Last Friday, the United Automobile Workers announced that workers at two more assembly plants would walk off the job, bringing the number of autoworkers now on picket lines to twenty-five thousand as part of the union’s escalating “stand-up” strike. The escalation solidifies 2023 as another headline year for worker collective action, according to Cornell University’s Industrial and Labor Relations (ILR) Labor Action Tracker.

In response to the strikes, employers have deployed one of their most hated and devastating economic weapons: the replacement worker, or “scab” as they are more affectionately known in the labor movement. Luis Feliz Leon at Labor Notes reported that one hundred scabs had arrived on Tuesday, September 19, at a GM parts facility in Burton, Michigan. Later that afternoon, “five strikers were hit by a car leaving a GM parts center in Swartz Creek, Michigan.” Striking workers believed that the driver was a scab, although GM claims that the driver was a housekeeping worker employed by an outside contractor.

Whatever the particulars of this incident, past experience makes it clear that replacement workers not only undermine the strike effort by keeping the employer’s business running, but also inflame divisions among workers, both on the picket line and even after the strike ends — when striker and replacement have to work alongside one another.