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    Doctors at Allina Health Form Union

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    The physicians, at Allina Health in Minnesota and Wisconsin, appear to be the largest group of unionized doctors in the private sector.In the latest sign of growing frustration among professionals, doctors employed by a large nonprofit health care system in Minnesota and Wisconsin have voted to unionize.The doctors, roughly 400 primary and urgent-care providers across more than 50 clinics operated by the Allina Health System, appear to be the largest group of unionized private-sector physicians in the United States. More than 150 nurse practitioners and physician assistants at the clinics were also eligible to vote and will be members of the union, which will be represented by a local of the Service Employees International Union.The result was 325 to 200, with 24 other ballots challenged, according to a tally sheet from the National Labor Relations Board, which conducted the vote. In a statement, Allina said, “While we are disappointed in the decision by some of our providers to be represented by a union, we remain committed to our ongoing work to create a culture where all employees feel supported and valued.”The doctors complained that chronic understaffing was leading to burnout and compromising patient safety.“In between patients, your doctor is dealing with prescription refills, phone calls and messages from patients, lab results,” said Dr. Cora Walsh, a family physician involved in the organizing campaign.“At an adequately staffed clinic, you have enough support to help take some of that workload,” Dr. Walsh added. “When staff levels fall, that work doesn’t go away.”Dr. Walsh estimated that she and her colleagues often spend an hour or two each night handling “inbox load” and worried that the shortages were increasing backlogs and the risk of mistakes.The union vote follows recent walkouts by pharmacists in the Kansas City area and elsewhere over similar concerns.A variety of professionals, including architects and tech workers, have sought to form unions in recent years, while others, like nurses and teachers, have waged strikes and aggressive contract bargaining campaigns.Some argue that employers have exploited their sense of mission to pay them less than their skills warrant, or to work them around the clock. Others contend that new business models or budget pressures are compromising their independence and interfering with their professional judgment.Increasingly, doctors appear to be expressing both concerns.“We feel like we’re not able to advocate for our patients,” said Dr. Matt Hoffman, another doctor involved in the organizing at Allina. Dr. Hoffman, referring to managers, added that “we’re not able to tell them what we need day to day.”Consolidation in the health care industry over the past two decades appears to underlie much of the frustration among doctors, many of whom now work for large health care systems.“When a physician ran his or her own practice, they made the decisions about the people and technology they surrounded themselves with,” Dr. Robert Wachter, chair of the department of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, said in an email. “Now, these decisions are made by administrators.”Doctors at Allina say that staffing was a concern before the pandemic, that Covid-19 pushed them to the brink and that staffing has never fully recovered to its prepandemic levels.Relatively low pay for clinical assistants and lab personnel appears to have contributed to the staffing issues, as these workers left for other fields in a tight job market. In some cases, doctors and other clinicians within the Allina system have quit or scaled back their hours, citing so-called moral injury — a sense that they couldn’t perform their jobs in accordance with their values.“We were promised that when we get through the acute phase of the pandemic, staffing would get better,” Dr. Walsh said. “But staffing never improved.”Allina, which takes in billions in revenue but has faced financial pressures and recently eliminated hundreds of positions, did not respond to questions about the doctors’ concerns.Joe Crane, the national organizing director for the Doctors Council of the S.E.I.U., which represents attending physicians, said that before the pandemic, he would receive about 50 inquiries a year from doctors interested in learning more about forming a union. He said he received more than 150 inquiries during the first month of the pandemic. (Mr. Crane was with another physicians’ union at the time.)Mr. Crane, citing the siloed nature of the medical profession, said that unionization among attending physicians had nonetheless proceeded slowly, but that the victory at Allina could create momentum.In March, more than 100 doctors voted to unionize at another Allina facility, a hospital with two locations. Dr. Alia Sharif, a physician involved in that union campaign, said doctors were under pressure there not to exceed length-of-stay guidelines for patients, even though many suffer from complex conditions that require more sustained care.Allina is appealing the outcome of that vote to the National Labor Relations Board in Washington; a board official rejected an earlier appeal.Even as rates of unionization have languished among attending physicians, they have increased substantially among medical residents. A sister union within the S.E.I.U., the Committee of Interns and Residents, has added thousands of members over the past few years.Dr. Wachter said this could herald an increase in unionization among doctors outside training programs. “When these physicians finish training and enter practice, they are more comfortable with a world in which unionization doesn’t automatically conflict with their notions of being a professional,” he wrote. More

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    U.A.W. Says Auto Strikes Will Become More Unpredictable

