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A deep dive into the union’s demands
It’s time to deliver pumpkin spiced lattes to the picket lines, because Hot Labor Summer is raging into the fall.
The United Auto Workers Union’s contract with General Motors, Ford Motor Company and Stellantis expired at midnight on Thursday, and the union has made the unprecedented decision to strike all three companies at once.
The transition to electric vehicles is a defining issue of the fight. The Big Three say they aspire for 40% to 50% of their U.S. sales to be electric vehicles by the end of this decade. But they argue that ceding to workers’ demands for higher wages would jeopardize their ability to invest in EVs and their competitiveness against Tesla and foreign automakers that operate nonunion plants.
Meanwhile, the automakers are opening new joint venture battery plants that are not covered under the union’s national agreement, and paying workers there less. That trend, plus the fear that electric vehicles will require fewer workers to assemble than gas-powered vehicles, call into question the Biden administration’s key selling point of tackling climate change — that switching to EVs and other clean technologies is an opportunity “to create millions of good-paying, union jobs.”
When it comes to what UAW is trying to do about all of this, it's not entirely clear. Fain has taken a different stance than his predecessors by embracing the transition to EVs. But when you look at the union’s key demands, electric vehicles aren’t mentioned anywhere.
So how is the union actually tackling the transition? The negotiations are largely confidential, and the UAW has only shared the loose outlines of its proposals to the Big Three. But here’s what we know.
Electric vehicles aren’t named directly on the union’s list, but the transition away from gas-powered cars is implicated in multiple proposals.
1. Wages. The union’s top priority is higher pay. Fain went into negotiations asking for a 40% increase in wages over the next four years, equivalent to the raises that Big Three CEOs received over the last four, and cost of living increases to match inflation. This would boost the pay of all its members, including those working on EVs.
2. Ending Tiers. Fain also aims to end the “tier” system which created different pay classes and benefits between workers. Currently, new hires start at $16 to $18 and have to pay their dues for eight years before earning senior-level wages that top out at $32. Temporary workers make even less, and temp workers at Stellantis have no clear path to permanent positions. It’s not entirely clear what the tier system will mean as the automakers ramp up EV production.
3. Right to strike plant closures. One fear is that automakers will shut down existing plants and build new ones elsewhere, forcing workers to relocate and disrupt their lives if they want to keep their jobs. For example, earlier this year, Stellantis idled a plant in Illinois, laying off a workforce of 1,350. The company said it made the decision due to the escalating costs to shift to electric vehicle production. Some of the plant’s workers transferred to other plants in other states. Workers also fear the companies will end up building new EV plants in right-to-work states, and doing so under new ownership structures, like the joint-venture battery plants, enabling them to keep the UAW out entirely.
The union contracts typically contain a “no strike, no lockout” clause that bars workers from protesting. So if one of the automakers decides not to “allocate” any new vehicle models to a particular plant, signaling potential closure, workers have no way to fight the decision. This provision would change that. While it’s unclear how effective a strike at a plant slated for closure would be, it could provide a path for them to open negotiations with the company to try and keep it open, or move one of its planned EV models into the plant.
4. Paid community service. Fain has also proposed a “Working Family Protection Program.” This seems more like a veiled threat than a real protection plan for workers. The details are vague, but the union said it's asking that in the event of a plant closure, companies have to pay UAW members to do community service work. In a speech to UAW members this week, Fain described it as a way to “disincentivize the Big Three from killing jobs.”
This one’s a bit murky. UAW leadership has made it clear it wants jobs at the Big Three’s joint venture battery plants to be union positions. But the UAW leadership hasn’t said publicly whether rolling joint-venture plant workers into the master contract is one of its demands in the negotiations. And it’s not even clear the union can use a joint venture as a bargaining chip in its current talks, as The American Prospectreports.
The automakers have already tried to quash the notion earlier this summer in negotiations between UAW and the Ultium Cells plant in Lordstown, Ohio, which is owned by GM and LG Energy Solutions, a South Korean company. In August, the union reached an interim agreement with Ultium, winning $3 to $4 raises and thousands more in backpay for workers. But the company has resisted the union’s calls to roll plant workers into the national GM contract, insisting it “is a separate legal entity and independent employer from GM or LGES.”
