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As UAW strike looms, auto workers want 4-day, 32-hour workweek, among other contract demands
United Auto Workers – the union that represents workers at the Big 3 automakers in Detroit – are threatening to strike over stalled contract negotiations. One of the changes the union wants to see is a four-day workweek, working 32 hours for 40 hours of pay.
UAW President Shawn Fain gave an address last month on Facebook Live, explaining the demands of the union. “Our members are working 60, 70, even 80 hours a week just to make ends meet. That’s not living. It’s barely surviving and it needs to stop,” he said.
After receiving a contract proposal from Ford, which Fain said “insults our very worth,” he gave another address on the platform.
“The labor movement once fought for a vision of work life in which everyone had 8 hours for work, 8 hours rest, and 8 hours recreation,” he said. “Sadly, it feels like we’ve gone so far backwards that we have to fight just to have the 40-hour workweek back.”
Advocating for shorter workweeks is not a new concept for auto workers. Congress amended federal labor laws in 1940, limiting the workweek to 40 hours, but nearly 15 years earlier, Ford Motors became one of the first companies to implement a 40-hour week.
In an interview with In These Times, a monthly progressive publication, Fain said he learned that UAW had advocated for 35- and 32-hour workweeks back in the 1930s and 1940s. “And you know, 80 years later, in bargaining in 2019, our leadership was agreeing to seven-day, 12-hour schedules,” Fain said.
“I don’t consider [a 30-hour workweek] ambitious. I consider it almost a human rights issue,” he said, adding that many workers’ health has been impacted by the long hours, with some suffering injuries. “That’s the reality of standing there on assembly lines working day after day, seven days a week, 10 hours a day, 12 hours a day.”
UAW isn’t the first group that has advocated for four-day workweeks – and in some industries, the change has been made.
Hundreds of U.S. school districts have adopted a four-day workweek, including Independence School District in Missouri, one of the largest districts in the state to implement the change. Superintendent Dale Herl told CBS News earlier this year that 35 minutes will be added to each day to make up for the loss of Mondays, and childcare on Mondays will be offered for $30 a day.
The four-day school week helps schools experiencing a teacher shortage recruit staff. “The number of teaching applications that we’ve received have gone up more than four-fold,” Herl said.
The change for a shorter week may be a result of the pandemic, when workers in some industries found a better work-life balance while working from home. A survey from the International Foundation of Employment found that 75% of corporate and single employers have employees working remotely on certain days of the week.
And while 80% are not considering a four-day workweek, 14% are, with 1% already implementing pilot programs and another 1% formally implementing the change.
Nearly 70% of employers that are considering a four-day workweek come from five industries: manufacturing or distribution, health care and medicine, professional service firms, nonprofits and high technology, according to the survey.
The main reasons employers are not adopting four-day workweeks? Lack of interest by upper management, difficulty implementing it organization worldwide, unsure if it would work with organizational structure and concern that it would hurt business operations, the survey showed.
What are UAW’s other demands?
The four-day workweek is just one part of the UAW’s demands for the Big 3 – Ford, General Motors and Stellantis, formerly Fiat Chrysler. The union also wants big pay raises – which Fain says the Big 3 can afford, since their CEOs saw a 40% pay increase on average in the last four years. They also want more paid time off and a benefit pension, among other things.
They also want to restore COLA – cost of living adjustments – that ensure the working class receives the benefits needed to survive in the current economy. COLA is used by the Social Security Administration, which increased benefits for 70 million people by 8.7 percent in 2023.
UAW says 65 Big 3 plants have been closed in the last 20 years, which they say devastates hometowns. The union wants to implement a “working family protection program” that pays UAW to do community service work if the companies shut down a facility.
The strike of more than 140,000 union members is looming and the automakers have until 11:59 p.m. Thursday to reach an agreement.
How much do UAW workers make?
In one of his addresses, Fain said the Big 3 raked in a combined $21 billion in profits in the first six months of 2023. “Record profits mean record contracts,” Fain said.
UAW wants Ford and GM’s full-time assembly plant workers to make $32.32 an hour and Stellantis’ full-time employees to make $31.77 an hour.
Fain said starting wages have decreased from 2007, when new workers made $19.60 an hour, or $28.96 an hour to account for inflation. Now, starting wages are $18.04 an hour.
In 2007 it took three years to reach $28 an hour – now, it takes about eight years to reach $32 an hour.
An Israeli attack on Iran damaged facilities at a secretive military base southeast of the Iranian capital that experts in the past have linked to Tehran’s onetime nuclear weapons program and at another base tied to its ballistic missile program, satellite photos analyzed Sunday by The Associated Press show.
Some of the buildings damaged sat in Iran’s Parchin military base, where the International Atomic Energy Agency suspects Iran in the past conducted tests of high explosives that could trigger a nuclear weapon. Iran long has insisted its nuclear program is peaceful, though the IAEA, Western intelligence agencies and others say Tehran had an active weapons program up until 2003.