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    The United Automobile Workers union refrained from expanding the strikes at Ford, General Motors and Stellantis but said it could do so at any time.Four weeks after starting limited strikes against three large automakers, the United Automobile Workers is shifting to a more aggressive strategy, suggesting that work stoppages could spread to more plants and possibly go on for some time.In an online video, the union’s president, Shawn Fain, said on Friday that he would no longer wait to announce expansions of the strikes on Friday, as he had been doing. Further actions could come at any time.“We’re not messing around,” Mr. Fain said. “The companies are now on notice. If they’re not willing to move, we are going to give them a push.”The union began its strikes on Sept. 15 when workers walked out of three plants, owned by General Motors, Ford Motor and Stellantis, which makes Chrysler, Jeep and Ram vehicles. It has since expanded the strike in stages, in a bid to increase the pressure on the companies.Stellantis said on Friday that it was temporarily laying off an additional 700 workers at two plants in Indiana that supply transmissions and castings for a Toledo, Ohio, Jeep factory that has been idled by the U.A.W. strikes. Stellantis has laid off more than 1,300 workers in total in response to the union’s strikes.Ford has laid off more than 1,900 workers as a result of the strike, and G.M. about 2,300. Ford said about 90 of its parts suppliers had laid off about 13,000 workers.Stellantis also said its negotiations had made progress in talks with the U.A.W. this week. The company said it hoped “to reach an agreement as soon as possible to get everyone back to work.”The U.A.W. and the automakers have been negotiating new labor contracts since July.On Wednesday, the U.A.W. unexpectedly told workers to walk out of Ford’s Kentucky Truck Plant in Louisville. It is the company’s largest and the producer of its highly profitable Super Duty version of its F-Series pickup trucks.Ford has said the Kentucky plant typically produces a new truck every 37 seconds, and generates $25 billion in revenue, about 16 percent of the company’s annual total.All told, the strike has halted operations at three Ford plants in Michigan, Chicago and Kentucky; two G.M. plants in Michigan and Missouri; and a Stellantis plant in Ohio. U.A.W. members are also on strike at 38 G.M. and Stellantis spare-parts warehouses across the country.About 34,000 of the 150,000 U.A.W. members employed by the three companies are now on strike.The U.A.W. has demanded substantial wage increases and improvements in other areas of its contract, like retirement plans. The union also wants an end to a system that pays new hires a little over half the top U.A.W. wage of $32 an hour.The union is also concerned about the possible loss of jobs as automakers ramp up production of electric vehicles. The companies have offered wage increases of more than 20 percent over four years and to reduce the time it takes a new worker to rise to the top wage to four years from eight.On Thursday, Ford officials said the company had reached its limit on what it could offer the union without hurting the company’s business and its ability to continue heavy investments in electric vehicles. “Any more will stretch our ability to invest in the business,” Kumar Galhotra, president of the Ford division that makes combustion engine vehicles, said on a conference call on Thursday.Apart from the car companies, U.A.W.-represented workers went on strike this week at Mack Trucks. Its members voted this week to authorize a strike against General Dynamics, an aerospace and defense contractor. The U.A.W. also represents about 1,000 workers who have been on strike at Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan for a month. More

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    Ford Says It Won’t Raise Its Contract Offer to U.A.W.

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    The company said it had reached the limit of what it could offer to the United Automobile Workers union, which has expanded its strike to Ford’s largest plant.Ford Motor said on Thursday that it could not improve its contract offer to the United Automobile Workers union without hurting its business and its ability to invest in electric vehicles.The automaker also said the union’s decision to expand its strike to Ford’s largest factory, the Kentucky Truck Plant, would probably hurt workers at other factories and lead to layoffs across the auto industry.“We are very clear,” Kumar Galhotra, president of the Ford division that makes combustion engine vehicles, said in a conference call with reporters. “We are at the limit. Any more will stretch our ability to invest in the business.”The U.A.W. is negotiating new labor contracts with Ford, General Motors and Stellantis, the parent of Chrysler and Jeep. The union’s members have struck selected plants and parts warehouses owned by the three companies. On Wednesday, its talks with Ford broke down, and the union responded by calling on the 8,700 U.A.W. workers at Kentucky Truck to walk off the job.“If the companies are not going to come to the table and take care of the membership’s needs, then we will react,” the U.A.W. president, Shawn Fain, said in an online video after the strike in Kentucky was announced.Production at the plant, in Louisville, stopped Wednesday evening. The factory makes the Super Duty versions of Ford’s F-Series pickup trucks as well as the Ford Expedition and Lincoln Navigator full-size sport utility vehicles.On its own, the Kentucky Truck plant generates about 16 percent of Ford’s revenue. On a typical day, a new vehicle rolls off its assembly line every 37 seconds.The plant is so large that a prolonged idling will probably cause stoppages and layoffs at up to 13 other Ford plants that make engines, transmission and axles. Factories owned by the 600 suppliers that provide parts for Ford could also have to lay off workers, Mr. Galhotra said.“This goes way beyond just hitting Ford’s profits,” he said.The U.A.W. is seeking a substantial increase in wages as well as a cost-of-living provision, an expanded retirement plan, improved retiree health care benefits and job security as automakers make the transition to producing electric vehicles. It also wants to end a system in which new hires start at a little more than half the top U.A.W. wage of $32 an hour.Ford has offered to increase wages 23 percent over four years, adjust wages in response to inflation and cut the time for new hires to rise to the top wage, to four years from eight.The U.A.W. went into a negotiating session on Wednesday expecting Ford to sweeten its offer, according to the union. Mr. Galhotra said Ford was prepared to discuss adjustments to its existing offer but not to make a completely new proposal.The differences became clear quickly, and Mr. Fain instructed Ford workers at the Kentucky plant to strike, union and company officials said. Mr. Fain and other union negotiators left the meeting minutes after it started.“Unfortunately, we had to escalate our action,” Mr. Fain said in his video. “We came here today to get another offer from Ford, and they gave us the same exact offer as two weeks ago.” More

