WAYNE, Mich. — This summer, Markeis Womack, 31, installed visors and glove boxes on Broncos and Rangers for about eight hours a day on the assembly line at the Ford plant in Wayne, starting at 6 a.m. After, he cleaned offices, churches and day cares on a 10-hour shift working as a janitor. His work day ended at 4 a.m., because his Ford job didn’t pay enough to make ends meet. Womack, the father of two young kids, makes $20.69 an hour at Ford and said he can only dream of “stability and owning a house.”
Steven Summers, 60, who works in incoming quality control in the same Ford factory, has had things a bit easier. After 24 years on the job, Summers makes $32 an hour. He and his wife, a former autoworker, own a four-bedroom house with a pool in a suburb of Detroit. They raised four daughters and a grandchild on their wages, vacationing in Myrtle Beach, S.C., and signing up for softball leagues. His family isn’t rich, Summers says, but “we’re doing all right.”
Back in 1999, Summers started at $14 an hour — almost three times as much as minimum wage at the time — a rate that, adjusted for inflation, would be the equivalent of $22 an hour in 2020, when Womack started at Ford. But Womack’s starting wage was much less than that — $16.67 — about 1½ times as much as Michigan’s minimum wage and not much more than market wages at local fast-food chains.
The two work in different tiers at Ford, a system that creates vast differences in the compensation between new and legacy autoworkers. These tiers are at the heart of a labor dispute that last week pushed the United Auto Workers to launch the first strike against all of the Big Three Detroit automakers at once, starting with one factory each. Abolishing the tiered wage system is one of the union’s top demands.
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Eight striking Ford assembly line workers who are in the lower tier of the workforce told The Washington Post that they must work second jobs to make ends meet. They stock shelves at Dollar Tree, sort packages in Amazon warehouses, wax eyebrows professionally, sell discounted jewelry and deliver food on Uber Eats.
Ford said Monday that it has given significant ground to workers in the talks with the UAW and remains focused on getting a deal. In addition to 20 percent wage hikes over four years, Ford is offering some cost-of-living adjustments to wages, increased contributions to workers’ retirement savings and more paid time off. The company says it has offered to get rid of tiers, but is not offering to pay new hires the same rate as longer-term employees.
The tiered wage system came about as a concession the union made to automakers to save autoworkers’ jobs during the height of the 2008 financial crisis, when the automakers were teetering on the edge of solvency and eventually received government bailout loans of nearly $80 billion. To keep the companies afloat, the autoworkers union conceded to lower wages and reduced benefits for all workers hired after 2007.
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Labor historians say U.S. employers across industries began implementing tiers in the 1990s as a cost-cutting tactic that simultaneously sowed workplace resentment between union workers who do the same job for different pay and benefits. Over time, especially during the financial crisis, these discrepancies deepened. This summer, UPS workers and their union, the Teamsters, approved a new contract that ended a tiered wage system that paid newer part-time employees less. The autoworkers union has pointed to workers’ victory at UPS to argue that the Big Three should also abolish tiers.
Gabriel Winant, a history professor at the University of Chicago, said tiered workforces have been “totally toxic” for unionized industrial workplaces, which rely on wall-to-wall solidarity for their strength.
“Usually a given worker over the course of their time [in a union] can move up with seniority” when it comes to wages and benefits, Winant said, but a tier system makes at least some of the growth “impossible.”
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For Womack, ending tiers could be life-changing. Before his stint as a janitor, Womack worked at FedEx to supplement his income at Ford. He said he hopes to win a pay raise from Ford that’s good enough to survive on a single paycheck.
“I shouldn’t have to work two jobs,” Womack said, standing on the picket line Saturday outside the gates of the Ford factory. “I thought this would be a career, with benefits and overtime.”
Womack said he had quit his second job at the cleaning company a couple of weeks earlier, because working 18-hour days meant he had no life outside work. Indeed, his life has started to fall apart.
