Up First from NPR - UAW Strike Latest, Migrants in Italy, Azerbaijan Cease-Fire

Episode Date: September 22, 2023

The UAW is set to expand its strike if automakers fail to meet a deadline, the tiny Italian island of Lampedusa is overwhelmed by more than 11,000 migrants in the past week and Azerbaijan ends an offensive in Nagorno-Karabakh.Want more comprehensive analysis of the most important news of the day, plus a little fun? Subscribe to the Up First newsletter.Today's episode of Up First was edited by Rafel Nam, Mark Katkov, Michael Sullivan and Olivia Hampton. It was produced by Shelby Hawkins, Ziad Buchh and Julie Depenbrock. We get engineering support from Stacey Abbott. And our technical director is Zac Coleman.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

In just a few hours, more workers could join a strike against the big three automakers that already includes 13,000 workers across three plants. The point is to get a fair deal out of them. So what is a fair deal? I'm E. Martinez, that's Leila Fadl, and this is Up First from NPR News. In the past few days, more than 12,000 migrants made it to the Italian island of Lampedusa. The journey is risky. Many drown. One of the worst tragedies here was a decade ago when a boat sank just off the coastline. What's Italy doing to avoid a repeat?

There's a ceasefire in Nagorno-Karabakh in the South Caucasus. We want to integrate them. We don't want them to leave. What's the future of the breakaway ethnic Armenian region now under Azerbaijani rule? Stay with us. We'll give you the news you need to start your day. Now, Our Change will honor 100 years of the Royal Canadian Air Force and their dedicated service to communities at home and abroad. From the skies to our change, this $2 commemorative circulation coin marks their

storied past and promising future. Find the limited edition Royal Canadian Air Force $2 coin today. We're just hours away from a new deadline set by the United Auto Workers Union. Yeah, we'll soon know whether more auto workers will join the strike against the big three automakers. NPR's Andrea Hsu has been covering the story and joins us now. Hi, Andrea. Hi, good morning. Good morning. So catch us up. How did the union get to this noon deadline? Well, it's been exactly a week since the strike first began. Last Friday, we saw roughly 13,000 autoworkers walk off the job at all three of the big three at once.

It was GM, Ford, and Stellantis, the parent company of Chrysler. And that was a first for the union. And we have seen a ripple effect this week. All three companies have temporarily laid off workers who were not striking, a couple thousand in all, saying they can't properly do their jobs while the plants elsewhere in the supply chain are shut down. And earlier this week, we heard UAW President Sean Fain get kind of impatient. He set a new deadline saying if there's not serious progress in these talks by Friday, that's today at noon, we'll call on more workers to join the strike. So that's where we are now. Okay. So what does serious progress mean?

Well, he didn't specify, and this is part of Sean Fain's strategy, keeping everyone guessing. Now it's important to note that talks have not reached an impasse. The parties have been trading proposals this week. Negotiators have been meeting face-to-face, having side conversations. And from what we can tell, they're still quite far apart on a lot of big issues from wages to how long it takes to get to the top wage and to retirement benefits. But at some point, Leila, you know, sooner, maybe sooner, maybe later, something's got to give. I spoke to a labor historian this week, Eric Loomis, and he reminded me that auto companies and the union actually have some common goals. They both want the car companies to be profitable and to control a sizable piece of the market. It's not the goal of the UAW to bring down Ford, GM, and Chrysler, right? That's not the point. The point is to get a fair deal out of them.

But clearly there remains a lot of disagreement over what's fair. Yeah, of course. So where does this leave workers? It's a week into the strike. How are they doing? What are you hearing from them? Yeah, they appear pretty fired up. Of course, everyone's wondering, is my plant going to be next? There have been rallies this week outside Detroit, as well as last night in Chicago and Kentucky. Here was Rashad Martinez at one of those rallies last night. He works at the Ford plant in Louisville.