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    G.M. Reaches Deal With Canadian Union

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    General Motors and the Unifor union reached an agreement hours after more than 4,000 workers went on strike on Tuesday.General Motors and a Canadian union, Unifor, reached a tentative deal on a new contract on Tuesday, ending a short-lived strike by more than 4,000 workers that began earlier in the day.The deal includes the same raises and other terms that Unifor had agreed to last month with Ford Motor, including a 20 percent wage increase for production workers over three years and a 25 percent raise for skilled trades workers.The contract must be ratified by Unifor members before it can take effect. Workers at Ford’s Canadian operation have ratified their contract.Work was expected to restart at the three G.M. plants and distribution centers that were struck on Tuesday afternoon.This agreement “recognizes the many contributions of our represented team members with significant increases in wages, benefits and job security while building on G.M.’s historic investments in Canadian manufacturing,” the company said in a statement.The tentative deal was reached after nearly 4,300 Unifor workers walked off the job at midnight on Tuesday at three locations in Ontario: a vehicle assembly plant and stamping site in Oshawa that makes the company’s popular Chevrolet Silverado pickup truck; a plant in St. Catharines that supplies engines and transmissions to G.M. factories around the world; and a parts distribution center in Woodstock.Unifor had been pushing G.M. to accept the same terms as those in the Ford contract, a practice known as pattern bargaining that the automakers and their unions have long used.“When faced with the shutdown of these key facilities, General Motors had no choice but to get serious at the table and agree to the pattern,” Unifor’s national president, Lana Payne, said in a statement. “The solidarity of our members has led to a comprehensive tentative agreement that follows the pattern set at Ford Motor Company to the letter.”Ford’s agreement with Unifor, in addition to wage increases, provides productivity bonuses, higher entry-level wages, improved pensions, cost-of-living allowances and other improvements. G.M. also agreed to convert all temporary workers into permanent employees over the life of the agreement.Workers at G.M.’s CAMI Assembly Plant in Ingersoll, Ontario, are covered by a separate contract and did not go on strike on Tuesday. Unifor represents 315,000 workers in a variety of industries.In the United States, the United Automobile Workers union is on strike at a G.M. pickup truck plant in Missouri, a sport-utility plant in Michigan and parts warehouses around the country. The U.A.W. has also struck two Ford plants. At Stellantis, the maker of Chrysler, Jeep and Ram vehicles, union members have struck one factory and 20 parts warehouses.Altogether, about 25,000 of the 150,000 U.A.W. members employed by the three automakers are on strike. Like Unifor, the U.A.W. is seeking a substantial increase in wages, pensions for a greater number of workers, and a shorter time to move up to the top wage level.Talks began in July, and the strike began on Sept. 15, when the current labor contracts with the companies expired. More

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    U.A.W. Workers at Mack Truck Go on Strike

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    The strike at the truck manufacturer by 4,000 members of the United Automobile Workers comes in the middle of the union’s strikes at three large U.S. car companies.Nearly 4,000 members of the United Automobile Workers union went on strike against Mack Trucks on Monday after rejecting a tentative contract that union’s leaders had worked out with the company.The union informed the truck maker on Sunday that members had opposed the contract by a 73 percent vote, and that a strike would begin at Mack’s factories in Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Florida.“The members have spoken, and as the highest authority in our union, they have the final word,” the U.A.W. president, Shawn Fain, wrote in a letter to Mack’s parent company, Volvo Trucks.The two sides have been negotiating for three months over a range of issues including wage increases, cost-of-living allowances, job security, pensions, prescription drug coverage and overtime. The proposed contract included raises of 19 percent over five years and a bonus of $3,500 for ratifying the agreement.Mack’s president, Stephen Roy, said in a statement that the company was “surprised and disappointed,” noting that the U.A.W. negotiators had called the tentative agreement a “record contract for the heavy truck industry.”Commercial truck sales have been recovering slowly from the disruptions caused by the coronavirus pandemic. Volvo has forecast about a 10 percent increase in industrywide truck sales this year in North America. Mack has about a 6 percent share of the North American market.The Mack strike comes as the U.A.W. is conducting a strike at plants and distribution centers owned by the three automakers, General Motors, Ford Motor, and Stellantis, the maker of Chrysler, Jeep, and Ram vehicles.The auto strike began nearly a month ago at three plants and the U.A.W. has expanded it in a bid to increase the pressure on the manufacturers. About 25,000 of the 150,000 U.A.W. workers employed by the three automakers are on strike. The stoppage affects two plants owned by G.M., two owned by Ford, and one owned by Stellantis, as well as the 38 spare-parts warehouses owned by G.M. and Stellantis.The automakers have offered wage increases of more than 20 percent over four years. They have also agreed to shorten the time — to four years from eight — that it takes a new worker to rise up from the entry-level wage of about $17 an hour to the highest-level wage of $32 an hour.The union is pushing for greater wage increases, noting that raises over the last 15 years have not kept pace with inflation. It is also demanding the companies provide pensions for more workers, pay the cost of retiree health care, and convert temporary employees into permanent staff. More

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    Amid Strikes, One Question: Are Employers Miscalculating?