Art Wheaton, director of Labor Studies at Cornell University, told me one thing the automakers could do is agree to a non-compete clause, or pledge neutrality at the joint-venture plants, so that workers could more easily organize and vote to join UAW.
We don’t know what other transition-related provisions the union may have proposed, like job training guarantees. Ultimately, its EV wins could look more like new plant investment announcements than broader protections for workers in the transition.
For example, going into the last UAW strike in 2019, GM had four “unallocated” plants that were likely to close. But the union negotiated with GM to save one of the plants — the Detroit-Hamtramck assembly factory. The final contract contained a promise from GM to invest $3 billion to retool it for electric truck and van assembly. In 2021, the plant reopened as Factory ZERO, the company’s first dedicated EV assembly plant, and began producing the 2022 GMC Hummer EV Pickup.
It should be noted that the Big Three are not Fain’s only target. The union boss has also withheld his support for Biden’s re-election, putting pressure on the administration to do more to support organized labor.
We’re unlikely to see a big spending package like the Inflation Reduction Act that could premise subsidies on union labor anytime soon. But Ian Greer, another professor at Cornell’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations, told me there’s a lot more policymakers can do to protect workers. He pointed to a federal program called Trade Adjustment Assistance, which provided aid to workers who lost their jobs, including training opportunities. The program expired in 2022.
“Congress could just reauthorize that, and that would release a lot of resources to support these workers who are going to lose their jobs,” said Greer. “Our institutions create so few tools and levers that unions can use to manage this transition and protect their members. I think this is a really important bit of context about why there's a strike that very few Americans are talking about.”
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Suburban streets, exploding pipes, and those Santa Ana winds, for starters.
A fire needs three things to burn: heat, fuel, and oxygen. The first is important: At some point this week, for a reason we have yet to discover and may never will, a piece of flammable material in Los Angeles County got hot enough to ignite. The last is essential: The resulting fires, which have now burned nearly 29,000 acres, are fanned by exceptionally powerful and dry Santa Ana winds.
But in the critical days ahead, it is that central ingredient that will preoccupy fire managers, emergency responders, and the public, who are watching their homes — wood-framed containers full of memories, primary documents, material wealth, sentimental heirlooms — transformed into raw fuel. “Grass is one fuel model; timber is another fuel model; brushes are another — there are dozens of fuel models,” Bobbie Scopa, a veteran firefighter and author of the memoir Both Sides of the Fire Line, told me. “But when a fire goes from the wildland into the urban interface, you’re now burning houses.”
This jump from chaparral shrubland into neighborhoods has frustrated firefighters’ efforts to gain an upper hand over the L.A. County fires. In the remote wilderness, firefighters can cut fire lines with axes, pulaskis, and shovels to contain the blaze. (A fire’s “containment” describes how much firefighters have encircled; 25% containment means a quarter of the fire perimeter is prevented from moving forward by manmade or natural fire breaks.)
Once a fire moves into an urban community and starts spreading house to house, however, as has already happened in Santa Monica, Pasadena, and other suburbs of Los Angeles, those strategies go out the window. A fire break starves a fire by introducing a gap in its fuel; it can be a cleared strip of vegetation, a river, or even a freeway. But you can’t just hack a fire break through a neighborhood. “Now you’re having to use big fire engines and spray lots of water,” Scopa said, compared to the wildlands where “we do a lot of firefighting without water.”
Water has already proven to be a significant issue in Los Angeles, where many hydrants near Palisades, the biggest of the five fires, had already gone dry by 3:00 a.m. Wednesday. “We’re fighting a wildfire with urban water systems, and that is really challenging,” Los Angeles Department of Water and Power CEO Janisse Quiñones explained in a news conference later that same day.
LADWP said it had filled its 114 water storage tanks before the fires started, but the city’s water supply was never intended to stop a 17,000-acre fire. The hydrants are “meant to put out a two-house fire, a one-house fire, or something like that,” Faith Kearns, a water and wildfire researcher at Arizona State University, told me. Additionally, homeowners sometimes leave their sprinklers on in the hopes that it will help protect their house, or try to fight fires with their own hoses. At a certain point, the system — just like the city personnel — becomes overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of the unfolding disaster.
