The Big Three have fallen like a house of cards.

The UAW's historic Stand Up strike has come to an end – for now, at least. After forty-four days on the picket line, the Auto Workers have reached tentative agreements with each of the Big Three automakers. GM was the last domino to fall on Saturday, October 28, just days after Ford and then Stellantis acquiesced to their own tentative deals.

50,000 strikers have returned to work, and all 146,000 Big Three union members are now voting on the contracts. While it's up to the workers to decide whether the deals are adequate, one thing is already clear: the UAW has turned the tide on decades of concessionary bargaining.

For this episode, we invited Barry Eidlin back on the show to unpack the gains and wider implications of the UAW's tentative agreements. Barry Eidlin is an associate professor of sociology at McGill University, who studies class, labor, politics and social movements. He is the author of Labor and the Class Idea in the United States and Canada, published by Cambridge University Press in 2018.
We explore why the agreements may represent a shift toward a "new kind of unionism," how the UAW's prospects for organizing the rest of the auto industry may have changed, and what listeners should be following in the rest of the labor movement.

Read the transcript of this podcast here.

*
Hosted by Teddy Ostrow
Edited by Teddy Ostrow
Produced by NYGP & Ruby Walsh, in partnership with In These Times & The Real News
Music by Casey Gallagher
Cover art by Devlin Claro Resetar
**
Support the show at Patreon.com/upsurgepod.
Follow us on Twitter @upsurgepod, Facebook, The Upsurge, and YouTube @upsurgepod.
***
Read Barry Eidlin's article on the Belvedere plant in Jacobin.

Help us continue producing radically independent news and in-depth analysis by following us and becoming a monthly sustainer:

Donate: https://therealnews.com/donate-pod
Sign up for our newsletter: https://therealnews.com/newsletter-pod

Like us on Facebook: https://facebook.com/therealnews
Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/therealnews