Workers of BorgWarner in Lansing, New York continue to strike after rejecting a contract offer on Sept. 6.
BorgWarner is an automotive parts manufacturer with locations across the globe. The company is one of the largest commercial employers in Tompkins County. It has approximately 1,000 employees spread between two plants, 700 of whom are represented by the Teamsters Local 317.
The new contract offered wage increases of 22.5 percent over a four-year period. 88 percent of the workers rejected this proposal, noting proposed changes that would decrease the benefit package employees would receive, which would reduce the total wage increase to only 18.5 percent over four years.
Many workers are also concerned with their job security as BorgWarner plans on shutting down one of its two Lansing plants by 2026.
This is the first time workers of BorgWarner have gone on strike in over 30 years as strikes across the country have become much more frequent.
Representatives from BorgWarner did not respond to a request for comment.
BorgWarner worker Jeffery Nguyen said that he is on strike to fight for better working conditions and overtime policies. According to Nguyen, BorgWarner has a strict attendance policy and failure to follow the policy will result in termination.
Nguyen said he still enjoys working for the manufacturing plant, despite the changes he wishes BorgWarner to make. He said he worries about how the plant’s strict policies make other workers feel uncomfortable, but he is happy “they are now on their way to get it fixed.”
Lane Yon, another BorgWarner worker on strike, said that the UAW strike’s success at Cornell generated discussion among his co-workers as they hoped for a similar outcome.
“[UAW Local 2300] got a great contract,” Yon said. “As Teamsters, we’re trying to get there too with better wages, insurance policies and our pension. It’s the same blueprint as the UAW.”
Prof. Kate Bronfenbrenner ’76 Ph.D. ’93, industrial and labor relations, called the nationwide influx of strikes “contagious.” According to Bronfenbrenner, the amount of strikes has increased each year since 2021 and continues to grow.
“There’s a strike wave where unions are seeing each other strike, workers are seeing that other workers are gaining from striking and workers are angry,” Bronfenbrenner said. “They see the strikes that have happened elsewhere in the country and in this county, and they say, we’ve had enough. ”
2023 saw “major strike activity” with a 280 percent increase in strike activity compared to 2022 and 458,900 workers involved in work stoppages, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
Workers at BorgWarner are on strike at the same time as workers at Boeing and multiple major hotel chains. Last month, Cornell workers in United Auto Workers Local 2300 went on strike for the first time since the 1980s.
Bronfenbrenner said that one reason for the surge in strikes is the increasing disparity between the wages of workers and executives.
“Companies like BorgWarner are making huge profits, and the workers feel like they’re not sharing those profits,” Bronfenbrenner said. “CEOs’ compensation has just grown, while the workers’ wages have stagnated. … Workers are just fed up.”
According to Bronfenbrenner, American companies are increasingly moving manufacturing jobs to Asia and Latin America, where they can pay workers lower wages than in the United States.
“Employers are constantly looking for something cheaper,” Bronfenbrenner said.
In 2023, BorgWarner announced that it would close one of its two Lansing plants by 2026.
A 2023 op-ed piece stated that BorgWarner would attempt to retain more than 70 percent of its “existing employment levels” despite closing one of its plants.
Bronfenbrenner said that the loss of one of the plants will have negative effects on both the workers and the community, foreseeing that these workers will have to turn to low-wage unorganized service sector jobs.
“It’s going to be a big cut in pay and the loss of health insurance,” Brofenbrenner said. “The ripple effect is so much greater than the workers’ jobs you lost. So that means fewer people paying taxes, which means less money for the public schools and less money to pave the roads.”
Prof. Ian Greer M.S. ’03 Ph.D. ’05, the director of the ILR Ithaca Co-Lab, said that when he visited the picket line, strikers shared their fear of losing their jobs from industry moving away from the country.
According to Greer, the UAW Local 2300 strike likely inspired BorgWarner workers. He also said that workers fear losing their jobs as industry moves away and as they manufacture products for combustion engines, a sector of the auto industry that is being replaced by electric vehicles.
“From talking to workers on the picket line, ongoing efforts to shift work to Mexico have upset people,” Greer said. “And then you add to it, the strike in Cornell, which I think sent the signal to workers, you can get a better deal by going on strike at the moment, if they didn’t already understand that.”
Bronfenbrenner said that workers are “not following the same old playbook,” increasingly learning from and supporting other strikes. But to make desired gains, Bronfenbrenner said, unions need to grow their membership.
“When workers feel empowered, that’s much more difficult for employers,” Brofenbrenner said. “All these factors — covid, recession, concessions, … the wealth gap — have led to workers being angry and fired up, … [however] unions would have to organize millions more workers to really have the power they need to grow.”