The current strike, the first in UAW history to target all of the big three simultaneously, is to a large degree an attempt to ensure that “shared prosperity” persists as a genuine thing in the profitable auto industry.
The fact that unionized workers have higher job satisfaction, lower turnover and a better quality of life doesn’t mean much to the balance sheet-obsessed corporate executives who sit at the bargaining table.
Tesla already pays its workers significantly less than the big three, and as long as Musk has no union to answer to, he will sit back and savor a UAW win against his competitors that widens that gap.
This is exactly what auto companies are trying to do every time they move a factory into a poor, anti-union southern state, where they can run it without any pesky interference from anyone trying to empower the people working the line.
What we cannot have, in the long term, is a situation in which the world’s richest conspiracy-addled Twitter addict uses the UAW’s gains at the Big Three as a chance to increase his market share by sticking it to his own underpaid non-union workforce.
The public, the politicians and every Tesla owner who would prefer not to be complicit in Gilded Age-style plutocratic inequality all need to lean on the big billionaire baby who can’t imagine having to share.
The original article contains 943 words, the summary contains 228 words. Saved 76%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The current strike, the first in UAW history to target all of the big three simultaneously, is to a large degree an attempt to ensure that “shared prosperity” persists as a genuine thing in the profitable auto industry.
The fact that unionized workers have higher job satisfaction, lower turnover and a better quality of life doesn’t mean much to the balance sheet-obsessed corporate executives who sit at the bargaining table.
Tesla already pays its workers significantly less than the big three, and as long as Musk has no union to answer to, he will sit back and savor a UAW win against his competitors that widens that gap.
This is exactly what auto companies are trying to do every time they move a factory into a poor, anti-union southern state, where they can run it without any pesky interference from anyone trying to empower the people working the line.
What we cannot have, in the long term, is a situation in which the world’s richest conspiracy-addled Twitter addict uses the UAW’s gains at the Big Three as a chance to increase his market share by sticking it to his own underpaid non-union workforce.
The public, the politicians and every Tesla owner who would prefer not to be complicit in Gilded Age-style plutocratic inequality all need to lean on the big billionaire baby who can’t imagine having to share.
The original article contains 943 words, the summary contains 228 words. Saved 76%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!