Column: Fain's unusual tactics bring home rich deal for UAW members

We've taken all you've given,
It's getting hard to make a livin',
Mr. President, have pity on the working man ...

Those opening lines from Randy Newman's classic song from the 1974 album "Good Old Boys" were not written about the UAW strike of 2023, but they do have some resonance across the decades.

It may have been difficult for some folks to hear UAW President Shawn Fain complain that "thousands" of members earn less each year than Ford Motor Co.'s Kentucky Truck Plant generates each minute, given that most brought home a lot more than that.

But negotiations — and the public statements around them — sometimes aren't as much about empathy, fairness and accuracy as they are about expressing grievances and trying to extract as much from the other side as possible.

And in the end, Fain brought home a tentative agreement that is likely to be well received by the union's members — especially those who have been on the picket line from when it was warm and sunny until it was chilly and brisk (and then strangely, warm again before the UAW announced its deal with Ford).

Fain's unorthodox approach to striking — select operations at odd times — achieved some of the stated goals, such as keeping the automakers off-balance. It also satisfied what may have been unstated goals, such as minimizing the impact on profits, which will be shared with UAW members. And it led to suboptimal union situations in some cases, such as creating unequal economic outcomes for members — those newly on strike and getting no pay, those on strike more than a week and making do with $500 a week and those working full-time or overtime for full wages.

Could Fain have had a historically successful contract without all the histrionics of throwing contract proposals in the trash can or the weekly Facebook Live speeches? Perhaps. But without the populist demonstrations, it's not clear he would've had the members behind him and trusting him to get the best deal he could.

Let us not forget: Fain, the first UAW president in decades to be directly elected by the members, won a narrow victory when few turned out to vote. He squeaked into office with no base, no mandate and no machine.

He came to power in the wake of a sweeping scandal and steadily built up the UAW's pride and reputation while backing automakers into a corner. Every time they spoke up about his unreasonableness, he was ready with a quip about how much better executives and shareholders have it compared with workers. He even got the president of the United States to come to a picket line and cheer the strikers on.

I've been known to compare UAW negotiations to those between a consumer and a car salesman: Both want to make a deal; neither wants to be taken advantage of. At some point, the consumer might head toward the door, trying to get one last benefit before signing on the dotted line.

That's a bit of what we saw in the past few weeks as Fain expanded the walkout to the Detroit 3's most lucrative assembly plants — before calling off the strike against Ford.

Indirectly supporting Fain's argument about the challenges facing working women and men was none other than Elon Musk, who happens to run the company that has done the most to humble the Detroit 3.

On Tesla's third-quarter earnings call this month, Musk bemoaned the pressure of higher interest rates on consumers — the people who buy new cars. Tesla's epic price cuts, he argued, have basically been just enough to offset rising interest rates for shoppers who calculate how much car they can afford based mostly on the monthly payment. And he explained that after having lived and worked through the global financial crisis and Great Recession, he's now "paranoid" about how the economy can turn on car companies.

Along the way, he chastised the upper-middle class for their ignorance of what life is like for the workers of the world.

"It's sometimes difficult for people who are high income — and I'd say high to be like someone who's earning over $200,000 a year — to understand what life is like for someone who is earning $50,000 or $60,000 or $70,000 a year, which is most people," said Musk, whom Bloomberg lists as the richest man in the world.

Not the ideal messenger, but he's not wrong.

Over the coming years, UAW members who were making $60,000 and up are going to be making $80,000 and up. Even some who were making $40,000 are going to be making $80,000. Those kinds of results should give Fain a solid base and probably a durable political machine.

There's still a ways to go: Ratification at Ford, deals and votes at General Motors and Stellantis.

Those companies are facing the same high interest rates as Tesla, and soon they will do so with higher labor costs even as their market share has tumbled from 68 percent in 1999 to about 40 percent today.

The UAW, like Unifor in Canada, won historic raises in 2023. Here's hoping that the Detroit 3 can afford the price of labor peace and continue to earn enough to reinvest for the future.