CHICAGO — Nearly 100 years ago, Henry Ford built a factory here to churn out the Model T. It remains Ford’s longest-continuously running plant, producing vehicles through the Great Depression, World War II, and decades of globalization. Now the factory’s 4,600 workers wonder: Can they survive the electric era, too?

That worry was on workers’ minds as they walked out the door of a factory vital to the city’s South Side economy two weeks ago to join a United Auto Workers strike for better pay and benefits at Ford, General Motors, and Jeep maker Stellantis.

“That’s what I believe is really holding this contract up, is our job security and what’s going to happen in the future,” Lenny Faria said from the picket line on a crisp fall night as passing cars honked in support. “It’s not just a pension. It’s not just a higher wage. It’s about bringing job security and another vehicle, an electric vehicle, to this location.”

Those fears help explain the origins of the biggest strike to hit the auto industry in decades. Years of sharp inflation and lagging wages, combined with employee concerns about the industry’s once-in-a-century retooling for electric vehicles, have prompted the first simultaneous walkout at all of Detroit’s Big Three automakers as workers push for a better contract.

The Biden administration has faced pointed questions from the UAW about why the federal government is pouring billions of taxpayer dollars into subsidizing EV manufacturers and buyers without ensuring strong protections for autoworkers’ pay and job security. Former President Donald Trump, the front-runner for the Republican nomination for the 2024 race, has excoriated President Biden’s EV policies, calling them an existential danger to U.S. manufacturing jobs.

Scrambling to show support for the union, Biden in late August announced that federal programs worth $15.5 billion will prioritize EV manufacturing projects with strong labor standards to help “companies avoid painful plant closings.”

The UAW and Ford made early progress over wages and benefits as they negotiated a new contract last month, but talks have run aground in recent days over issues that include EVs. The UAW wants Ford to include its battery factories in the main union contract, which the UAW says would protect wages and job security. Ford CEO Jim Farley has balked at making a firm commitment, saying the factories aren’t built or even organized yet by the UAW.

The fate of existing vehicle assembly plants is a related concern. The Chicago factory makes the Ford Explorer and Lincoln Aviator SUVs, the profits from which are helping the company fund its multibillion-dollar investments in EV and battery factories located elsewhere – in Tennessee, Kentucky and Michigan. A $9.2 billion federal loan to Ford and its joint-venture partner, South Korea’s SK On, is also funding that construction.

Ford has stressed that it isn’t going to stop building gasoline-powered vehicles anytime soon, and it has pledged that every U.S. factory will get a “product commitment” in the new contract, meaning assigned vehicles to build. In 2019, the company invested $1 billion in the Chicago factory and a nearby auto parts plant to update the production technology.

Speaking at a factory on the edge of Detroit this week, Ford executive chairman Bill Ford argued that the company is deeply committed to the UAW, noting that Ford is the only automaker to have added UAW jobs in the last 15 years. He also warned that the strike itself was the biggest near-term threat to American manufacturing jobs.

The company’s plants “have become the foundation of our communities and the Midwest cities that we know and love,” Henry Ford’s great-grandson said in a webcast speech. If the strike continues, “it will have a major impact on the American economy and devastate local communities,” he added.

Sam Fiorani, vice president of global vehicle forecasting at AutoForecast Solutions, predicted that the Chicago factory will be busy building gas-powered vehicles for at least another decade, particularly “with the current transition to EVs being as slow as it is.”

But workers say they still want clearer promises about their future – particularly given Fiorani’s forecast, picked up in the automotive press, that Ford is planning to build electric versions of the Explorer and Aviator in Canada, starting in 2025. Ford “can’t comment on speculation about future products,” spokesman Dan Barbossa said.

“I don’t want my job to go to Canada. I don’t want it to go to Mexico,” said Vicky Gossett, a veteran worker who grew up not far from the picket lines. “I want it to stay right here. This plant has been here 100 years.”

Pockets of poverty on Chicago’s South Side make the factory particularly vital to the local economy, Gossett and other workers said. The plant is one of the biggest manufacturing employers in the city, according to the Illinois Manufacturers’ Association.

The factory has long been celebrated as a cornerstone of U.S. manufacturing, with President Barack Obama during a 2010 visit calling it “part of American history.”

“When the Great Depression struck and 25 Ford plants closed down, this one stayed open. When World War II was raging, this plant was churning out armored vehicles that helped make victory possible,” Obama said. “For nearly nine decades, this plant has been the backbone of this community.”

Paris Gusta started working here 32 years ago, when his father, a longtime employee, advised him to put in an application. Gusta’s sister eventually joined them.

Their father had previously worked as an English teacher in Mississippi but came to work at Ford in 1970, because the pay was significantly better and helped him provide for his four children, Gusta said.

Gusta, who lives on the South Side, started out as a production worker and eventually became an electrician. In his early days, “there was a lot of pride working for this plant,” he said. “We actually had the Ford emblem on our coveralls. And people see you and they’re like, ‘Oh, you work for Ford? Are they hiring?’ You wanted to work there.”

Some of that spirit has eroded in recent years as wages have lagged inflation and Ford has cut retirement benefits for new workers, Gusta said. He’s still managing to raise his young children – a boy and a girl, ages 10 and 7 – on his factory wages, but it has become harder. He said he worries what will happen if EVs don’t materialize at the plant.

“It’s a big worry. If we don’t say, ‘Make this part of us now,’ then you’re going to eliminate us in the future,” he said.

On Oct. 7, the UAW’s fiery president, Shawn Fain, held a rally with striking workers next to the Chicago factory, where he promised he was fighting to ensure that they won’t “be left behind in the green economy.” The union was outsmarting and out-organizing the companies and forcing them to negotiate over their battery plants, he added.

Fain has gone so far as to demand that if automakers close any factories in the future, they agree to keep paying workers to do community service indefinitely.

Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, a Democrat, this summer said it could be challenging for Ford to convert the Chicago factory site to EV production, because there might not be enough land to build a battery factory and an EV assembly plant side by side, as some companies prefer. In an interview with Fox 32 Chicago, he said he’s encouraging Ford to keep producing gasoline cars at the factory as long as needed and to build an EV factory on a bigger site in Illinois.

Some of the Chicago workers say they would be okay moving to a new location, but they want guarantees in the contract that such a transfer would be possible. “We would like to be incorporated in that, because they’re using taxpayer money to build [EVs]. And that’s putting us out of work,” said Roy Wood, who moved to Chicago a dozen years ago from St. Louis after his Chrysler factory there closed.

But many wince at the suggestion of leaving. April Calmese, an assembly line worker for 13 years whose whole family lives in the Chicago area, said she’d have to consider any good offer to move. “Nobody really wants to leave home, though,” she added.

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