The United Auto Workers’ six-week strike against the US’s three largest automakers appeared to be coming to an end on Monday as the union brokered a deal with General Motors.
The agreement follows on the heels of deals with Ford and Stellantis, brokered in the past few days, effectively ending the first simultaneous strike against the three Detroit automakers.
The UAW strike has been the largest by car workers in decades, and has proved an unusual political flashpoint, with Donald Trump and Joe Biden supporting workers over the car companies.
Biden lauded the reported agreement reached with GM. “I think it’s great,” said Biden, who has touted himself as pro-union.
“Today’s historic agreement is yet another piece of good economic news, showing something I’ve always believed: worker power is critical to building an economy from the middle out and the bottom up, and so is economic growth,” Biden said during an event at the White House.
After the union reached a tentative agreement with Ford last week, Stellantis reached an agreement with similar contract terms on Saturday, and General Motors followed suit on Monday. The agreements include 25% wage increases for workers over the life of the contract and cost-of-living adjustments.
The union also won shortened wage progression scales, ended lower-paying wage tiers, and secured the reopening of Stellantis’s plant in Belvidere, Illinois, which closed down earlier this year.
The UAW president, Shawn Fain, surprised the automakers in September when, rather than all workers represented by the union being called on to strike simultaneously, the union strategically announced “stand-up” strikes at specific work sites to pressure the automakers to continue making progress in contract negotiations.
At the peak of the strikes, 46,000 auto workers were on strike at all three car firms.
“The stand-up strike will go down in history as an inflection point for our union, and for our movement,” Fain said during a livestream update on 29 October.
In the update on the tentative agreements reached with Ford and Stellantis, Fain said the next contract expiration was set for 1 May 2028. He called on other unions to align their contract expirations with their own to build collective pressure on employers in the next round of union contracts.
Fain had previously referred to workers at other auto companies including Tesla, Toyota and Honda as “UAW members of the future” and said on Sunday that the union’s next efforts will aim at unionizing auto workers at US plants currently not represented by unions at companies such as Tesla, Toyota and Volkswagen.
“It’s important that we not only strike, but that we strike together,” added Fain.
