What about nonunion companies like Tesla and Toyota? “Foreign automakers operating in the United States (Toyota, Hyundai, etc.) pay their workers about $55 per hour all in,” Rampell observed in September. “Tesla is estimated to pay workers somewhere in the mid-$40s. In other words, the legacy manufacturers are already at a significant cost disadvantage compared with their biggest competitors.” Yes, Fain is well aware of that. So one week after the Big Three agreement was ratified, he initiated an organizing drive at the 13 nonunion car companies that operate in the United States, including Toyota, Honda, Volkswagen, BMW, and Tesla. These companies employ about 150,000 workers or slightly more than are represented by UAW. If Fain organized all of them, he could double the number of workers covered by the October agreement.
Even before Fain launched his organizing drive, Honda and Toyota responded to the Big Three contracts by hiking pay 11 percent and 9 percent, respectively. “We’ve shown the world,” Fain says in a rousing organizing video posted on the UAW website,
that this industry is harming workers and consumers to the benefit of company executives and the rich, and it’s time that the working class did something about it. But it’s not just the Big Three. It’s across the auto industry. CEOs are raking in billions while autoworkers’ real wages are falling.
Fain then goes on to say that the Japanese and Korean automakers “made nearly twice as much as the Big Three in the past decade … with over 40 percent of their revenue coming from their North American operations. Don’t autoworkers at Toyota, Honda, Hyundai, Nissan, Subaru, and Mazda deserve a record cut of those record profits?” Good question! During that same period, Fain said, BMW, Volkswagen, and Mercedes Benz “made almost the same as the Japanese and Korean companies … Do Volkswagen, BMW, and Mercedes workers not deserve their fair share of this booming auto industry?”