Begin with what fifteen years had taken. Cost-of-living adjustments were stripped from autoworkers’ contracts in the 2008 crisis and never came back. New hires entered a lower tier and spent eight years climbing to top rate. By 2023, real hourly earnings in American auto manufacturing had fallen 19.3 percent since 2008. epi.org
The companies across the table were not struggling. In just the first six months of 2023, Ford, General Motors and Stellantis had booked roughly $21 billion in profits. epi.org That year GM paid its chief executive $27.8 million and Stellantis paid its own about $39.5 million aol.com epi.org, and over the previous decade the three companies’ CEO pay had climbed about 40 percent—the same years the workers’ real pay was falling. epi.org
In September 2023 the UAW did something no union had done: it struck all three Detroit automakers at once. Not everywhere, and not on a schedule—the Stand-Up Strike took out a plant at a time, on no announced pattern, expanding week by week so that no company could plan around it. labornotes.org It ran about six weeks. Ford settled on 25 October, Stellantis on the 28th, General Motors on the 30th. jacobin.com
The settlement’s arithmetic: wages up 25 percent across a four-and-a-half-year contract, with 11 percent landing at once. COLA returned after its fifteen-year absence. The road to top rate shortened from eight years to three. The two-tier system that had split the workforce closed. A $5,000 ratification bonus. jacobin.com bridgemi.com
Then the contract started paying people who had never walked a picket line.
Within weeks of the tentative agreements—before UAW members had even finished voting—Toyota announced raises of 9 to 10 percent for its American factory workers, Honda 11 percent, and Hyundai 25 percent by 2028 at its Alabama and Georgia plants. None of those plants is unionized. Harry Katz, the Cornell labor scholar, read the motive plainly: these companies “always wanted to stay nonunion” and have historically tried to stay close to Detroit’s top-tier wages—raising pay is what keeping the union out costs. UAW president Shawn Fain offered his own translation: “UAW, that stands for ‘You Are Welcome.’” cbsnews.com
The ripple reached Tennessee too, and kept going. Volkswagen raised Chattanooga pay 11 percent weeks after the strike ended—and the organizing drive there continued anyway labornotes.org, through a 73 percent vote to join the UAW in April 2024 and a first contract ratified at 96 percent in February 2026. newschannel9.com The strike’s terms became the measuring stick for a plant the union had twice failed to organize.
A strike is priced by what it wins its members. This one has to be priced by what it won everyone else.
Comment
The Questions the Ripple Raises
The bump is real, and so is what it is for. Katz’s point cuts both ways: if matching union wages is the cost of staying nonunion, then the nonunion worker’s raise is set in Detroit, at a bargaining table that worker has no seat at. That arrangement holds only as long as a strong union exists to be matched—and the same expert who described the mechanism doubts the organizing will follow, because it historically has not.
So the questions on this desk’s ledger: Who bargains for the worker whose raise arrives as a defensive measure? And if the answer is “the UAW, indirectly, for free”—what happens to that worker’s pay when the next contract is bargained by a weaker union, or none? Chattanooga chose its own answer in 2024. The plants in Alabama and Georgia have not yet been asked.
What You Can Do
The pre-strike arithmetic—who had given back what, and who was earning what—is public because the Economic Policy Institute published it. epi.org Labor Notes covered the strike week by week from inside it. labornotes.org If this account was useful, they did the work; read them directly, and the next contract fight will not need explaining after the fact.