This month marks two years since the United Auto Workers’ (UAW) “stand-up strike.” We made history as a union with that fight. But we’ve got more to win, at the Big Three and beyond.
Our Big Three contract expiration in 2028 is less than a thousand days away. So it’s time to talk about how far we’ve come, how far we have left to go, how we’re going to fight differently so we can win differently, and how we’re going to finally win justice for what the working class lost in the Great Recession — starting with retiree pensions and health care.
I want to start with a couple images, what I believe are the most important charts in America in 2025. They are simple charts, but they tell the whole story about everything that is wrong with our country and economy.
On one line, you see productivity. Since 1948, American workers have been producing more and more value. Our productivity is through the roof. An average full-time worker today is creating 250 percent more value for their employers than a worker did in 1948. We work harder, we work smarter, we generate more wealth than any generation of workers in US history.
On another line, you see wages. For a while, wages kept up with productivity. Unions had the power to make sure that when workers produced more, they also got paid more. That’s how it should be.
But starting around 1980, that line broke. Productivity kept climbing, and wages flatlined. And as seen on the second graph, at the same time productivity climbed and wages flatlined, union membership began to crash. One in three workers belonged to a union in the 1950s. Today only about one in ten workers are in a union.
When corporations went on the attack, union membership went down, and wages went down with it. But that…
Auteur: Shawn Fain
