It was on Sunday morning, March 3, that Starla Woods was awakened by the call that she had been dreading.
Woods is an Ohio autoworker who just the evening before had put in a nine-and-a-half hour shift at Stellantis’ Toledo Assembly Complex (TAC). That morning, she was informed via robocall that she was one of 341 production employees at that facility who were being fired that day.
Roslyn Roberson received the same computerized message. And, as she later told a TV reporter for Channel 11, Toledo’s CBS affiliate, Stellantis offered little to soften the blow: “They left us with one paycheck. They left us with no help with job placements; they left us with no severance pay. Just a ‘thanks for your job,'” along with health insurance that expires at the end of this month.
While the termination calls were obviously “very depressing,” by the time they happened they were not unexpected. In early December, Stellantis telegraphed its plans by announcing up to 1,094 TAC “supplemental” employees like Woods and Roberson, along with up to 131 “production operators/team members,” would soon be laid off.
But just a couple of weeks before that bombshell hit, rank-and-file supplemental employees who pay dues to the United Auto Workers (UAW) were being told by national and local Big Labor bosses that their lives were about to get much better. Union brass had just struck deals with Stellantis, GM, and Ford after waging so-called “stand up strikes” against all three companies in the fall of 2023.