Itemoids ★ UAW Strike

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The United Auto Workers strike has sparked fears of major economic turmoil, but the experts I spoke with think a recession is unlikely. Still, even if the economic effects of the strike aren’t felt nationwide, they are very real for workers, their families, and their communities.

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The Real Stakes

For more than a year, a drumbeat of warnings about an imminent recession has haunted even those who casually follow the news. Though a recession hasn’t materialized, many Americans still have a bleak outlook on the economy. So it’s little wonder that news of an imminent United Auto Workers strike last week stoked fears of further economic disruption. On Friday, the UAW decided to proceed with a “limited and targeted” stoppage at three locations: a Stellantis plant in Ohio, a General Motors factory in Missouri, and a Ford plant in Michigan. The strike is relatively small in size so far: About 13,000 of the UAW’s 150,000 workers at Stellantis, GM, and Ford are participating (though the union has threatened to add more). Ahead of the strike, a widely cited analysis—assuming that a strike would shut down all three of America’s major carmakers—predicted that its effects would ricochet across the economy, swiftly causing billions of dollars in damage.

But now that the strike has begun, in a targeted format at just three of the country’s dozens of plants, the economists and labor-relations experts I spoke with said that, barring major escalations in scope and duration, the strike is not likely to have a wide impact on national, or even state, economies. Peter Berg, the director of the School of Human Resources & Labor Relations at Michigan State University, told me that the likelihood of this strike tipping the economy into a recession, or meaningfully boosting inflation, is small, unless the strike stretches out for several more months.

Just because an event may not reshape the economy doesn’t mean its effects won’t be acutely felt: Eligible striking workers are making less while on strike, receiving stipends of $500 a week from a strike fund instead of their salary. Having less spending money may cause real pain for striking workers and their families, and may cause local businesses in striking communities to suffer too. Gabriel Ehrlich, an economic forecaster at the University of Michigan, emphasized this when we spoke, even as he explained that the strike would not likely affect the trajectory of Michigan’s economy (though not the only state targeted in the strikes, it is the historic seat of the American car industry), much less the national one. And, he added, if striking workers get a strong contract that includes pay raises, their spending power could even go up soon. In a “worst-case scenario,” he said, a dragged-out strike against all three companies at once could affect job-loss numbers and cause disruption to the national economy. But in the meantime, select workers (and the targeted carmakers and other companies, such as parts manufacturers, that do business with them) are likely to feel the effect of the strikes more acutely than the general public.

Harry Katz, a collective-bargaining professor at the School of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell, told me that he sees potential for compromise between the two sides, and thinks the talks are unlikely to stretch on for several months. Some of the issues in play in the UAW’s current negotiation with carmakers include higher pay—the union has asked for nearly 40 percent raises over four years, rejecting the carmakers’ offer of a roughly 20 percent bump—and job preservation in the era of electric vehicles. “I don’t think that this is a fight to the death,” Katz said. The UAW and the auto manufacturers were in talks this past weekend, and the union’s president said yesterday that if the talks don’t progress by noon on Friday, it may expand the number of workers participating in the strike. UAW did not immediately respond to my request for comment.

Carmaking looms large in the American psyche: Americans tend to think of the auto industry as powerful. But the industry is much smaller than it once was, and much less unionized. In the heyday of American car manufacturing after the Second World War, Katz noted, 95 percent of workers in the independent auto-parts sector were in unions. Now that figure is closer to 5 percent. As the size and heft of the auto industry have declined, so, too, has the power of a strike to affect America’s economy.

One week ago, the public did not know whether, or how many, UAW workers would go on strike. Now we don’t know where the strike will be in a week’s time, or the week after that. The stakes will continue to rise, not only for workers and the carmakers, but for President Joe Biden too. Biden has thrown his support behind the striking workers, though his electric-vehicle ambitions are a source of tension in the negotiations, and the UAW has not endorsed him. “Biden still is aligned with the labor movement, and I don’t think it helps him if there was a really big, long strike,” Katz explained. “I think that’s a more potent effect than the effect on the economy.”

Today’s News

India has expelled a Canadian diplomat after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau accused the Indian government of being connected to the assassination of the Sikh leader Hardeep Singh Nijjar and expelled an Indian diplomat. A court in Moscow refused to hear the Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich’s appeal against his continued pretrial detention. President Joe Biden and President Volodymyr Zelensky both spoke at the annual United Nations General Assembly about continued Russian aggression.

Evening Read

Jemal Countess / Getty

Russell Brand Wasn’t an Anomaly

By Sophie Gilbert

In the summer of 1999, when I was 16 years old, I remember walking to a train station in West London from a babysitting job when a 40-something man in a Range Rover pulled up, told me he was on television, and then announced to his young son (also in the car) that I was “Daddy’s new girlfriend.” I don’t know who the man was; I didn’t get in the car, not because I was afraid but because I’d just bought Californication for my minidisc player and wanted to listen to the album on the way home. But what he did wasn’t abnormal for the time. This was two years before the 35-year-old TV presenter and radio host Chris Evans (not the actor) married the 18-year-old pop star Billie Piper in Las Vegas, after a months-long relationship that started when he gave the teenager—so young, she hadn’t yet learned to drive—a Ferrari filled with roses. A year later, in 2002, the BBC Radio 1 host Chris Moyles offered, live on air, to take the singer Charlotte Church’s virginity on her 16th birthday, claiming that he could “lead her through the forest of sexuality” now that she was legal.

I’ve often wondered how Millennial women in Britain survived the aughts: not just the incessant fat shaming and the ritualized alcohol abuse, but also the cheerful, open predation that was everywhere in popular culture then.

Read the full article.