By Patricia Prado
The goal never was to build cars; the idea hadn’t even crossed her mind. Tiffanie Simmons was set on writing musicals and was pursuing an associate’s degree in theater management. But she started working at a Ford factory to pay for school.
Now at 38, she has been working for the American automaker for the past 17 years, and as a union representative for the United Auto Workers (UAW) Local 900, where she was one of the workers who grabbed headlines during the union’s historic strike last year.
“The union is my stage,” Simmons said. And she wants that stage to get bigger. “I would like to be the first female president of the UAW.”
Simmons first stepped onto the plant floor when she was 21 as a temporary worker, and became a full-time worker five years later. “The auto industry is a family business,” she said. Her Ford family consists of her father and three younger brothers. “We all do it because someone did it before us,” she added.
However, her father, Larry Simmons, was not initially on board with his daughter joining the auto industry. “As a parent, you want your child to become something better than you,” said the 56-year-old auto worker.
But now, having witnessed his daughter’s dedication to the union movement — and her leadership during last year’s historic strike — he said he “couldn’t be prouder.”
Seventeen tattoos
Simmons said one of the things she appreciates about about working at an auto plant is the fact that no one cares about how people look, or where they stand politically. “It’s a take-you-as-you-are facility,” she said.
In her first year on the assembly line, Simmons said she worked next to a man who was tattooed from head to toe, including his ears and lips. He told her you are not “a real auto worker until you’ve got some tattoos,” she said.
Today, Simmons proudly sports 17 tattoos. She has a 14-year-old daughter and works 12-hour night shifts, seven days a week, as an upfitter at the Ford Assembly Plant in Wayne, MI. That was the first Ford plant to go on strike along with the General Motors plant in Missouri and Stellantis plant in Ohio, last fall.
As union members watched the UAW President Shawn Fain’s broadcast, Simmons’s plant was the very first of the three called to walk out.
She said she will never forget that moment.
The Local 900 union hall, originally quiet enough to hear a pin drop, was quickly filled with the sound of auto workers shuffling to leave. “We turned Michigan Avenue red that night,” Simmons said, as those approaching the picket line wore red in solidarity.
As secretary of community service for the UAW, Simmons was one of the committee members facilitating the strike and providing hot meals to union workers. Every night of the strike, Simmons was at the union hall, from midnight to 7 a.m.
The strike lasted 46 days.
On October 30, the Big Three made tentative deals with the UAW that were ratified on November 8 by 64 percent of workers at all three plants. These new contracts were a historic win for the UAW, which included restoring regular cost-of-living wage adjustments to offset inflation and granting union workers an immediate pay increase of 11 percent; union members would see total a pay increase of 25 percent over the course of the four-and-a-half-year deal.
Enter Electric Vehicles
Last December, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer issued an executive directive aiming to convert all state-owned and -operated vehicles to zero-emission vehicles by 2040, a move intended to reduce air and noise pollution in the state. For auto workers, that might mean fewer jobs. EVs require 30-to-40 percent less labor, according to the UAW’s “Taking the High Road: Strategies for a Fair EV Future” report.
That’s why Simmons said she was against EVs. “I can’t in good faith support anything that I think will jeopardize my brothers’ and sisters’ jobs,” she said.
Meanwhile, the UAW’s Fain, who is trying to organize Tesla, a leading EV manufacturer, said he knows EVs are part of the future. “We have to embrace it, we have to endorse it and we have to lead it. We’re going to do whatever we can to make it work for the working-class people,” he told BusinessWeek.
Fain was elected in March of 2023 and he has been credited with turning the union around, and running a successful strike. Simmons said she didn’t vote for him, because he wasn’t well known at that point. “Am I impressed with him? Very,” she said.
Simmons admitted that the pay raise was a major factor in the new contract negotiated by Fain, but the part she’s most proud of is that younger workers can make a livable wage. Those who have been earning below the top hourly wage of $32 will get more than $40 over the next four-and-a-half years.
Indeed, the strike eliminated the tiered wage system that was instituted in the 1970s and 1980s, when the auto industry began struggling against foreign competition; the tiered wages meant that newly hired auto workers received substantially lower pay and fewer benefits than long-time workers.
“To be able to be in a plant and make good money, and actually having a good job is great for me,” said Simmons’s younger brother Rodney Johnson, who is 22.
Johnson said Simmons has been a role model for him. “My sister has always been one to be self-ambitious, always been the one in our family doing the right thing,” he said.
With overtime and night pay, Simmons now makes about $150,000 a year, she said.
As the UAW expands its reach throughout the country, Simmons and her co-workers said they hope she will grow with the movement. “She’s a bright light in the UAW,” said her fellow union representative, Charles Wade.
The UAW has failed to unionize foreign-owned automaker plants before, but that changed in April, as workers at the Volkswagen Chattanooga Assembly Plant in Tennessee overwhelmingly voted to join the union. “A freaking victory,” Simmons said, adding that she believes there will be more.
But, in May, Simmons and her UAW colleagues got a reminder of just how much work lies ahead: workers at two Mercedes-Benz plants in Alabama voted against unionization.