Well, I got work tomorrow, so we'll be that crew to walk off and I tell you we're ready. And we have heard some frustration from the rank and file about the strategy that the UAW has deployed of targeting just a few plants first. But there's also been a lot of praise, workers comparing it to a chess game or a game of battleship. You know, in Facebook comments, one person posted, Sean Fain knows where all the boats are, and he knows exactly how to sink them. Okay, so it sounds like they have confidence in him. What are the automakers saying? Well, this week, we've heard them fight back against some of the union rhetoric. You know, the UAW has been calling them out for being greedy and for paying poverty wages. GM President Mark Royce had an op-ed in the Detroit Free Press this week saying, look,

we've offered a 20% raise over four years, and that would bring most of our workers up to a base wage of $82,000 a year. And then close to double that when you add in overtime and benefits, and autoworkers do work a lot of overtime. You know, he also stressed the need to reinvest those profits, including into electric vehicles. And he wrote, the auto company that doesn't invest in its own feature gets left behind. The big three are already worried that their labor costs are much higher than that of their non-union competitors, Tesla, of course, and also Honda and Toyota, who have plants in the South. So it sounds like things may be changing this morning. If that happens, we'll come back to you. NPR's Andrea Hsu. Thanks, Andrea.

Thanks so much. Last week alone, more than 12,000 people from North Africa landed on the small Mediterranean island of Lampedusa. That's double the island's population. Lampedusa is only 120 miles from Tunisia, but it belongs to Italy, which means migrants who land there have entered Europe, which is now once again trying to handle a migrant crisis that never really went away. NPR's Ruth Sherlock just returned from Lampedusa and joins us now from Rome. Good morning, Ruth. Good morning. So tell me about the situation there on the island. Well, I should describe this island to you, Leila.

It's tiny. It's seven by two miles across with a population of about 6,000 people. And like A said there, you know, the town's deputy mayor estimates that twice the number of migrants arrived on the island as the population itself. The reception center was just overwhelmed. The migrants were hungry and exhausted and they crowded the streets of the town, which are full of trinket shops for tourists. Mario Verde is a retired local I spoke with there

and he said, you know, it was residents who stepped in when the Italian Red Cross and others couldn't cope. He says, they were all on the street asking for food, and what are we meant to do, not give them something to eat? No, everyone on the island rallied. You know, people let them into their homes to wash and shower. Now most of those migrants have been taken to Sicily or the mainland. But I found residents of Lampedusa still in rebellion,

not against the migrants so much as the Italian government. In rebellion, why are they upset with the Italian government? Well, first Prime Minister Giorgia Maloney, she campaigned on a promise to reduce the number of migrant arrivals to Italy. That clearly hasn't happened. There's about 130,000 people that arrived this year so far. And in Lampedusa, people are terrified that these arrivals mean they're going to lose their way of life.

So Attilio Lucia is the town's deputy mayor. And he said, you know, he's scared that the island will become a kind of detention center. We don't have to make it Alcatraz. We live here as tourists. You hear him there talking about Alcatraz, the island prison. And he says, here we live from tourism and fishing and we don't want that to change. Lucia and other residents are so sensitive to this that when the government recently tried to send tents to house

the migrants, the islanders blocked the ship at the port that was carrying them. So people really worried about migrants on the island, but also it's a really dangerous journey for the people trying to make it. Many have died making that journey. What are EU governments doing about these things? Absolutely. You know, it's the EU Commission. President Ursula von der Leyen is championing this 10-point plan that includes things like paying Tunisia, where lots of migrants set sail from,

to more tightly patrol the waters there. And there's talk of, you know, standing with Italy. Like von der Leyen even came to Lampedusa last week. But in practice, France is tightening its border controls, other countries are doing the same. And you know, there is sympathy for what migrants are going through, but it doesn't seem like that is translating into European governments wanting to offer them a home. And so this migration crisis is straining the kind of norms and principles of things like freedom of movement and human rights that the European Union has traditionally tried to stand by. That's NPR's Ruth Sherlock in Rome. Thanks, Ruth.

