The standoff between the United Auto Workers union and the Detroit Three—General Motors, Ford and Stellantis—is likely to linger.
And part of the reason for that is two very different perspectives on key negotiation issues.
Automotive News, a sister publication of Rubber News, recently broke the data central to those issues in three graphics online. Here's a look at the graphics and breakdown of four viewpoints it addresses.
In terms of membership, the UAW took a hit during the Great Recession. Looking just at the 21st century, membership peaked at 700,000 in 2001 and continued on a downward trajectory from there, hitting its lowest point in 2009.
It rose a bit in the years after and has held steady since, hovering between 350,000 and 400,000.
"This is not to say that the UAW has lost half of its leverage," Ted Morgan, a partner with Plante Moran, said during a webinar hosted by the Association for Rubber Products Manufacturers. "They still have a ton of leverage."
Look no further than this strike—and the graphic below—for proof of that.
"What this (graphic) does kind of highlight," Morgan said, "is the impact that a fairly small percentage of the work force associated with building cars and trucks is impacting the whole industry, including everyone on this call that makes any automotive parts."
The auto industry is changing. And the North American landscape has shifted.
The Detroit 3 used to own the lion's share of the North American market, but that's changed over the last 25 years or so—and particularly in the last 10 as electrification emerges and new players, such as Tesla, step up.
In the same graphic that shows the D3 market share, Automotive News notes how the cost of doing business has grown. For the OEMs, the cost of hourly work went up $21 from $45 in 1999 to $66 in the first half of 2023.
At the same time, the top hourly pay for workers has remained fairly steady, rising by just $6 per hour from 1999 to 2023. And that is one of the reasons the UAW is fighting for bigger pay increases.
Yes, the hourly per-hour cost of labor is going up more quickly for the OEMs than the hourly pay for the UAW.
Comparatively, though, the Detroit 3 are paying higher per-hour labor costs than other OEMs industrywide.
Automotive News data shows that they could be paying as much as $22 more than Tesla.
"It doesn't take a negotiation genius to pick out why that might be," Mark Barrott, a partner with Plante Moran, said during the ARPM webinar. "And it doesn't take an investing genius to say, 'We know what Tesla's market cap is here, which is 10 times the combined market cap of D3' and to see why. For the most part, transplants and Tesla are non-unionized. If I am sitting on the GM, Ford or Stellantis side of the negotiating table, this is a chart I will refer to fairly often."
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