The UAW’s Bargaining Dilemma: Wages or Jobs?

Preston Bunce, an assembly-line worker at a GM sport-utility vehicle plant in Lansing, Mich., is at the center of the upcoming contract talks between the United Auto Workers and U.S. automakers. The 29-year-old father of two started in 2008 at $14 an hour and today makes less than $16, a wage that he says is too low to buy a home or purchase the SUV he builds, a Chevrolet Traverse that sells for more than $30,000. His mother, who like Bunce’s grandparents is a GM lifer, makes double his wage for similar work at a GM plant across town. “It is tough to make ends meet,” says Bunce, who also works part-time installing windows and siding when he can find extra work.

As the UAW bargains for a new labor deal with GM, Ford Motor, and Chrysler Group, a key question is how much of a raise the union will demand for workers such as Bunce. UAW President Bob King has a tough choice: He can push for higher wages to secure new workers a better standard of living—as the union has for decades while watching its membership shrink by almost 80 percent since 1979, to barely 360,000 members—or he can keep pay low and use the cheap wages as a carrot to get carmakers to increase the number of unionized U.S. jobs.