Thank you. A shaky ceasefire in the South Caucasus appears to be holding. The former Soviet Republic of Azerbaijan says it has now re-established control over the breakaway ethnic Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh. That follows an Azerbaijani offensive earlier this week that the separatists say killed at least 200 people and injured many more. Joining us to talk about all this and the latest on the ground, as well as its impact on the region, is NPR's Charles Maines in Moscow. Hi, Charles. Good morning. Good morning. So what's the latest? Well, as you know, the ceasefire appears to be mostly holding, but it's a ceasefire,

I should add, that's imposed entirely in Azerbaijan's favor. Baku stopped its military offensive, but on the condition the Gornikarakh's army surrender. Azerbaijan's president, Ilham Aliyev, later declared that control over Nagorno-Karabakh had been completely restored. And so in little over a day, Azerbaijan appears to have crushed this decades-long independence movement in Nagorno-Karabakh, what Armenians historically call Artsakh. That's, of course, triggered concerns among ethnic Armenians about reprisals. There's a long, long history of bad blood between the two, but one that Azerbaijan insists it's trying to overcome. I spoke with Alon Suleymanov. He's Azerbaijan's current ambassador to the UK, previously to the US,

who argued reintegration talks, which got underway yesterday, were themselves a counter-argument to any charges Azerbaijan intends to force out Armenians. Who does that if we want people to leave? We want to integrate them. We don't want them to leave, but we are not going to keep anybody by force there if they don't want to be a citizen of Azerbaijan. I mean, this is a choice people have. Now, the fighting this week raised concern about a wider regional war with neighboring Armenia, which has fought too with Azerbaijan over this enclave, the last one in 2020. How are people reacting in Armenia to this offensive and now this truce?

Well, there's a lot of distrust of Azerbaijan in Armenia. So the government is bracing for a flow of refugees out of Nagorno-Karabakh. Meanwhile, the government is also bracing for more angry protests at home. So for a third straight night, we saw sizable demonstrations demanding the ouster of the Prime Minister, Nikol Pashanyan, over his failure or refusal to intervene on Nagorno-Karabakh's behalf. Now, Pashanyan has his reasons. Armenia is in a far weaker position militarily than Azerbaijan,

in particular given Azerbaijan's backing from Turkey, its traditional ally. And Armenians are also frustrated, I should add, with Russia, their ally, for failing to prevent Azerbaijan from launching this offensive in the first place. Okay, so what's Russia saying? Well, Russia is completely wrapped up with the war in Ukraine, which seems to have impacted its ability to play its traditional role of regional cop. You know, not only was Moscow's peacekeeping force, which is on the ground there since 2020, not enforcing the peace as this new fighting broke out, but for months we've seen Russia

look the other way as Azerbaijan imposed a partial blockade of goods into Nagorno-Karabakh. You know, many saw this as reflecting Moscow's growing reliance on Azerbaijan and Turkey for trade, given Western sanctions. But also not helping things, Armenia's government has taken action seen as unfriendly by Moscow recently, including calling its reliance on Russia for its security a mistake. In fact, Armenia just hosted U.S. forces for training exercises. That didn't go over well here in Moscow. So we've talked about sort of the region,

what's happening, but what does this mean for ethnic Armenians who are living in this enclave? Well, what happens to ethnic Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh is the big question here. And depending on the answer, you could still see Armenia somehow drawn into yet another conflict with Azerbaijan. And that could trigger wider consequences,

drawing bigger powers like Russia, Turkey, and even Iran to the west to enter the fray as well. That's NPR's Charles Maines in Moscow. Thanks, Charles. Thank you. And that's Up First for Friday, September 22nd. I'm Leila Faldin. And I'm E. Martinez. Today's episode of Up First was edited by Rafael Nam, Mark Katkov, Michael Sullivan, and Olivia Hampton. It was produced by Shelby Hawkins, Ziad Butch, and Julie Deppenbrock. We get engineering support from Stacey Abbott, and our technical director is Zach Coleman.

And our executive producer is Erika Aguilar. And don't forget, Up First airs on Saturday, too. Aisha Roscoe and Scott Simon have the news. It'll be here in this feed.