Solidarity with Uaw
Floor Speech
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Ms. JAYAPAL. Mr. Speaker, we have seen workers standing up to corporate greed and fighting for better rights on the job, good benefits, and fair wages.
Today, our Congressional Progressive Caucus Special Order hour is devoted to this topic and to our solidarity with striking workers at UAW plants across the country.
This week, the United Auto Workers authorized a strike. As a long- term organizer myself, and as the chair of our 103-member strong Congressional Progressive Caucus, a caucus that has been at the center of championing labor issues, I am proud to stand in solidarity with the nearly 150,000 United Auto Workers across the country.
Let me start today by thanking all the workers who have had the courage to organize, the courage to use their collective power to stand up for better pay, cost-of-living adjustments, increased job security, and many other critical benefits that they deserve to live with dignity.
Unionization is fundamentally about workplace democracy, about the engagement and the priorities of workers; your benefits, your hours, your pay, your priorities. Nobody tells you what those are except the workers themselves.
UAW workers are showing us what it means to have collective power to stand together and to demand better.
Over the last decade, CEOs at the Big Three automakers have seen their salaries skyrocket by 40 percent, and these companies have made close to $250 billion in profits over the last decade.
Let me just say that again: A quarter of a trillion dollars in profit for these three automakers, while workers in the auto manufacturing industry have actually seen their wages drop by more than 20 percent when adjusted for inflation.
Just listen to these numbers.
At Ford, the CEO makes 281 times that wage of the median worker.
At General Motors, the ratio is 362 to 1, and at Stellantis, which makes Chrysler, Jeep, and Ram, the ratio is 365 to 1.
Do these CEOs work hundreds of times harder than their lowest paid workers?
The answer is, there is nothing at these companies without the workers. There would be no profits without these workers. Why is it that they cannot share in the profits in an equitable way?
It is workers who have built the successes of these companies and led them to these record profits. Yet, these same workers have reported being forced to work 12-hour shifts for 90 days straight without a single day off. That is just unconscionable.
It is unacceptable for these CEOs to be raking in multimillion-dollar salaries while their workers are forced to strike for the pay raises and the benefits they should be entitled to.
UAW has been clear about their demands for months. We are in this situation because the Big Three automakers, their CEOs, have refused to even come to the table in meeting workers' demands halfway. These companies need to come to the bargaining table in good faith. They cannot expect workers to continue working unreasonable hours without job security to make cars that they cannot even buy.
In spite of the failure of the Big Three to grant workers' demands, the unionization movement is not slowing down. When their contract expired on Thursday, September 14, UAW president Shawn Fain announced initial strikes at three plants that include nearly 13,000 workers. Still awaiting a fair contract, a new strike deadline of this Friday, September 22, at noon has been announced if Ford, General Motors, or Stellantis haven't made progress toward a new agreement.
Many of these CEOs frame UAW's demands as unreasonable, but let me be clear about something. Labor costs make up only about 5 percent of the costs that goes into a vehicle. These companies could raise worker wages to the levels they are asking without raising costs to consumers and still rake in billions in profits.
Let's not forget who stepped up and sacrificed during the recession. These companies actually got billions of dollars in taxpayer bailouts, and autoworkers were the ones who took life-changing cuts to benefits and wages just to keep the industry alive because they cared about that industry.
For the Big Three, this is a huge opportunity to lead and to repay the American taxpayers and the autoworkers who made the sacrifices to keep those companies afloat.
These big corporations should be standing with instead of against the very workers who built their companies from the bottom up, and any management that says otherwise does not understand what workplace democracy means.
It is clear that President Biden understands what is at stake. He just recently said--and it is quite unprecedented for a President to say this--the Big Three ``should go further to ensure record corporate profits mean record contracts for the UAW.''
We agree. House Democrats in the Congressional Progressive Caucus understand this, too. That is why we in the House have passed the PRO Act multiple times, despite it dying in the Senate because of a Jim Crow legacy filibuster.
That is why we are bringing manufacturing union jobs to America in every corner of this country. Unions keep our economy strong. They protect our workers. The power to come together and organize is so important, and it is a right that I will always defend in Congress.
As workers at UAW and other unions across the country push for fair pay and better benefits, we at the Congressional Progressive Caucus, we in the Democratic Caucus, will be standing with them in solidarity today, tomorrow, and forever.
Meng), who has been a champion for labor issues and of justice in general.
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Ms. JAYAPAL. Mr. Speaker, before the gentlewoman leaves, I would engage in a colloquy with her for a couple of minutes.
I know she has been on the picket lines with workers. She has talked to striking workers. Can she tell us some of what she is hearing about what people have been giving up, just in terms of their own security, their own ability to take care of their families?
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Ms. JAYAPAL. I yield to the gentlewoman from Michigan.
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Ms. JAYAPAL. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman so much for her leadership, and I thank her for sharing that.
I think it is really important to remember that these are the workers who actually saved the auto industry by giving up defined benefit pension plans, by giving up salary increases, wage increases, benefit increases at that very time when we needed them to because they care so much about making sure that we have a competitive auto industry. I know that that has been everything that the gentlewoman has worked for, as well.