The other damage could be seen at the nearby Khojir military base, which analysts believe hides an underground tunnel system and missile production sites.
Israel launched a series of strikes on Iranian military facilities in retaliation for the barrage of ballistic missiles the Islamic republic fired on Israel earlier this month.
Planet Labs PBC / AP
Iran’s military has not acknowledged damage at either Khojir or Parchin from Israel’s attack early Saturday, though it has said the assault killed four Iranian soldiers working in the country’s air defense systems.
Iran’s mission to the United Nations did not immediately respond to a request for comment, nor did the Israeli military.
However, Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Sunday told an audience that the Israeli attack “should not be exaggerated nor downplayed,” while stopping short of calling for an immediate retaliatory strike. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Sunday that the strikes “severely harmed” Iran and achieved all of Israel’s goals.
“The air force struck throughout Iran. We severely harmed Iran’s defense capabilities and its ability to produce missiles that are aimed toward us,” Netanyahu said in his first public comments on the strikes.
It remains unclear how many sites in total were targeted in the Israeli attack. There have been no images of damage so far released by Iran’s military.
Planet Labs PBC / AP
Iranian officials have identified affected areas as being in Ilam, Khuzestan and Tehran provinces. Burned fields could be seen in satellite images from Planet Labs PBC around Iran’s Tange Bijar natural gas production site in Ilam province on Saturday, though it wasn’t immediately clear if it was related to the attack. Ilam province sits on the Iran-Iraq border in western Iran.
The most telling damage could be seen in Planet Labs images of Parchin, some 40 kilometers (25 miles) southeast of downtown Tehran near the Mamalu Dam. There, one structure appeared to be totally destroyed while others looked damaged in the attack.
At Khojir, some 20 kilometers (12 miles) away from downtown Tehran, damage could be seen on at least two structures in satellite images.
Analysts including Decker Eveleth at the Virginia-based think tank CNA, Joe Truzman at the Washington-based Foundation for Defense of Democracies and former United Nations weapon inspector David Albright, as well as other open-source experts, first identified the damage to the bases. The locations of the two bases correspond to videos obtained by the AP showing Iranian air defense systems firing in the vicinity early Saturday.
At Parchin, Albright’s Institute for Science and International Security identified the destroyed building against a mountainside as “Taleghan 2.” It said an archive of Iranian nuclear data earlier seized by Israel identified the building as housing “a smaller, elongated high explosive chamber and a flash X-ray system to examine small-scale high explosive tests.”
“Such tests may have included high explosives compressing a core of natural uranium, simulating the initiation of a nuclear explosive,” a 2018 report by the institute says.
Planet Labs PBC / AP
In a message posted to the social platform X early Sunday, the institute added: “It is not certain whether Iran used uranium at ‘Taleghan 2,’ but it is possible it studied the compression of natural uranium hemispheres, which would explain its hasty and secretive renovation efforts following the IAEA’s request to access Parchin in 2011.”
It’s unclear what, if any, equipment would have been inside of the “Taleghan 2” building early Saturday. There were no Israeli strikes on Iran’s oil industry, nor its nuclear enrichment sites or its nuclear power plant at Bushehr during the assault.
Rafael Mariano Grossi, who leads the IAEA, confirmed that on X, saying “Iran’s nuclear facilities have not been impacted.”
“Inspectors are safe and continue their vital work,” he added. “I call for prudence and restraint from actions that could jeopardize the safety & security of nuclear & other radioactive materials.”
Other buildings destroyed at Khojir and Parchin likely included a warehouse and other buildings where Iran used industrial mixers to create the solid fuel needed for its extensive ballistic missile arsenal, Eveleth said.
In a statement issued immediately after the attack Saturday, the Israeli military said it targeted “missile manufacturing facilities used to produce the missiles that Iran fired at the state of Israel over the last year.”
Destroying such sites could greatly disrupt Iran’s ability to manufacture new ballistic missiles to replenish its arsenal after the two attacks on Israel. Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard, which oversees the country’s ballistic missile program, has been silent since Saturday’s attack.
Iran’s overall ballistic missile arsenal, which includes shorter-range missiles unable to reach Israel, was estimated to be “over 3,000” by Gen. Kenneth McKenzie, then-commander of the U.S. military’s Central Command, in testimony to the U.S. Senate in 2022. In the time since, Iran has fired hundreds of missiles in a series of attacks.
There have been no videos or photos posted to social media of missile parts or damage in civilian neighborhoods following the recent attack – suggesting that the Israeli strikes were far more accurate than Iran’s ballistic missile barrages targeting Israel in April and October. Israel relied on aircraft-fired missiles during its attack.
However, one factory appeared to have been hit in Shamsabad Industrial City, just south of Tehran near Imam Khomeini International Airport, the country’s main gateway to the outside world. Online videos of the damaged building corresponded to an address for a firm known as TIECO, which advertises itself as building advanced machinery used in Iran’s oil and gas industry.
Officials at TIECO requested the AP write the company a letter before responding to questions. The firm did not immediately reply to a letter sent to it.
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