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    UPS, the Hollywood studios and the Detroit automakers appear to have been taken aback by the tactics and tougher style adopted by new union leaders.The list of gains that the Hollywood writers secured to end a nearly five-month strike with studios once seemed ludicrously ambitious: not just wage increases, but also minimum staffing levels for shows, new royalties on successful series and restrictions on outsourcing writing duties to artificial intelligence.Yet far from an anomaly, the writers’ deal was the latest high-profile labor standoff that seemed to produce substantial gains for workers, and to suggest that they have more leverage than in the past.United Parcel Service employees won large pay increases for part-timers by pushing the company to the brink of a strike, while the lowest-paid academic student employees at the University of California won salary increases of more than 50 percent after a monthlong strike affected thousands of students.Given the unions’ apparent bargaining power and the economic costs to a prolonged work stoppage, the question arises: Why wouldn’t management make its eventual concessions more quickly?The answer, many union and management experts say, is that employers are increasingly miscalculating — acting from a template that applied in previous decades, when employees had little leverage, and underestimating the frustration and resolve in the postpandemic work force.“Psychologically, it’s a big shift: They’ve been in control. They have been able to tell their representatives to go and get concessions on X and Y, to make sure the wage increase is modest,” said Thomas Kochan, an emeritus management professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, referring to corporate executives.“Now, they have to change their expectations internally,” Dr. Kochan added. “They have a lot of work to do.”In example after example, executives appear to have been taken aback by unions’ new, more assertive leaders and their success at rallying members and the public, as well as the ineffectiveness of the employers’ traditional bargaining approach.Sean O’Brien, the Teamsters president, right, attacked UPS over what the union referred to as “part-time poverty” jobs.Jenna Schoenefeld for The New York TimesIn Hollywood, the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which represents entertainment companies in negotiations with writers, directors and actors, has frequently tried to forge a deal with one of the three guilds, then push the other two to accept similar terms.That appeared to be the group’s strategy this year as well: After the writers went on strike in May, the alliance reached a deal with directors the next month. But any hope that the writers would be isolated collapsed when SAG-AFTRA, the union representing more than 150,000 actors, went on strike in July.“The playbook was clearly outdated,” said Peter Newman, a longtime independent producer who heads a dual-degree master’s program in business and fine arts at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.Still, Mr. Newman said, the strikes saved the studios hundreds of millions of dollars on shows in the short term as Wall Street was pressuring them to cut costs.The producers’ alliance declined to comment for this article.In Detroit, the three major U.S. automakers had grown accustomed to closed-door negotiations with the United Automobile Workers union, in which the parties did not disclose the potential terms until they reached an overall agreement.But in the run-up to this year’s mid-September strike deadline, the union’s new president, Shawn Fain, appeared to wrong-foot executives at Ford Motor, General Motors and Stellantis — which makes the Chrysler and Jeep brands — by disclosing and deriding the companies’ offers. In one case, he literally threw a Stellantis proposal in the garbage.Automakers have expressed impatience with the leadership style of Shawn Fain, center, the United Automobile Workers union leader.Cydni Elledge for The New York TimesThe companies’ responses — a Stellantis executive sent employees a letter saying that “theatrics and personal insults will not help,” while Ford and G.M. have also expressed impatience — may have further galvanized members and built public support. Polls have found that the public supports the autoworkers over the companies by large margins, and that the margins increased after the U.A.W. began a limited strike.“It doesn’t seem like they were prepared for the direction he was headed with his public comments,” David Pryzbylski, a labor lawyer who represents employers at Barnes & Thornburg, said of the reaction to Mr. Fain. “The way they have responded may have escalated it further versus letting it die out.”Stellantis declined to comment. Auto industry executives argue that they have made historically generous offers, and that they haven’t been put off by Mr. Fain’s outspokenness so much as what they say are the showmanship and the unrealistic expectations he has created.Mr. Pryzbylski emphasized that it was too early to tell whether the landscape had tilted to labor’s advantage for the longer term, or just temporarily. The outcome of the U.A.W. strike remains unclear, and the workers’ resolve could diminish if the strike drags on for weeks. Talks between the sides are ongoing.Other management-side lawyers said that while a handful of executives might have miscalculated of late, there was no broader trend in this direction. They say that employers remain capable of assessing and acting in their self-interest, and that unions are equally capable of miscalculating.“People are sophisticated on both sides,” said Marshall Babson, a longtime management-side lawyer and former member of the National Labor Relations Board. “From my experience, good negotiators don’t get distracted by pyrotechnics.”But in many cases, what has changed is not so much the bluster from union leaders as their willingness to follow through — a potentially disruptive shift after years of often empty threats.When Sean O’Brien, the Teamsters president, ran to succeed his longtime predecessor, James P. Hoffa, in 2021, he promised to raise wages for part-time workers at UPS, many of whom had long felt shortchanged.And yet, according to two people close to the negotiations, the company seemed caught off guard when talks broke down over the issue on July 5 — Mr. O’Brien’s initial deadline.Mr. O’Brien and the union spent the next few weeks publicly attacking UPS over what the union referred to as “part-time poverty” jobs before the company agreed to hourly wage increases for part-timers of more than $7.50 over the life of the new five-year contract.The chief executive of UPS, Carol Tomé, said the company had expected contract talks this year “to be late and loud, and they were.”Jenna Schoenefeld for The New York TimesShortly after a tentative deal was reached in late July, the UPS chief executive, Carol Tomé, said the company had expected the negotiations “to be late and loud, and they were.” The company declined to comment for this article.Part of the challenge for employers is public opinion: Confidence in big business is at its lowest point in decades, according to Gallup, while approval of labor unions is close to its highest. Mr. Fain and Mr. O’Brien appear to have devised their public campaigns to press this advantage.Unions also appear to have benefited from new methods of keeping members focused on shared goals — as when writers erupted on social media over the news that the talk show hosted by Drew Barrymore would return before the strike ended. (Ms. Barrymore soon reversed course.)And rank-and-file members appear to have become more committed to their leaders’ negotiating strategy as unions have become more democratic and involved members more in the push for a contract, said Jane McAlevey, a longtime labor organizer and scholar.But perhaps most important, employers seem to be underestimating the determination of workers, who believe they have little to lose from striking amid rising prices and fundamental shifts in their industry that have sometimes made their jobs more precarious.A few weeks after the writers walked off the job this spring, Mae Smith, a strike captain and former writer on the Showtime series “Billions,” predicted in an interview that the economic pain of a protracted strike against the studios would not discourage the writers because “unfortunately they’ve been training us to live off very few months of work for a long time.”The prediction largely held, in something of a departure from the 2007 writers’ strike. Back then, when streaming felt like a distant threat, there were some splits within the Writers Guild over how aggressive to be, said Chris Keyser, a past president of the union.This time, the writers appeared particularly unified by the looming role of artificial intelligence, an issue on which the studios largely refused to engage for months.“A number of C.E.O.s, when we talked to them later about A.I., said that was a mistake,” recalled Mr. Keyser, a co-chair of the writers’ negotiating committee this year.(The writers did compromise on some key issues in the end — there is no ban on studios’ use of scripts they own to train A.I. tools, though the guild reserved the right to challenge instances of this.)Dr. Kochan of M.I.T. said the concession from studios on artificial intelligence was especially significant because it highlighted another shift: employers’ diminished ability to limit negotiations to conventional issues like wages and benefits while often reserving the right to control other aspects of the job, like technology adoption.“For decades, management has been able to say: ‘These are our decisions, our prerogatives. It’s none of your business,’” he said.With the breakthrough on artificial intelligence, he added, “this is a new day — that’s why the writers’ strike was so important.” More

