Column: Ford, Fain stumble onto a path out of UAW strike. Will they take it?

Ford Motor Co. Executive Chair Bill Ford and UAW President Shawn Fain nipped at each other on Monday, but ironically, there's a potential compromise path out of the UAW strike by taking each man at his word.

Here's what I mean.

Speaking Monday from Ford Motor's historic Rouge Complex in Dearborn, Mich. — site of the infamous "Battle of the Overpass" in which the automaker's goons beat the hell out of UAW organizers in 1937, by the way — Ford said this:

"Choosing the right path is not just about Ford's future and our ability to compete. This is about the future of the American automobile industry. Toyota, Honda, Tesla and others are loving this strike because they know the longer it goes on, the better it is for them. They will win, and all of us will lose."

He's not wrong, at least about Detroit's future ability to compete should the UAW successfully win all it has asked. But I would argue that Ford's aim is off.

In direct response to Ford's comments, the UAW president said this:

"It's not the UAW and Ford against foreign automakers. It's autoworkers everywhere against corporate greed. If Ford wants to be the all-American auto company, they can pay all-American wages and benefits. Workers at Tesla, Toyota, Honda, and others are not the enemy — they're the UAW members of the future."

The path forward? Merge their statements.

Automakers including Toyota, Honda, Tesla, Hyundai, Kia, Nissan, Daimler, BMW, Volkswagen and Rivian all have assembly and/or component plants in the U.S., as do General Motors, Ford and Stellantis.

The main difference between the Detroit 3 and everybody else operating here is the UAW. The Detroit 3 are unionized, the others aren't. And why is that?

Well, the UAW organized what is now the Detroit 3 almost a century ago at a time when organized labor was ascendant, while foreign automakers didn't start showing up in the U.S. until the late 1970s and early 1980s, when labor was in the midst of a long, steady decline.

In 2022, the unionization rate in the U.S. economy fell to 10.1 percent, its lowest on record, with just 14.3 million unionized workers in the country, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. By comparison, in 1983, the year after American Honda's pioneering plant in Marysville, Ohio, opened, the union membership rate was 20.1 percent and there were 17.7 million union workers, the bureau said.

Yet, despite the unionization rate dropping in 2022, the total number of unionized workers in the U.S. actually rose by 273,000 last year from 2021. Part of that gain can be attributed to another statistic contained in the latest bureau release on the topic: In 2022, nonunion workers had median weekly earnings of $1,029 — 85 percent of union members' $1,216. Meanwhile, according to an annual Gallup survey, some 67 percent of respondents supported unions, while in Washington, President Joe Biden bills himself as a champion of organized labor, going so far as to visit a UAW picket line.

Add all that up, and it arguably gives the UAW the most fertile ground for organizing foreign automakers that it has ever had, but it still has to get up off the floor from its string of losses and do the work.

If the Detroit 3 rightfully can't put themselves at a competitive disadvantage, then they should insist that any remaining gap between their offers and the UAW's wage demands can only be closed contingent on the union successfully organizing at least some of their domestic competitors. Fain's rhetoric above would seem to agree, albeit not on the contingent part.

Of course, the details of such a contractual agreement would be enormously complicated and require legions of labor lawyers — such as how many competitors would the UAW need to organize for that agreement to kick in? But the fact is, the Detroit 3 can and should negotiate a written incentive for the UAW to improve its winless record of automaker organizing. And rank-and-file Detroit 3 workers should rightfully be the beneficiary: Organize a Toyota plant, and Detroit 3 workers benefit. Organize a Tesla plant, and they would get even more. And so on.

There's the path, folks.

All you have to do is take it — and find a way to get it ratified.