Autoworkers shut down Ford’s largest factory in Kentucky in a surprise walkout Wednesday night.
The United Auto Workers (UAW) called on 8,700 union members at Ford’s truck plant in Louisville, Kentucky, to initiate a walkout Wednesday night after the legacy automaker declined to further their proposal to resolve differences.
“We’re not gonna wait around forever,” UAW president Shawn Fain said Wednesday in a post on the social media platform X, formerly Twitter. “If Ford can’t get that after four weeks on strike, these 8,700 workers shutting down their biggest plant will help them understand it.”
The Kentucky strike is a warning to other automotive manufacturing corporations like Stellantis, suggesting that more walkouts could follow if the automaker refused to come to the bargaining table Thursday with wage and benefit improvements.
“Here’s to hoping talks at Stellantis today are more productive than Ford yesterday,” Fain posted Thursday on X.
The UAW walkouts against Ford, Stellantis, and GM are approaching the one-month mark, and with tensions escalating and contract negotiations seemingly stalling, the union could call on more members to join the strike. Thus far, the UAW has independently targeted a smaller number of plants rather than a large number simultaneously.
As such, Wednesday’s surprise walkout brings the number on strike against the three automakers to approximately 22% of the 150,000 UAW members, per Reuters.
However, Wells Fargo analyst Colin Langan suggests that the strikes could end by the end of October.
“We think this escalation is a sign that the UAW could be close to a contract proposal with Ford in the next 1-2 weeks,” said Langan, Yahoo Finance reported.
With business operations and manufacturing actively shut down at Ford’s Kentucky truck plant – the automaker’s most profitable and largest facility responsible for $25 billion in annual revenue – Ford is expected to lose millions of dollars each day the walkout persists.
“We know it’s going to hit them,” said Anthony Spencer, a UAW member who has worked at the Ford Kentucky plant for nearly a decade, per AP News. “This is a historic moment. We’ve got people that’s got 30, 35, 40 years — they’ve never been on strike. So the morale is good.”
In response to the walkout Wednesday night, Ford called the decision “grossly irresponsible” but “unsurprising given the union leadership’s stated strategy of keeping the Detroit 3 wounded for months through ‘reputational damage’ and ‘industrial chaos,’” per Reuters.
Additionally, Ford said its current proposal to the union, which includes a 23% wage increase over four years, is an “outstanding offer that would make a meaningful positive difference in the quality of life for our 57,000 UAW-represented workers, who are already among the best compensated hourly manufacturing workers anywhere in the world,” per The Washington Post.
The Dallas Express reached out to Ford and the UAW but did not hear back by the time of publishing.
