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But outlets like the Wall Street Journal (10/30/23), New York Times (11/9/23) and Bloomberg (11/9/23), still struggling to report on labor from a workers’ perspective (see FAIR.org, 9/26/23), instead focused on the economy at large or predictive reporting. Throughout the strike, media seemed interested in any story—how the union will wreck the economy, Musk’s potential countermoves, why the EV transition is doomed—that didn’t focus on bread-and-butter gains for union members.
Unions vs. the economy
CBS Detroit (10/23/23) didn’t put the big number in perspective—or acknowledge that its source worked for the companies the UAW was on strike against.
Bloomberg (11/7/23, 11/9/23) reported that the work stoppage cost the auto industry billions of dollars. Others mourned the revenue loss for car companies, running headlines about the millions or billions lost (Fortune, 11/30/23; CNN, 10/31/23; PBS, 10/24/23).
Meanwhile, on earnings calls in late October, GM reported that total company revenue was up 5%, to more than $44 billion, boosting profits to $3.6 billion. And Ford assured investors that “our revenue remains strong, up 11%.” As Axios (11/30/23) pointed out, while Stellantis said the labor action cost it $3.2 billion, “it also reported that net revenues so far this year were at $48 billion, up 7% compared to the same quarter in 2022.”
CBS News Detroit (10/23/23) said that economic losses to the nation as a whole had surpassed $9.3 billion, citing Anderson Economic Group, consultants whose clients include General Motors and Ford, who had previously said that even a 10-day UAW strike could cost the US economy $5.6 billion, a line that was parroted throughout the media (Bloomberg, 9/10/23; New York Times, 9/13/23; Forbes, 9/15/23; see FAIR.org, 9/26/23). Even if the strike had cost the economy $9 billion, for perspective, that’s 1/30th of 1% of the US GDP.
As more workers continued to join the strike across the country and tentative deals were made, outlets like the Wall Street Journal (10/30/23) bemoaned rising labor costs. It even went as far (10/31/23) as to warn that high wages were “a potential complication for the Federal Reserve’s fight to lower inflation.”
“Even before the raise they are striking for, Detroit’s unionized auto workers are probably the best paid in the world after factoring in benefits such as healthcare,” said the Journal (10/11/23). “Their employers can afford it for now, but high labor costs box them in strategically.”
However, at the same time, GM CEO Mary Barra bragged to investors about the company’s profitability in an October 24 earnings call (Motley Fool, 10/24/23). “It’s been clear coming out of Covid that the wages and benefits across the US economy would need to increase because of inflation and other factors,” she added.
Unions vs. green energy
“These [electric] vehicles have fewer parts, and making them will eventually require fewer workers,” NPR (10/1/22) reported. But it isn’t necessarily so.
In its write-up about Biden taking a “victory lap” in the wake of the agreement, Bloomberg (11/7/23) wrote that “the strike put Biden’s pro-union bonafides up against his clean-energy push” for electric vehicles, because “union leaders and workers worried that push would cost them jobs, reduce wages and favor non-unionized companies.”
A similar piece in the New York Times (11/9/23) said the president made the case for clean energy, even “as many workers fear the president’s climate change agenda could endanger their jobs.” However, later in the same article, reporters Lisa Friedman and Neal Boudette quoted Syracuse University’s David Popp, who studies the economics of technological change, saying that “there doesn’t seem to be a consensus yet on whether” electric vehicles will require fewer workers.
The reporters also floated as a fact that “it takes fewer than half the laborers to assemble an all-electric vehicle as it does to build a gasoline-powered car.” Similarly, there is no consensus or data to back up this claim.
So where did it come from? Ford estimated in 2017 that there could be a 30% reduction in labor hours per unit for electric vehicles. In 2019, Morgan Stanley’s analyst Adam Jonas (CNBC, 3/15/19) said tech start-ups like Tesla and Rivian could build electric vehicles at “a 50% reduction in direct labor…or more.”
Auto executives continue to repeat the line that as EVs have fewer moving parts, they will require less labor. In 2022, Ford president and CEO Jim Farley told reporters, “It takes 40% less labor to make an electric car.” The America First Policy Institute, led by former Trump administration officials and endorsed by Trump himself, put out a widely-cited research report (7/13/23) citing the estimates from Ford themselves in 2017 and Farley’s comments in 2022.
But according to CNN Business (10/6/23), “Several research reports…found little total difference in the labor hour requirements of EV manufacturing compared to gas-powered cars.” For instance, a recent Carnegie Mellon University study (7/13/22) estimated the EV supply chain could require more labor than gas-powered cars when taking other components, such as batteries, into account.
As CNN‘s report demonstrated, such information was readily available to journalists during the UAW strike—and dispelling a false talking point would have been a very useful role for journalism to play. But most were content to simply repeat Ford’s talking point, no questions asked.
Demonizing union leaders
A New York Times profile (10/5/23) described UAW president Shawn Fain as “a confrontational figure who vilifies the automakers while alarming Wall Street.”
Media have also struggled to understand this new wave of union activism, often lifting up stories of highly educated or “relatively privileged” “salts“—employees who join a workplace with the intent of forming a union. For example, Bloomberg (4/3/23) calls them “the mostly secret ingredient in a once-in-a-generation wave of union organizing.” Others have made efforts to put a spotlight on specific organizers, like Jaz Brizack or Chris Smalls.
At the UAW, that spotlight was put on the reformist UAW president Shawn Fain and his team. “Led by Fain and a cohort of outside labor activists, [the UAW leadership] drove a campaign that company executives have called acrimonious and theatrical,” described the Wall Street Journal (11/14/23). The paper also found the time to run nearly 1,000 words (11/7/23) on Fain’s “Eat the Rich” shirt. That article followed a 2,500-word piece (10/30/23) about how “Three Young Activists Who Never Worked in an Auto Factory Helped Deliver Huge Win for the UAW.”
Fain was elected UAW president earlier this year by less than 500 votes (Labor Notes, 3/3/23), running against a scandal-ridden caucus that had been in power for decades. Fain won after a rule change let union members vote directly for leadership, instead of leaving the choice to chapter officials.
He brought on a communications expert who worked with Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, as well as a lawyer and a former labor journalist who have both worked with the NewsGuild, among other unions. Like the Wall Street Journal article (10/30/23) that painted the UAW’s leadership as outside agitators, others describe him and his team as “adversarial” or “socialist-aligned.”
However, Fain was elected in the most democratic election of the UAW’s recent history, in a union previously described as having a “legacy of corruption.” Some blame Fain for promising too much to members on the contract, or said his “demands have gone too far,” such as calling for a 32-hour work week at 40 hours of pay for autoworkers. “I want to be clear on this point—I didn’t raise members’ expectations,” Fain rebutted on one of his many Facebook Live posts (10/13/23). “Our broken economy is what’s raising our members’ expectations, and our members are right to be angry.”
This article originally appeared in FAIR.org on December 7th, 2023.
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