The United Auto Workers are again hitting the heart of America’s truck industry. Today, UAW president Shawn Fain announced a new strike at Stellantis’ Sterling Heights Assembly Plant. It’s the company’s largest and the only one that builds the RAM 1500 pickup truck.
In total, some 6,800 UAW members walked off of the job today in an effort to turn up the heat on Stellantis. According to Fain, both General Motors and Ford are offering more than Stellantis at this point. It’s that fact that led to the walk-out. This marks the first new expansion of the strike since UAW members walked out of Ford’s Kentucky Truck Plant on October 11th.
Fain and the UAW have continually increased the pressure on the big three over the course of the strike. Initially, the union announced new strike expansions on Fridays. Now, it’s expanding whenever and wherever it believes it’ll have the largest effect. Despite today’s news, it appears that the two sides are close.
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“We are where we are. They know where we need to be. We can get there. We can get a deal done this week, but we gotta get serious, the company has gotta get serious, and get down to business,” Fain said according to WXYZ.
“We don’t want our members out here. We want to get our members off the picket lines and back to work building the greatest product in America, but we want our fair share.” In total, this new expansion of the strike brings the grand total of workers on strike across all the UAW to over 40,000.
That’s just less than a third of the 150,000 UAW members across the country. According to the UAW, the big three made a combined $21 billion in profits during the first six months of 2023. It believes that its strike strategy will more effectively balance out the share of those profits.