation whether she plans to trade in her Tesla Model 3 for a union-built EV.
However, there really aren’t many EVs she could pick from, and that’s a problem for the Big Three, the UAW, the American auto industry, and US workers in general. And also for AOC.
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While Tesla is not directly involved in the United Auto Workers (UAW) strike affecting the Detroit Big Three automakers, it still looms large over the situation as both sides of the table feel the EV giant breathe down their necks.
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The United Auto Workers union has begun a strike against all three major American automakers, with about 12,700 workers currently on strike, and the potential for up to 146,000 total to go on strike in the future if automakers do not offer the union a satisfactory agreement.
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GM’s first Ultium battery plant in Lordstown, Ohio has voted to join the United Auto Workers, with 98% of workers voting in favor of union representation.
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In July it was announced that LG Chem was working on a potential new billion-dollar US battery cell factory for electric cars. Today in a security filing in South Korea, LG Chem confirmed that investment, and that GM will invest another billion.
Reuters reports that the location is expected to be in the area of Lordstown, Ohio, where GM (pictured in Detroit) recently sold its factory to an EV startup affiliated with Workhorse. This follows news earlier this week that Piedmont Lithium received an important federal permit to proceed with its lithium mine in Gaston County, North Carolina — the second in North America. Looks like Interstate 77 will be America’s hot new lithium corridor.
The Union of Auto Workers (UAW) has been trying to unionize electric vehicle production in the US for a while now. It first tried and failed with Nissan’s Smyrna factory, where they manufacture the Leaf, and they are now pursuing Tesla’s Fremont factory.
Now the UAW warns that electric vehicle revolution is going to result in job loses.
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