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    U.A.W. Will Not Expand Strikes at G.M., Ford and Stellantis as Talks Progress

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    The United Automobile Workers reported improved wage offers from the automakers and a concession from General Motors on workers at battery factories.The United Automobile Workers union said on Friday that it had made progress in its negotiations with Ford Motor, General Motors and Stellantis, the parent of Chrysler, and would not expand the strikes against the companies that began three weeks ago.In an online video, the president of the union, Shawn Fain, said all three companies had significantly improved their offers to the union, including providing bigger raises and offering cost-of-living increases. In what he described as a major breakthrough, Mr. Fain said G.M. was now willing to include workers at its battery factories in the company’s national contract with the U.A.W.G.M. had previously said that it could not include those workers because they are employed by joint ventures between G.M. and battery suppliers.“Here’s the bottom line: We are winning,” said Mr. Fain, wearing a T-shirt that read, “Eat the Rich.” “We are making progress, and we are headed in the right direction.”Mr. Fain said G.M. made the concession on battery plant workers after the union had threatened to strike the company’s factory in Arlington, Texas, where it makes some of its most profitable full-size sport-utility vehicles, including the Cadillac Escalade and the Chevrolet Tahoe. The plant employs 5,300 workers.G.M. has started production at one battery plant in Ohio, and has others under construction in Tennessee and Michigan. Workers at the Ohio plant voted overwhelmingly to be represented by the U.A.W. and have been negotiating a separate contract with the joint venture, Ultium Cells, that G.M. owns with L.G. Energy Solution.Ford is building two joint-venture battery plants in Kentucky and one in Tennessee, and a fourth in Michigan that is wholly owned by Ford. Stellantis has just started building a battery plant in Indiana and is looking for a site for a second.G.M. declined to comment about battery plant workers. “Negotiations remain ongoing, and we will continue to work towards finding solutions to address outstanding issues,” the company said in a statement. “Our goal remains to reach an agreement that rewards our employees and allows G.M. to be successful into the future”Shares of the three companies jumped after Mr. Fain spoke. G.M.’s stock closed up about 2 percent, Stellantis about 3 percent and Ford about 1 percent.The strike began Sept. 15 when workers walked out of three plants in Michigan, Ohio and Missouri, each owned by one of the three companies.The stoppage was later expanded to 38 spare-parts distribution centers owned by G.M. and Stellantis, and then to a Ford plant in Chicago and another G.M. factory in Lansing, Mich. About 25,000 of the 150,000 U.A.W. members employed by the three Michigan automakers were on strike as of Friday morning.“I think this strategy of targeted strikes is working,” said Peter Berg, a professor of employment relations at Michigan State University. “It has the effect of slowly ratcheting up the cost to the companies, and they don’t know necessarily where he’s going to strike next.”Here Are the Locations Where U.A.W. Strikes Are HappeningSee where U.A.W. members are on strike at plants and distribution centers owned by Ford, General Motors and Stellantis.The contract battle has become a national political issue. President Biden visited a picket line near Detroit last month. A day later, former President Donald J. Trump spoke at a nonunion factory north of Detroit and criticized Mr. Biden and leaders of the U.A.W. Other lawmakers and candidates have voiced support for the U.A.W. or criticized the strikes.When negotiations began in July, Mr. Fain initially demanded a 40 percent increase in wages, noting that workers’ pay has not kept up with inflation over the last 15 years and that the chief executives of the three companies have seen pay increases of roughly that magnitude.The automakers, which have made near-record profits over the last 10 years, have all offered increases of slightly more than 20 percent over four years. Company executives have said anything more would threaten their ability to compete with nonunion companies like Tesla and invest in new electric vehicle models and battery factories.The union also wants to end a wage system in which newly hired workers earn just over half the top U.A.W. wage, $32 an hour now, and need to work for eight years to reach the maximum. It is also seeking cost-of-living adjustments if inflation flares, pensions for a greater number of workers, company-paid retirement health care, shorter working hours and the right to strike in response to plant closings.In separate statements, Ford and Stellantis have said they agreed to provide cost-of-living increases, shorten the time it takes for employees to reach the top wage, and several other measures the union has sought.Ford also said it was “open to the possibility of working with the U.A.W. on future battery plants in the U.S.” Its battery plants are still under construction and have not hired any production workers yet.The union is concerned that some of its members will lose their jobs, especially people who work at engine and transmission plants, as the automakers produce more electric cars and trucks. Those vehicles do not need those parts, relying instead on electric motors and batteries.Stellantis’ chief operating officer for North America, Mark Stewart, said the company and the union were “making progress, but there are gaps that still need to be closed.”The union is also pushing the companies to convert temporary workers who now make a top wage of $20 an hour into full-time staff.Striking at only select locations at all three companies is a change from the past, when the U.A.W. typically called for a strike at all locations of one company that the union had chosen as its target. Striking at only a few locations hurts the companies — the idled plants make some of their most profitable models — but limits the economic damage to the broader economies in the affected states.It also could help preserve the union’s $825 million strike fund, from which striking workers are paid while they’re off the job. The union is paying striking workers $500 a week.G.M. said this week that the first two weeks of the strike had cost it $200 million. The three automakers and some of their suppliers have said that they have had to lay off hundreds of workers because the strikes have disrupted the supply and demand for certain parts.Santul Nerkar More

