Technological change is a bumpy road
The United Auto Workers are on strike against the Big Three (Washington Post):
UAW Ford workers say they are striking because they are not making enough money to support their families or their futures.
“We have our limits too,” said Kevin Ewald, a Ford employee who has worked at the company for nearly three decades. He wants his newer colleagues to be paid more for doing “bone-breaking” work.
UAW workers began striking just after midnight Friday morning after failing to reach a deal with the Big Three autoworkers, Ford, General Motors and Stellantis.
The union demanded 36 percent wage increases for workers over four years, saying that wages have not kept up with inflation. Full-time workers make about $18 to $32 an hour while CEOs at the Big Three companies each made more than $20 million in overallcompensation last year, figures the union used to justify its demands for higher worker wages. The UAW also wants an end to tiered employment system, which means that newer workers get lower pay and have worse benefits. The companies countered that they are offering bigger wage increases than they have in years but can’t meet all of the union’s demands and stay viable.
Auto manufacturers “still making most of their money from gasoline-driven cars” are trying to retool for making electric vehicles while trying to compete against Tesla and foreign EV makers, reports The New York Times:
Under pressure from government officials and changing consumer demand, Ford, G.M. and Stellantis are investing billions to retool their sprawling operations to build electric vehicles, which are critical to addressing climate change. But they are making little if any profit on those vehicles while Tesla, which dominates electric car sales, is profitable and growing fast.
Ford said in July that its electric vehicle business would lose $4.5 billion this year. If the union got all the increases in pay, pensions and other benefits it is seeking, the company said, its workers’ total compensation would be twice as much as Tesla’s employees.
Union demands would force Ford to scrap its investments in electric vehicles, Jim Farley, the company’s chief executive, said in an interview on Friday. “We want to actually have a conversation about a sustainable future,” he said, “not one that forces us to choose between going out of business and rewarding our workers.”
For workers, the biggest concern is that electric vehicles have far fewer parts than gasoline models and will render many jobs obsolete. Plants that make mufflers, catalytic converters, fuel injectors and other components that electric cars don’t need will have to be overhauled or shut down.
I don’t trust modern corporations as far as I can throw them, having worked inside and for a slew of them as clients. The financialization of the economy has dehumanized it even more than it once was. That employees who were once “personnel” are now “human resources” is a subtle hint of the shift not just in investments but in attitudes. Financialization turned millions of homes into bundled assets for investors and turned millions of families out into the streets when rapacious investors’ house of cards collapsed. We, you, they are inputs in the annual profit calculation. Cogs in the machine.
This is nothing new. Watch Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), nearly a century old. Watch CEO Tim Gurner insist in the last week that workers need to feel some pain to remind them who’s in charge. (He has since apologized for making comments that were “deeply insensitive to employees, tradies and families.” He did not apologized for how he thinks about them.)
Even so, technological change is a bumpy road for both employers and workers. Internal combustion engines are on their way out like CDs, cassettes, and 8-track tapes before them. And CRT TVs, DVDs, VHS tapes, and Blockbuster. Gasoline-powered engines will in time be a niche product like vinyl records for audiophiles.
I entered engineering at the transition from board drafting to rudimentary 2D AutoCAD and got out when the field was full 3D. Designers and employees had to retool and adapt. (I lucked into a specialty involving finite element analysis and never learned CAD.) There was a yearly “Homecoming Job Fair” I attended here for years out of curiosity. Men who made their livings for decades as tool and die makers in the textile and furniture industries found themselves having to retool their skills. They had to learn to program CNC machines (if they could get into a program at the local community college) for making aerospace parts or else settle for call center work.
Which is to say I have no idea how the UAW and automakers will navigate this transition and this contract negotiation. There will be pain enough to go around, and hopefully less on the beleaguered working class.