Making matters worse is the wind, which restricted some of the aerial support firefighters typically employ. As gusts slowed on Thursday, retardant and water drops were able to resume, helping firefighters in their efforts. (The Eaton Fire, while still technically 0% contained because there are no established fire lines, has “significantly stopped” growing, The New York Times reports). Still, firefighters don’t typically “paint” neighborhoods; the drops, which don’t put out fires entirely so much as suppress them enough that firefighters can fight them at close range, are a liability. Kearns, however, told me that “the winds were so high, they weren’t able to do the water drops that they normally do and that are an enormous part of all fire operations,” and that “certainly compounded the problems of the fire hydrants running dry.”
Firefighters’ priority isn’t saving structures, though. “Firefighters save lives first before they have to deal with fire,” Alexander Maranghides, a fire protection engineer at the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the author of an ongoing case study of the 2018 Camp fire in Paradise, California, told me. That can be an enormous and time-consuming task in a dense area like suburban Los Angeles, and counterintuitively lead to more areas burning down. Speaking specifically from his conclusions about the Camp fire, which was similarly a wildland-urban interface, or WUI fire, Maranghides added, “It is very, very challenging because as things deteriorate — you’re talking about downed power lines, smoke obstructing visibility, and you end up with burn-overs,” when a fire moves so quickly that it overtakes people or fire crews. “And now you have to go and rescue those civilians who are caught in those burn-overs.” Sometimes, that requires firefighters to do triage — and let blocks burn to save lives.
Perhaps most ominously, the problems don’t end once the fire is out. When a house burns down, it is often the case that its water pipes burst. (This also adds to the water shortage woes during the event.) But when firefighters are simultaneously pumping water out of other parts of the system, air can be sucked down into those open water pipes. And not just any air. “We’re not talking about forest smoke, which is bad; we’re talking about WUI smoke, which is bad plus,” Maranghides said, again referring to his research in Paradise. “It’s not just wood burning; it’s wood, plastics, heavy metals, computers, cars, batteries, everything. You don’t want to be breathing it, and you don’t want it going into your water system.”
Water infrastructure can be damaged in other ways, as well. Because fires are burning “so much hotter now,” Kearns told me, contamination can occur due to melting PVC piping, which releases benzene, a carcinogen. Watersheds and reservoirs are also in danger of extended contamination, particularly once rains finally do come and wash soot, silt, debris, and potentially toxic flame retardant into nearby streams.
But that’s a problem for the future. In the meantime, Los Angeles — and lots of it — continues to burn.
“I don’t care how many resources you have; when the fires are burning like they do when we have Santa Anas, there’s so little you can do,” Scopa said. “All you can do is try to protect the people and get the people out, and try to keep your firefighters safe.”
Plus 3 more outstanding questions about this ongoing emergency.
As Los Angeles continued to battle multiple big blazes ripping through some of the most beloved (and expensive) areas of the city on Thursday, a question lingered in the background: What caused the fires in the first place?
Though fires are less common in California during this time of the year, they aren’t unheard of. In early December 2017, power lines sparked the Thomas Fire near Ventura, California, which burned through to mid-January. At the time it was the largest fire in the state since at least the 1930s. Now it’s the ninth-largest. Although that fire was in a more rural area, it ignited for many of the same reasons we’re seeing fires this week.
Read on for everything we know so far about how the fires started.
Five major fires started during the Santa Ana wind event this week:
Officials have not made any statements about the cause of any of the fires yet.
On Thursday morning, Edward Nordskog, a retired fire investigator from the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department, told me it was unlikely they had even begun looking into the root of the biggest and most destructive of the fires in the Pacific Palisades. “They don't start an investigation until it's safe to go into the area where the fire started, and it just hasn't been safe until probably today,” he said.
It can take years to determine the cause of a fire. Investigators did not pinpoint the cause of the Thomas Fire until March 2019, more than two years after it started.