We are so delighted she is now here in Congress to do that work.
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Ms. JAYAPAL.
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Ms. JAYAPAL. Mr. Speaker, I thank Representative DeSaulnier for his comments.
Velazquez), the ranking member of the Small Business Committee and a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus executive board, somebody who has truly seen around the world the plight of workers and the need for justice.
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Ms. JAYAPAL. Mr. Speaker, I will take a minute, just in case anybody who is out there listening has been interested in the concept of strikes.
I think it is important to say that striking is not an inherently bad or inherently good thing. It is not a failure of our system. In fact, it is a tool that is used to rebalance power between employers and workers.
Employers don't have any right to pay unsustainable wages. They don't have any right to put forward unsustainable benefits. They don't have a right to keep families unstable by filling their workforce with workers that they just name as temporary, even though sometimes they work for 8 or 10 years. They don't have any right to put the burden of a worker's retirement on families or on governments, particularly when so many of these autoworkers have spent generations working for these companies and building these companies. Employers have no such rights.
Striking is actually the noble way that workers can reset the power dynamic so that they and their families can get what they deserve. They make the decision to strike very soberly. If you listen to many of the autoworkers that are on the picket lines today, they talk about how they have been saving, preparing for this moment. They have not been going to movies. They have not been spending on things that they might otherwise spend on, because they know that in striking, what they are doing is fighting not only for their wages and benefits and working conditions, they are actually fighting for the wages, the benefits, and the working conditions of generations of workers to come, perhaps even their sons, their daughters, their children, their grandchildren, to be able to have good jobs.
I think that is a really important thing to think about. For us, our job, I think, is as a community of those workers to support that decision, especially when inequality is hurting our society so badly.
Here in Congress, I think our job as Members of Congress is to make sure that we strengthen the right to collectively bargain and to organize, to make sure that workers have that power, to work with management.
In many parts of the world, it is not an adversarial relationship, and it is not an adversarial relationship because both management and workers understand that a company can do better when management supports workers, when workers are paid well. Of course, by the way, when workers' wages go up, they spend more. When they spend more, their communities do better, their businesses do better, and everyone does better.
The tragedy of the last many decades really, accompanied by policy that has forced these changes, is that trickle-down economics doesn't work. What actually happens in trickle-down economics is a few people at the very top get rich and everybody else loses out. That is why we have the highest inequality in our country in half a century. It is why not just income inequality, but wealth inequality is at its highest. It is why in the wealthiest country in the world, we have 130 million people who are poor and low wage.
When workers are striking, it is a reflection, a consequence of bad policy choices that have not furthered the goal of equity and equality and fairness, and it is also a rebalancing of power.
I was interested, so as I was thinking about this Special Order hour, I looked up how many strikes we have seen recently. Just since the beginning of this year, there have been 247 strikes so far that involve 341,000 workers.
When you look at what has happened out of some of the big contracts we have seen, from the port contracts to the graduate students and the research students in my home State of Washington, the UPS workers, what you are finally seeing with collective bargaining is the ability to move wages in the right direction. Of course, if that doesn't happen, then the tool of a strike is always on the table as a way to force people to listen to the demands of workers.
I think today, as we think about the situation that we are in, everybody understands how important the auto industry is to us in this country. We all understand that we have competition from other countries around the world and that the way that we are going to make sure that we keep our industry strong is to bring back manufacturing to the United States. That is exactly what Democrats and President Biden have been pushing for with the bipartisan infrastructure bill, with the Inflation Reduction Act, with all of the bills that we have passed, with the CHIPS and Science Act.
The reality is that we are trying to bring back jobs to the United States and to make sure that they are good union jobs. Unfortunately, there are people who are cynically using the UAW strike to try to say that they stand up for workers, like our former President. He is saying that he is going to go to Michigan, he is going to suddenly appear to speak to the autoworkers. I would just remind anybody who is watching that under the former President, we lost hundreds of thousands of jobs that were offshored. We didn't make the American economy more competitive. We didn't bring back good union jobs.
In fact, my colleagues across the aisle have opposed us almost unanimously. We have some Republicans who have stuck with us on the PRO Act to advance collective bargaining. We have tried to move forward increases to the minimum wage. We have done all of the things on the Democratic side with very little, if any, Republican support, depending on the bill, to make sure that we are strengthening the middle class and the bottom, creating a bottom-up and middle-out economy that benefits all of us.
Nobody is against people earning profits. What is wrong is to earn those profits at the cost of the workers who actually make those profits for you. That is wrong. That is why we are so proud to stand in solidarity with the autoworkers, with the United Auto Workers.
We thank the president, Shawn Fain for his strength of negotiating and for his clarity of vision, for his moral call for everybody to do better, because when everybody does better, everybody does better. When only a few people at the very top do better, everyone suffers.
Mr. Speaker, I hope that the striking autoworkers across the country know that the Congressional Progressive Caucus and that House Democrats stand with them in this very difficult time. We promise that we will continue to protect workers, to protect collective bargaining, to expand collective bargaining, and to make sure that workers everywhere enjoy the rights and the dignity that they deserve.
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