American rust belt12/23/2023 ![]() to stretch its eight-hundred-and-twenty-five-million-dollar strike fund, so that the strike could go longer and wider if progress wasn’t made.īaumhower, who started at Jeep in 1972, told me that he was pleased his plant was one of the first. The stand-up tactic, as opposed to walking out all at once, would allow the U.A.W. The name was a reference to the sit-down strikes of the nineteen-thirties, in which workers occupied plants to prevent management or strikebreakers from operating the machinery. He deployed a new tactic-the “stand-up strike”-which initially called for only one assembly plant from each company to walk out. On September 14th, the U.A.W.’s new president, Shawn Fain, called the first simultaneous strike against all Big Three companies in the union’s history. “This is what he’s known for.” Baumhower told me later, in his office, “It probably wasn’t a very professional speech-I just said the scam’s up.” He was eight years old when he first met Baumhower, in the same auditorium he’d been so nervous that he spilled two plates of chili mac onto his lap. Mike Sawaya, whose family has worked at the plant for three generations, was leaning against the wall behind the lectern. The crowd exploded, applauding and yelling. “That’s all going to change now,” Baumhower said. The starting rate had barely budged in fourteen years. Those compromises had been exploited by corporate greed, he said close to a third of the unit still earned less than sixteen dollars an hour. He described how, not long ago, the union had given up hard-won wages and benefits to help save the industry in a period of crisis. ![]() He has wisps of reddish-gray hair and the large forearms of a former assembly-line worker. ![]() Bruce Baumhower, who is sixty-eight years old and has been president of the local for more than three decades, got up to the lectern. The union’s contract was set to expire three weeks later, at midnight, and negotiations between the union and representatives of the Big Three-General Motors, Ford, and Stellantis (Chrysler and Jeep’s parent company)-were going nowhere. Typically, the monthly meeting attracts a far smaller crowd, but word of a possible strike had been circulating among U.A.W. Local 12 is the largest amalgamated union in the country, representing more than ten thousand people, including nearly six thousand at a Jeep factory in town. Late in the summer, several hundred autoworkers jammed into the auditorium of United Auto Workers Local 12, in Toledo, Ohio, for a monthly meeting. ![]()
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