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    U.A.W. Chief Shawn Fain Has a Nonnegotiable Demand: Eat the Rich

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    For as long as anyone can remember, the Indiana city of Kokomo has been a conservative stronghold. Ronald Reagan crushed Walter Mondale in Kokomo. Bill Clinton lost twice. So did Barack Obama. The current mayor, a Republican, is running unopposed for re-election. It’s a town known for something it would prefer to forget: a Ku Klux Klan rally in 1923 that was the largest ever.Yet somehow Kokomo produced a union leader whose rhetoric is aimed at toppling the conservative and moneyed classes — a rebel who rejects the niceties of an earlier era in favor of a sharp-edged confrontation.“Billionaires in my opinion don’t have a right to exist,” says Shawn Fain, who is leading the United Automobile Workers in a multifront labor battle against the Big Three carmakers that has little precedent and is making a lot of noise.In interviews, in speeches and on social media, Mr. Fain hammers the wealthy again and again, making the cause of the union’s 150,000 autoworkers at General Motors, Ford Motor and Stellantis something much broader.“There’s a billionaire class, and there’s the rest of us,” he said at an impromptu news conference outside a Ford plant in Wayne, Mich. “We’re all expected to sit back and take the scraps and live paycheck to paycheck and scrape to get by. We’re second-class citizens.”Mr. Fain introduced President Biden on his visit to a U.A.W. picket line last month in Michigan.Pete Marovich for The New York TimesBefore Mr. Fain took over in March, the U.A.W. leadership did not so much scorn the billionaires as strive to emulate them. One executive spent $2 million in embezzled funds on gambling, cocaine and fancy cars. Another bought $13,000 worth of cigars in one day. A federal investigation won 17 convictions against the leadership.Mr. Fain defeated the incumbent by the thinnest of margins. That might have given another candidate an incentive to keep a low profile, secure an adequate contract and declare victory.Not this fellow. He is playing a very high-stakes game.First, there are the aggressive demands and the unusual tactics. The union wants a 40 percent pay raise over four years to make up for much smaller increases in past years, a four-day workweek, annual cost-of-living adjustments, paid health care for retirees and the elimination of a lower pay tier for newer workers. To secure these benefits, the U.A.W. is challenging all three companies at once, which it had never done, by staging a targeted, escalating walkout.Mr. Fain, 54, has made himself the face of the strike, which is in its third week. On Facebook Live in August, he literally threw away a contract proposal from Stellantis, the automaker that absorbed what was once Chrysler. “That’s where it belongs: the trash,” he explained.During a rally with President Biden last week, Mr. Fain invoked President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s hallowed phrase about American factories being the arsenal of democracy. “Today, the enemy isn’t some foreign country miles away — it’s right here in our own area,” he said, casting the automakers in the role of the Axis powers. “It’s corporate greed.”Since U.A.W. members began targeted walkouts over their contract demands, Mr. Fain has made himself the face of the strike.Brittany Greeson for The New York TimesWhether Mr. Fain’s fiery words will lead to effective negotiations is an open question. Fiery words can inspire, but they can also anger. Stellantis said the union leaders seemed “more concerned about pursuing their own political agendas than negotiating.” G.M. denounced the union’s “rhetoric and theatrics,” and Ford said the U.A.W. should focus on talks and not “planning strikes and P.R. events.”“I’m subtle as a hammer,” Mr. Fain acknowledged in an interview. “Probably always was. That’s in my work life. Privately, I’m more shy.” Even his official U.A.W. biography calls him “outspoken” and says he was “ostracized” for his contentious assertions in union meetings.The people who knew him in high school in Kokomo in the 1980s definitely did not see this rise to national prominence coming. They recall an easygoing guy with a lot of respect for authority.“I don’t think Kokomo was a breeding ground for radicals,” said Paul Nicodemus, another member of the class of 1987, adding that the city was “known for having the biggest tree trunk and the largest stuffed bull,” two longtime local tourist attractions. Malcolm X, whom Mr. Fain recently invoked, wasn’t on the curriculum.A closer look, however, reveals how Mr. Fain’s upbringing may have played a role in creating a confrontational figure who vilifies the automakers while alarming Wall Street. “Like watching a slow-moving car crash take place on black ice,” Wedbush analysts wrote as the strike expanded last week to more factories.Mr. Fain’s great-grandparents Gordon and Effie Fain were economic migrants, moving to Kokomo from Kentucky in the 1920s.Mr. Fain’s