Nonunion Workers Are Playing a Big Role in the Autoworkers’ Strike

Tens of thousands of people who work for Toyota in Kentucky, Mercedes-Benz in Alabama or Tesla in Texas are technically not involved in the high-stakes negotiations taking place between labor and management in and around Detroit.

But they are very much a presence.

Executives at Ford Motor, General Motors and Stellantis, the parent of Chrysler, invoke nonunion automakers, many of them in the South, as a competitive threat that makes it impossible for them to meet striking workers’ demands for big raises, more generous benefits and better working conditions.

“Toyota, Honda, Tesla and others are loving this strike because they know the longer it goes on, the better it is for them,” Bill Ford, the executive chair of Ford Motor, said in Michigan last week. “They will win, and all of us will lose.”

The United Automobile Workers union sees such statements as an attempt to play workers off one another. It views the strikes, entering their sixth week, as a first step toward better pay for not only U.A.W. members but also the nonunion workers that it plans to recruit in the future.

“We won’t be used in this phony competition,” Shawn Fain, the U.A.W. president, said on Friday, reacting to Mr. Ford’s speech. He added, “Nonunion autoworkers are not the enemy. Those are our future union family.”