UAW chief ready to take on Tesla, Musk; Fain predicts 'ugly' strife at Ford battery plants

Riding high on historic contract wins against Detroit’s automakers, UAW President Shawn Fain is confident he can take on Tesla Inc. and its anti-union CEO Elon Musk.

“We can beat anybody,” Fain said in an interview on Thursday with Bloomberg News. “It’s gonna come down to the people that work for him deciding if they want their fair share... or if they want him to fly himself to outer space at their expense,” he said. “I believe it’s doable.”

Fain said he’s already seeing non-union plants and workers in the U.S. react to the contract and is ready to go after them.

The UAW has before tried to organize the electric-car leader and others. Fain says these efforts failed because of the union’s corruption, coziness with bosses and bad contracts.

Fain’s predecessors Bob King and Dennis Williams both met with Musk. In 2020, Williams pleaded guilty to embezzlement and racketeering.

The union leader says he sees no reason to get face time with the Tesla CEO.

“I don’t know what that would serve,” said Fain. “Maybe we’ll meet at the bargaining table, once we’ve organized.”

Tesla didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Fain expects non-union companies will try to keep the UAW out by raising pay, like Toyota Motor Corp. did this week. The Japanese auto giant this week announced plans to increase the highest wage for most assembly line workers in the US by 9.2 percent.

That won’t work, Fain says. “Hopefully we get down there, we organize them and they become UAW members — and they can realize the full power of membership and get an even better contract,” he said.

UAW workers get 11 percent raises as soon as the new contracts are ratified. Over the life of the contract, the automakers agreed to give a 25 percent wage increase and a restoration in cost-of-living allowance, which takes top pay up 33 percent over that time, as well as giving new workers a faster progression to the top wage of $42 an hour.

Fain, during the interview, also said there could be a nasty fight ahead to organize workers at Ford Motor Co.’s jointly-owned EV battery plants, after the company declined to join its competitors in agreeing to ease the unionization process.

“Stellantis and GM agreeing to these terms, in effect buys them labor peace as we move forward,” Fain said. At Ford, in contrast, he said, “that could get ugly.”

Ford declined to comment. General Motors and Stellantis didn’t immediately comment in response to inquiries.

Because the automakers partnered with South Korean firms to mount the joint ventures, those plants are considered separate entities, not governed by the master contract that determines wages and benefits for auto workers. But terms in the tentative agreements will allow current GM and Stellantis employees to be “leased” to their joint ventures, while remaining employed by the Detroit firms, Fain said. That way they don’t take a pay cut.

The two companies have also agreed to a “card check” process to make it quicker and easier for new workers at those joint ventures to unionize, according to Fain. And if they do, he said, they will then be covered under the existing master agreement.

New employees at the joint ventures will get 75 percent of the pay rates in the master agreement, the UAW president said, but the union will aim to eliminate that gap when it renegotiates the deal in 2028. “The key thing was getting it under the master,” he said.

During the strike, Ford CEO Jim Farley accused the UAW of “holding the deal hostage over battery plants” as the automaker resisted bringing its joint-venture operations under the union’s master agreement.  

Ford has said it will allow its hourly workers to transfer into its wholly owned electric truck assembly plant under construction in Tennessee and the battery plant it has planned in Marshall, Mich., which it paused while negotiations unfolded.

With EV demand waning, Farley last week said Ford would delay construction of one of its three joint venture plants, a proposed second battery plant in Kentucky, as the automaker pushes back $12 billion in planned EV spending and throttles back ambitious production plans for plug-in models.

By the time the Detroit 3 contracts expire in 2028, Fain said, he’s confident the UAW will have organized workers at all the Detroit 3 joint ventures that are up and running, and will have brought them under the master agreement.