hometown, Kokomo, Ind., is a traditional Republican bastion.Lee Klafczynski for The New York Times“My grandparents came from poverty,” Mr. Fain said. “When I see people from Mexico or Venezuela being vilified, I see my grandparents. They were born in Kentucky and Tennessee rather than across the border, but I don’t see them as different.”When the Fains arrived, the auto industry in Kokomo was consolidating. In 1937, Chrysler bought a dormant auto plant to make transmissions. Stanley Fain, Shawn’s grandfather, worked for Chrysler for 35 years. Other relatives worked for General Motors.Shawn’s father, Rodger, broke with tradition. He was the Kokomo chief of police; his wife, Stella, was a nurse. In Rodger’s career, there are echoes of his son’s situation. He was hired to clean up a mess.Kokomo had several high-profile murders in the 1970s, making the populace more fearful, but it was also a time when relations between the police and the city were strained. There were allegations that the police were hostage to political whims, which led to a chief’s resignation. The police protested low wages by driving past the mayor’s house with sirens blaring and similar antics, according to a 2014 history of law enforcement in the county. They also went on strike for a day.The first Chrysler pay stub received by Mr. Fain’s grandfather Stanley Fain, a union member, in 1937.Sarah Rice for The New York TimesKokomo has a long automaking history. Chrysler took over a dormant plant in the 1930s and remained the dominant local employer when Mr. Fain was growing up.Lee Klafczynski for The New York TimesRodger Fain, who became chief in 1980, is credited with professionalizing the force and ending the acceptance of gratuities. When the Klan decided to march through town shortly after he took the job, it was a high-tension moment. There were vivid memories of a 1979 march in North Carolina where Klan members shot and killed five participants in a counterdemonstration organized by the Communist Party.The Kokomo march took place without incident, and Chief Fain got credit for an absence of violence. Still, the work wasn’t the sort of thing he wanted his son to do.“My father steered me away from a career in law enforcement,” Mr. Fain said. “When he retired in 1987, he told me that back in his day, you only had to worry about someone pulling a knife. Now everyone was arming themselves.”The 1987 yearbook for Taylor High School had the theme “… lovin’ every minute of it!” There was nothing Shawn loved more than sports. He played basketball all four years of high school. Football, golf, cross-country and baseball took up other seasons.“In Indiana, you have one option, and that’s basketball,” Mr. Fain said. “It was religion. Fathers pushed their sons and even their daughters to play basketball. I had a pretty hard-core basketball coach, in your face all the time, and I adopted a lot of that mentality.”Mr. Fain was an avid athlete in high school, with a particular passion for basketball. In Indiana, “it was religion,” he said.Paul Sancya/Kokomo TribuneThat aggressive attitude on the court served him and the team well, to an extent. The yearbook put a good face on it, calling it an “educational” season, but the record was 5-16.His teammates remember the good parts.“There was one game when we were down by one,” Brian Tate said. “The ball came back to us, I dribbled the length of the court, looked to my right, saw Shawn was open. I said, ‘This is the guy.’ I got it to him, and he nailed it at the last second — game over. He was clutch.”Dr. Tate, now an endodontist, does not recall any budding activists.“We were pretty simple kids,” he said. “I don’t ever remember Shawn by any stretch expressing a political opinion. We never talked about billionaires.”There weren’t many billionaires to talk about. In 1982, Forbes found only 13 when it started listing the country’s richest people. In 1986, there were 26. In 1987, Forbes listed 49.In Kokomo, the non-billionaires were not doing as well. The economy had recovered from the devastating recession of the early 1980s, when one in four workers in the area was unemployed. But it wasn’t moving forward. Local average wages were stagnant, the Labor Department reported.A high school yearbook photo of Mr. Fain, second from right in the back row. “We were pretty simple kids,” a classmate recalled.Lee Klafczynski for The New York Times“Some of them may grow up knowing what they want to do,” Mr. Fain said of teenagers, “but I wasn’t one of them.”Lee Klafczynski for The New York TimesMr. Fain had no idea what to do with his life. “A lot of young teenagers are pushed to pick out a career in the eighth grade, but they haven’t experienced life, they haven’t experienced reality,” he said. “Some of them may grow up knowing what they want to do, but I wasn’t one of them.”He attended the Kokomo branch of Indiana University, not a top-tier basketball school. He got some attention for a good game or two, but dropped out before getting a degree.There were hard times. Mr. Fain married a high school classmate in 1991 and had two girls. “When you go through hardship and are laid off, live on $80-a-week unemployment, apply for government aid to get formula and diapers for your child, it makes you realize what it takes to survive in this world,” he said. (The marriage ended in divorce. He is engaged to Keesha McConaghie, a financial analyst for the U.A.W.)It was a neighbor in the electricians’ union who set Mr. Fain on a viable path. “If you had asked me, ‘Do you want to be an electrician?’ — I probably would have laughed. I knew nothing about that trade. I applied, got in, and the rest is history.” He began working for Chrysler in 1994.His father provided a final element that shaped the future union leader. Rodger Fain ran for the Indiana legislature as a Democrat in 1986. His platform included supporting economic development, attracting high-paying jobs and tearing down the “walls” between labor and management. The vote was close, but as usual Kokomo went for the Republican.Mr. Fain talking to U.A.W. members at a Michigan plant during his run for the union presidency early this year.Jim West/AlamyShawn Fain, raised to be active in the community, ran for the school board in 1998. He wasn’t elected but liked the idea of service.“Some people, when they see things happening they disagree with, let it happen,” Mr. Nicodemus, the former classmate, said. “And there are others like Shawn. Instead of sitting back, he steps up and says, ‘I’ll be the guy.’”That was what happened at the U.A.W., even if for the longest time the union leadership didn’t want the guy.“I didn’t like the way things were going in my plant, was elected, and the rest was history,” Mr. Fain said, who won five terms as a skilled trades committeeman and held other posts.In 2007, he was a leader in a grass-roots campaign to reject a contract with Chrysler that would pay new workers at a lower rate and made other concessions. In accepting the deal, he told U.A.W. leadership, “you might as well get a gun and shoot yourself in the head.”The contract was approved, but Mr. Fain gained a reputation as a rebel. Eleven years ago, he moved from Kokomo to Detroit to work directly for the union. In the ensuing years, corruption scandals at the top of the U.A.W. ended with two successive union presidents in prison, along with a mandate from a court-appointed monitor for the top posts to be elected by popular vote for the first time.It was an opening for reformers, and Mr. Fain led an insurgent ticket that ousted the old guard. He pledged not only to end corruption but also to jettison a go-along, get-along approach that he denounced as “company unionism.” One of his first public acts was to decline the traditional handshake with the automakers at the start of negotiations in July.“I never planned on running for U.A.W. president,” Mr. Fain said. “It wasn’t on my radar. But things change.”Brittany Greeson for The New York TimesHe calls his caustic attitude “a migration,” something he took on “just from experience.” Likewise with his political journey. “I never planned on running for U.A.W. president,” he said. “It wasn’t on my radar. But things change.”The inexorable rise of the billionaires offered more motivation. There are an estimated 750 of them in the United States now, and they are quite a bit richer than they were. “We’re all fed up with seeing the rich get richer,” Mr. Fain declared recently. (His own income last year was $160,000; the U.A.W. lists the president’s base salary at $207,000.)Nelson Lichtenstein, a labor historian, said he saw Mr. Fain as a throwback.“He is using more forceful rhetoric than any U.A.W. leadership in a long while, reaching back to the 1930s and 1940s,” Mr. Lichtenstein said. “The idea of mutual accommodation with the companies is gone.”Mr. Fain took Senator Bernie Sanders, the progressive Vermont independent, to a September rally and cites Walter Reuther, the U.A.W. leader during the postwar years, as an inspiration, along with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the “pyramid of success” developed by John Wooden, the coach who produced a U.C.L.A. basketball dynasty. The Wooden principles include at the apex a suggestion about “enjoyment of a difficult challenge.”A strike is a double-edged sword, said Patrick Anderson, chief executive of Anderson Economic Group in East Lansing, Mich. The greater the number of striking workers, the more pressure on the employer. But as the strike goes on, the people who will feel it the worst are those very workers, which gives them an incentive to settle. The automakers know this, of course, which makes for a difficult challenge indeed.Mr. Fain copes with stress by working out and listening to music, cranking up selections from the entire spectrum — hip-hop, ’80s rock, Metallica, Frank Sinatra. He’s still getting used to the job, and to the fact that Shawn Fain from Kokomo Local 1166 is the U.A.W. president.“Surreal,” he calls it. If anything will keep him grounded, he figures it might be this: “U.A.W. leaders in the past tended to forget who they’re here to represent. I don’t forget.” More