The New Yorker:

In forcing the Big Three automakers to pay higher wages and make other concessions, the union demonstrated the enduring power of organized labor.

By John Cassidy

The six-week rolling strike by members of the United Auto Workers union seems to be at an end. After making deals with Ford and Stellantis last week, U.A.W. leaders reached a tentative agreement with General Motors on Monday, opening the way for a full return to work. Although some details of the agreements haven’t yet been made public, it’s clear that the U.A.W. has achieved a historic victory for its members. Capitalizing on the industry’s high profits, a tight labor market, and support from President Biden, the union forced the Big Three automakers to make big concessions not just on wage rates but in other areas, too.

Shawn Fain, the leader of the U.A.W., has hailed the outcome of the strike as a major win for the entire labor movement, and he’s right. Like the recent deals between the Teamsters and UPS, health-care workers and Kaiser Permanente, and the Writers Guild and the Hollywood studios, the tentative agreement between the U.A.W. and the Big Three has demonstrated that, even in the fissured and outsourced economy of the twenty-first century, organized labor can still wield considerable power, especially in favorable economic conditions. That isn’t a surprise to anybody familiar with labor history, but it is a lesson that in recent decades has often been lost, or deliberately obscured.

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