Andy Levin

UAW workers were the clear winners in their strike at GM. The contract workers just ratified includes improvements from the status of temporary workers to overall pay and benefits to keeping the Detroit-Hamtramck plant open to build electric pickup trucks.

Why did they win? In a word, solidarity.

In many visits to various picket lines, I never heard of a single person breaking rank — that’s 49,000 Americans, diverse in every way, sticking together 100%. Can you think of another example of that happening in our country, which everyone says is so divided?

Yet, it took a month of this incredible solidarity for the workers to achieve what they did, and 44% of production workers and a third of skilled trades workers still voted against the pact. Despite the hard-won gains, GM will continue to use temps, workers will still toil for years instead of months to reach full pay, GM will still close several facilities, and its promises of jobs going forward are less precise and robust than in the past.

In this moment when unemployment is so low, the stock market so high and the recovery so long, why can’t workers win more, and more easily?

First, America’s labor laws are so outdated that only 6.4% of private sector workers have a union today, compared to a third when we were building the world’s greatest middle class after World War II. Employers can easily crush workers’ attempts to organize, without any meaningful deterrent. Our largest employer, Walmart, has zero unionized workers among its 1.5 million employees, despite the obvious gains they could make through collective bargaining.

Unionized workers can’t win truly just wages and benefits when the vast majority of their fellow workers neither have unions nor a realistic hope of creating them. We need to pass the Protecting the Right to Organize Act so that the 48% of Americans who say they would like to be in a union can make that happen. Massive income and wealth inequality will not subside until we do.

Second, even though UAW pioneered the idea of pattern bargaining (winning very similar contracts at GM, Ford and Chrysler), the union no longer represents critical mass of the workforce in the auto industry anymore. German, Japanese and Korean auto giants that are unionized in their own countries have set up shop mostly in the South and fight unions here like they never would at home. Neither the UAW nor any union will be able to win what workers deserve when they can’t bargain with all employers in any given industry.

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More broadly, companies have taken many steps to shed responsibility for their workers. We will have to update our labor laws to account for 21st Century realities. The great pattern bargaining in auto, steel and other sectors helped all workers when so many toiled in massive factories. In today’s world where so much work is part-time, temporary, contracted out, franchised and gigged, we need to introduce sectoral bargaining, so company and worker representatives in each industry can negotiate fair wages and benefits at the national level, allowing for bargaining closer to home over regional variations and concerns.

Finally, there will be no justice for workers at GM or other companies whose goods move about the globe as long as they are subject to international trade agreements that create a race to the bottom.GM increased its car production in Mexico by 50% in the last 10 years. Yet, most of GM's overall production in Mexico is sold in the U.S. The company pays its workers in Mexico an estimated $2 an hour, based on information available from 2016. This intentional strategy is repeated in auto parts, aerospace, call centers and industrial bakeries — yes, your Oreos may be made in Mexico.

I have proposed language to Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s working group to ensure that President Trump’s proposed NAFTA replacement, the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), actually makes things better for American workers by raising standards for Mexican workers. I won’t support an agreement that hollows out the middle class for another quarter century.

The bottom line is this. The destruction of good U.S. manufacturing jobs isn’t some automatic result of globalization or the march of technology. Germany is subject to all the same forces, yet twice as much of its GDP as ours comes from industrial production – and its workers are more heavily unionized, better compensated and enjoy universal health care, vacations, family leave and more.

We must admit that for 40 years we have adopted labor, economic and trade policies – across Democratic and Republican administrations – that have weakened American workers. To me, accepting that truth is liberating rather than depressing. Why? It means that we can change course and create the conditions for a renaissance of worker voice, power and prosperity in the years ahead.

Andy Levin, a Democrat from Bloomfield Township, represents Michigan's 9th House District in the U.S. House of Representatives.