UAW Strike Is Effectively Messy Now, But End Game May Not Turn Out Well

United Auto Workers president Shawn Fain continued to roll out unprecedented tactics on Friday when he selectively broadened the union’s strike against the Detroit Three to include Ford’s assembly plant in Chicago and General Motors’ assembly facility in Lansing, Mich. Fain pointedly didn’t include any new Stellantis facilities in the expansion of the union’s work stoppage, he said, because Friday morning the company had upped its offer at the bargaining table.

Yet a week earlier, it was Ford that Fain had singled out for commendable behavior in negotiations, which was the reason the UAW didn’t target parts depots for that company, as it did for GM and Stellantis.

Confused? That’s what Fain wants, at least if you’re an automaking executive. But it’s far from clear that the UAW boss’s tactical machinations will have much to do with how this strike ends up being settled and what the terms of the new agreements are.

Perhaps a more important element affecting that outcome will be his extreme rhetoric so far — of the bombastic sort that hasn’t been heard from a UAW president for decades — as when Fain last week charged Stellantis with “enabling” picket-line violence. GM in statements denied the accusations, and Stellantis responded by citing unionist actions against white-collar employees who crossed the picket lines.

Going further, Fain actually alluded to his union as a new “Arsenal of Democracy” — and to the automakers as “the enemy” — in a comparison with America’s industrial might against the Nazis. And he did it in front of President Biden, who was famously joining a UAW picket line in Michigan.

The automakers didn’t let that go unremarked upon. “It was sad and offensive to see the leader of the UAW make such a comment in front of the president of the United States,” Ford’s chief communications officer, Mark Truby, said in a statement. The company’s Willow Run plant, where many WWII bombers were manufactured, “deserves better than to be a set-piece for overheated rhetoric.”

Indeed, Fain’s saber-rattling so far made the remarks by former President Donald Trump, who visited Michigan a day after Biden, seem tame by comparison. In a bald play for even more than the considerable (if private) support from UAW rank-and-file members than he already has, Trump savaged the automakers and the union for plunging into the electric-vehicle revolution and participating in the accelerating demise of the internal-combustion vehicle.

And it is moving attention away from that coming demise which is the real point of Fain’s distracting maneuvers and fiery remarks. It’s already a given that the UAW will obtain hefty compensation increases from the Detroit Three in the coming days and weeks. But this will only paper over the inevitability of steep job losses in coming years as all automakers more fully participate in the EV revolution, because making all-electric vehicles requires about one-third less labor than putting together their “ICE” alternatives, which need heavy and complicated engines and transmissions.

Just as clearly as it is ironically, it is President Biden, his administration, and his political allies that are hog-tying automakers and dragging them into an EV-dependent future with massive penalties, such as California’s quickly spreading anti-ICE regulations, and incentives such as the Inflation Reduction Act, which along with other vessels of federal largess will distribute hundreds of billions of dollars to companies willing to fold their opposition and build plants for making batteries and EVs in America.

It would have been even more confusing and, of course, self-defeating for Fain to have mentioned that unpleasant reality. So while the details of the strike’s end are still unclear, the union’s long-term future isn’t.

Dale Buss has reported on automotive labor off and on for decades, beginning with a stint as the chief reporter on this area for the Wall Street Journal.