On Tuesday morning, General Motors (GM) announced their latest quarterly revenue, reporting billions of dollars in profit and beating Wall Street expectations.
In response, just hours later, 5,000 workers at GM’s largest and most profitable plant walked out, joining over 40,000 other workers who are picketing as part of the United Auto Workers (UAW) historic “Stand Up Strike” in its fifth week.
The surprise strike began after GM announced that it made over $3 billion in profit in the third quarter of 2023. The company said that the strike is costing it $200 million a week. But the company has still seen success in the first nine months of the year, reporting $8.9 billion in adjusted income, an increase of 11 percent over the same period last year — a year in which GM saw record earnings.
Workers walked out from Arlington Assembly in Texas, where they make SUVs like the Chevrolet Tahoe, GMC Yukon and Cadillac Escalade, which are among the biggest moneymakers for GM.
“As we’ve said for months: record profits equal record contracts,” said UAW President Shawn Fain. “It’s time GM workers, and the whole working class, get their fair share.”
The union says that the company’s latest contract offer is insufficient given GM’s $10 billion in profits so far this year. GM’s offer includes a two-tier wage system, a weak retirement contribution offer and insufficient cost of living adjustments.
“On the heels of their previous quarter, which set ‘a post-bankruptcy record’ in terms of revenue, it is clear that GM can afford a record contract and do more to repair the harm done by years of falling real wages and declining standards across the Big Three,” the union said.
GM has said that it has provided a “comprehensive” offer and that the company is “disappointed” by the strike.
The walkout comes one day after UAW announced the largest expansion of its strike so far. The union has been steadily rolling out strikes at the Big Three U.S. automakers following the expiration of the last workers’ contract in September.
In another surprise action on Monday, nearly 7,000 workers at the Michigan Stellantis plant, the company’s largest facility, began striking. The plant makes the Ram 1500 pickup truck — among Stellantis’s most profitable products.
The steady rollout of the strike — in which workers are being sent on strike local by local, rather than all at once — is a relatively unique tactic, allowing Fain and other union leaders to strategically time the strikes against the Big Three. Earlier this month, UAW won a major concession after it threatened to shut down the Arlington GM plant, getting GM to agree to include key electric vehicle manufacturing facilities into its national union agreement.
“We were about to shut down GM’s largest money maker, in Arlington Texas,” Fain said at the time. “Today, under threat of a major financial hit, they leapfrogged the pack in terms of a just transition. And here’s the punchline: Our strike is working. But we’re not there yet.”
The escalation of the strike is reflective of a trend within the labor movement at large, in which unions are becoming increasingly militant in their tactics — and winning bigger contracts as a result.
“Across the US, labor unions are winning surprisingly large contract settlements as workers have reset their expectations to demand considerably more than they did just a few years ago,” wrote labor reporter Steven Greenhouse for The Guardian this week, on a phenomenon he dubbed the “Great Reset.”
“The result has been a wave of impressive – sometimes eye-popping – union contracts over the past year, far more generous than in recent decades.”
We’re not backing down in the face of Trump’s threats.
As Donald Trump is inaugurated a second time, independent media organizations are faced with urgent mandates: Tell the truth more loudly than ever before. Do that work even as our standard modes of distribution (such as social media platforms) are being manipulated and curtailed by forces of fascist repression and ruthless capitalism. Do that work even as journalism and journalists face targeted attacks, including from the government itself. And do that work in community, never forgetting that we’re not shouting into a faceless void – we’re reaching out to real people amid a life-threatening political climate.
Our task is formidable, and it requires us to ground ourselves in our principles, remind ourselves of our utility, dig in and commit.
As a dizzying number of corporate news organizations – either through need or greed – rush to implement new ways to further monetize their content, and others acquiesce to Trump’s wishes, now is a time for movement media-makers to double down on community-first models.
At Truthout, we are reaffirming our commitments on this front: We won’t run ads or have a paywall because we believe that everyone should have access to information, and that access should exist without barriers and free of distractions from craven corporate interests. We recognize the implications for democracy when information-seekers click a link only to find the article trapped behind a paywall or buried on a page with dozens of invasive ads. The laws of capitalism dictate an unending increase in monetization, and much of the media simply follows those laws. Truthout and many of our peers are dedicating ourselves to following other paths – a commitment which feels vital in a moment when corporations are evermore overtly embedded in government.
Over 80 percent of Truthout‘s funding comes from small individual donations from our community of readers, and the remaining 20 percent comes from a handful of social justice-oriented foundations. Over a third of our total budget is supported by recurring monthly donors, many of whom give because they want to help us keep Truthout barrier-free for everyone.
You can help by giving today. Whether you can make a small monthly donation or a larger gift, Truthout only works with your support.