United Auto Workers’ Strike Yields Win for “Just Transition”

Nov 1, 2023

Unionized auto workers appear to have reached a tentative agreement with the Big Three automakers based in Detroit. After weeks of creative strategizing around strikes and setting high standards for their contract negotiations, manufacturers have agreed to many, but not all, of United Auto Workers (UAW)’s demands, including hefty wage increases, cost of living adjustments, and the elimination of a two-tiered hiring system.

Part of the union’s victory includes an agreement secured with GM in early October to bring electric car battery facilities under UAW’s national contract. Labor analyst Les Leopold sees this as critical to what climate justice organizers have for years been calling a “just transition” away from fossil fuels. Leopold is the executive director of the Labor Institute and author of the forthcoming book, Wall Street’s War on Workers: How Mass Layoffs and Greed Are Destroying the Working Class and What to Do About It.

He spoke with YES! Racial Justice Editor Sonali Kolhatkar on YES Presents: Rising Up With Sonali about what UAW’s victory means for labor organizing and climate justice.

Sonali Kolhatkar joined YES! in summer 2021, building on a long and decorated career in broadcast and print journalism. She is an award-winning multimedia journalist, and host and creator of YES! Presents: Rising Up with Sonali, a nationally syndicated television and radio program airing on Free Speech TV and dozens of independent and community radio stations. She is also Senior Correspondent with the Independent Media Institute’s Economy for All project where she writes a weekly column. She is the author of Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice (2023) and Bleeding Afghanistan: Washington, Warlords, and the Propaganda of Silence (2005). Her forthcoming book is called Talking About Abolition (Seven Stories Press, 2025). Sonali is co-director of the nonprofit group, Afghan Women’s Mission which she helped to co-found in 2000. She has a Master’s in Astronomy from the University of Hawai’i, and two undergraduate degrees in Physics and Astronomy from the University of Texas at Austin. Sonali reflects on “My Journey From Astrophysicist to Radio Host” in her 2014 TEDx talk of the same name.