He said he often slept in his car in Ford’s parking lot between 4 and 6 a.m. With only two hours to rest between getting off from the cleaning job and starting at Ford, it made no sense to drive 45 minutes to his house on the opposite side of Detroit to sleep, he said.
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Womack said he and his fiancée recently parted ways “because I was working too much.”
Share this articleShare“The main reason we broke up was stability, bills,” Womack said mournfully. “Not enough time spent with her.”
These days, he spends about $1,000 a month on rent, $600 for his car loan and more than $300 on car insurance. It costs $50 to fill up his gas tank and $60 a month for his phone bill.
Meanwhile, he sees his kids, who are 4 and 9, only on the weekends; they live mostly with their mother. He said he longs to take them to the aquarium or on a trip.
Summers, the 24-year Ford employee, said he has watched the quality of life for new hires at Ford disintegrate since he was a kid.
Summers’s father and grandfather were both autoworkers. Summers said his father supported his wife and three kids on a single salary from General Motors. His father bought a house and put Summers’s brother through college. Now, new workers “can’t afford to raise a family. Buy a house. Buy the products we make,” he said. “To me it’s wrong. I just don’t understand the greed.”
Things haven’t always been easy for Summers. He used to take on roofing work to pay the bills. And during the financial crisis, Summers said, he took a pay cut, saw his break time reduced, and lost holiday and lump-sum bonuses. He had to take out money from his retirement plan. “It was really rough,” he said. “We didn’t get a raise or profit-sharing” for a long time.
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Summers said he has always been proud to be a UAW member, but this year — with ambitious new leadership and the first strike at Ford since the 1970s — things are different. “I’m so proud. In the past we were proud, but not like this,” he said. “Your chest is pounding.”
It can take close to a decade for lower-tier workers’ pay to catch up to those hired before 2007. At Ford, new hires now start full time at $18.04 an hour.
Often, new hires at the Big Three start as “temps,” or temporary workers making about $16 an hour, depending on the company, without profit-sharing, bonuses or pensions. Temps are essentially on a worse, third tier. Automakers have long used them to keep labor costs down, particularly when they are meeting temporary surges of demand, but workers complain that they are left in temp status for too long.
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Once workers get full-time status, they become eligible for bonuses and profit-sharing perks, but that conversion can take up to five years. Once full time, workers have to put in about eight years before their pay rises to the top of the wage scale.
One of the UAW’s demands, in addition to 40 percent raises and a 32-hour workweek, is that all new hires get paid at the top rate after 90 days — scrapping tiered wages.
But even at the top of the pay scale, right now lower-tier workers get worse health-care benefits and no company-financed health care in retirement or pension, compared with legacy employees. Lower-tier workers do receive 401(k) retirement accounts with a company contribution equaling 6.4 percent of workers’ wages. The union is asking the companies to offer the top-tier health-care benefits to all workers, reinstitute defined-benefit pensions that workers previously received, and pay all the health-care costs for retirees.
It’s hard to get a clear understanding of how many UAW workers could benefit from the end of tiers. More than 70 percent of GM’s workforce is at the top end of the wage scale, as are 87 percent of hourly Stellantis employees, according to company spokespeople. But these workers could be at the top of the pay scale and still not have full benefits. Ford did not respond to a request for comment. Roughly 70 percent of 150,000 union autoworkers were hired after 2007, according to a UAW official.
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So far in negotiations, Ford and GM have proposed to lower the length of time from eight to four years for workers to receive top pay. Stellantis has offered to end tiers in its motor parts division.
While tiers have fueled tension among rank-and-file autoworkers over the years, new and veteran employees have lately banded together to make the elimination of tiers a top priority during this strike, donning “End Tiers” T-shirts and holding signs on picket lines.
“The older generation is doing all right, but the kids are struggling,” Summers said. “It’s wrong that [legacy employees] make as much as we make, not great, but we make a living, and they’re not making a living,” he said. “They can’t afford to raise a family.”
Womack understands that deeply: “The bills don’t stop. All we really need is a little push to be able to be stable.”
Jeanne Whalen contributed to this report.
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