But Nordskog doesn’t think it will take very long this time. It’s easier to narrow down the possibilities for an urban fire because there are typically both witnesses and surveillance footage, he told me. He said the most common causes of wildfires in Los Angeles are power lines and those started by unhoused people. They can also be caused by sparks from vehicles or equipment.
At about 27,000 acres burned, these fires are unlikely to make the charts for the largest in California history. But because they are burning in urban, densely populated, and expensive areas, they could be some of the most devastating. With an estimated 2,000 structures damaged so far, the Eaton and Palisades fires are likely to make the list for most destructive wildfire events in the state.
And they will certainly be at the top for costliest. The Palisades Fire has already been declared a likely contender for the most expensive wildfire in U.S. history. It has destroyed more than 1,000 structures in some of the most expensive zip codes in the country. Between that and the Eaton Fire, Accuweather estimates the damages could reach $57 billion.
While we don’t know the root causes of the ignitions, several factors came together to create perfect fire conditions in Southern California this week.
First, there’s the Santa Ana winds, an annual phenomenon in Southern California, when very dry, high-pressure air gets trapped in the Great Basin and begins escaping westward through mountain passes to lower-pressure areas along the coast. Most of the time, the wind in Los Angeles blows eastward from the ocean, but during a Santa Ana event, it changes direction, picking up speed as it rushes toward the sea.
Jon Keeley, a research scientist with the US Geological Survey and an adjunct professor at the University of California, Los Angeles told me that Santa Ana winds typically blow at maybe 30 to 40 miles per hour, while the winds this week hit upwards of 60 to 70 miles per hour. “More severe than is normal, but not unique,” he said. “We had similar severe winds in 2017 with the Thomas Fire.”
Second, Southern California is currently in the midst of extreme drought. Winter is typically a rainier season, but Los Angeles has seen less than half an inch of rain since July. That means that all the shrubland vegetation in the area is bone-dry. Again, Keeley said, this was not usual, but not unique. Some years are drier than others.
These fires were also not a question of fuel management, Keeley told me. “The fuels are not really the issue in these big fires. It's the extreme winds,” he said. “You can do prescription burning in chaparral and have essentially no impact on Santa Ana wind-driven fires.” As far as he can tell, based on information from CalFire, the Eaton Fire started on an urban street.
While it’s likely that climate change played a role in amplifying the drought, it’s hard to say how big a factor it was. Patrick Brown, a climate scientist at the Breakthrough Institute and adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins University, published a long post on X outlining the factors contributing to the fires, including a chart of historic rainfall during the winter in Los Angeles that shows oscillations between very wet and very dry years over the past eight decades. But climate change is expected to make dry years drier in Los Angeles. “The LA area is about 3°C warmer than it would be in preindustrial conditions, which (all else being equal) works to dry fuels and makes fires more intense,” Brown wrote.
And more of this week’s top renewable energy fights across the country.
1. Otsego County, Michigan – The Mitten State is proving just how hard it can be to build a solar project in wooded areas. Especially once Fox News gets involved.
2. Atlantic County, New Jersey – Opponents of offshore wind in Atlantic City are trying to undo an ordinance allowing construction of transmission cables that would connect the Atlantic Shores offshore wind project to the grid.
3. Benton County, Washington – Sorry Scout Clean Energy, but the Yakima Nation is coming for Horse Heaven.
Here’s what else we’re watching right now…
In Connecticut, officials have withdrawn from Vineyard Wind 2 — leading to the project being indefinitely shelved.
In Indiana, Invenergy just got a rejection from Marshall County for special use of agricultural lands.
In Kansas, residents in Dickinson County are filing legal action against county commissioners who approved Enel’s Hope Ridge wind project.
In Kentucky, a solar project was actually approved for once – this time for the East Kentucky Power Cooperative.
In North Carolina, Davidson County is getting a solar moratorium.
In Pennsylvania, the town of Unity rejected a solar project. Elsewhere in the state, the developer of the Newton 1 solar project is appealing their denial.
In South Carolina, a state appeals court has upheld the rejection of a 2,300 acre solar project proposed by Coastal Pine Solar.
In Washington State, Yakima County looks like it’ll keep its solar moratorium in place.