When Ryder Littlejohn started working at Ford in 1994 his starting wage was $12.45 an hour with a path to go full rate after three years at $25 an hour.

A third-generation autoworker, Littlejohn noted that adjusted for inflation, his starting rate was over $20 an hour in today’s dollars and a full rate of $45 an hour, with pension, retiree healthcare and cost-of-living adjustment.

“What we’re asking for is what we already had,” said Littlejohn, a United Auto Workers union member and one of the 150,000 UAW workers to agree to strike against the US’s three largest car companies last week.

“That’s what we’re asking for today, what I was hired at in 1994. They have the money to return to us what we’re owed and what we were promised would be returned to us,” said Littlejohn, a skilled trades maintenance leader at the Buffalo, New York, Ford stamping plant.

As the strike at the big three US automakers – Ford, Stellantis and General Motors – continues, Littlejohn and others argue that their struggle highlights a bigger fight: to restore and sustain the prosperity of the American middle class whose wealth has dissipated in recent decades amid broadening wealth inequality.

“We’re all fed up, the temps are fed up, the legacy employees such as myself, we’re tired of watching because those temps are our children, our neighbors, our friends. You get that job like Dad or Mom, you saw Dad or Mom working hard all those years, and it’s not quite what you expected because your paycheck is a lot smaller than your Dad or your Mom with the same bills, if not more,” he said.

There was a time when a job in the auto industry was a pathway to a secure, middle-class future. Going back to Henry Ford, the industry helped create the industrial middle class and consumer society.

Facing increased competition and growing demand in 1914, Ford doubled pay for autoworkers to $5 a day for eight hours of work, albeit with conditions: about $20 an hour in today’s dollars when adjusted for inflation, higher than the current autoworkers’ starting wage of $18 an hour or less for temporary workers.

The move helped stabilize a workforce suffering from high turnover, pushed competitors to raise wages to compete with Ford, and put more money in the pockets of workers who could, in turn, afford to buy vehicles.

The relationship between car workers and their bosses has often been fractious. In subsequent decades, autoworkers held sit-down strikes and protests to organize and formed the United Auto Workers in the 1930s. The pay, benefits and collective bargaining rights fought for and won by autoworkers “created the middle class in America”, Olen Ham, who participated in the 1936-37 sit-down strikes at General Motors in Flint, Michigan, told Reuters in 2009.

As unions came under fire – an attack led by Ronald Reagan but also supported by lackluster commitment from successive Democrat administrations – that middle class was squeezed. UAW membership, which peaked near 1.5 million in 1979, fell to about 431,000 in 2008 and is now less than half that.

The financial crisis further undermined autoworkers’ pay. With large parts of the industry in bankruptcy, UAW agreed to a series of concessions to help keep the motors running. At General Motors, for example, the 2007 contract agreement dropped wages and benefits for new hires to $15 an hour. The union also agreed to sacrifice job security protections, healthcare for retirees and a tiered wage regime that severely affects new hires.

Shana Shaw started working at General Motors in Wentzville, Missouri, in 2008 and was among the first group of second-tiered workers to be paid less and given fewer benefits than workers hired before 2007.

“If things don’t change, when I hit 30 years, and I go to retire, I will not have healthcare,” said Shaw.

She recounted the numerous injuries she has suffered from working in the GM plant, including one that led to spinal surgery, a fractured left foot and an injured right hand. She has 16 years left before retiring, but worries about how she will cope with only a 401(k) savings plan instead of a pension to rely on.

“When you work for a company for 30 years, you give your life to them in a way,” said Shaw. “You’re paid for your time and your time is your most important asset and when you give it to a corporation you figure they would actually care about you enough when you’re older and your body is broken down because you made their product, a quality product because you care about who is in those vehicles, you want them to be safe and get home to their families because it could be your mother, brother, sister, neighbor, you want to make sure it’s the highest quality, and you aren’t taken care of in return. It breaks my heart.”

Shaw said she worried about her children’s futures. Most of the people she knows live paycheck to paycheck, and the high cost of living makes it hard to own a home or start a family.

“Everything is so expensive, and people are working harder and harder and harder, and they’re working longer hours. But when is it enough?” Shaw said. “I wish more people could understand this fight is not just for us, but it’s for everybody.”

Shawn Fain won election as president of the UAW in March 2023 on a reform slate aimed at clawing back the concessions autoworkers made in the 2007-2008 financial crisis.

As Fain has repeatedly pointed out, the US auto companies have returned to record profits – profits they have shared with shareholders and their CEOs.

Profits at Ford, General Motors and Stellantis almost doubled between 2013 and 2022, totaling $250bn, according to the Economic Policy Institute. CEO pay jumped by 40% during the same period and the companies paid out nearly $66bn in shareholder dividend payments and stock buybacks.

Stellantis, General Motors and Ford have all characterized the UAW’s proposals as unsustainable. Jim Farley, the Ford CEO, claimed the demands would cause the company to go bankrupt in an interview with CNBC. Mary Barra, the General Motors CEO, has said she is “frustrated” with the strike, telling CNN in a recent interview, “Our team is ready to be at the table … and we need UAW leadership to get back to the table so we can get these issues resolved and get people back to work.”

But for now, the UAW and the car companies remain at loggerheads. Fain has given the companies until Friday to make “substantial progress” on their offer or face a new wave of targeted strikes.

“You should be able to make a living wage working 40 hours a week, just like our grandparents did. We’re not asking to get something that isn’t normal in this country. That type of life has been squandered,” added Littlejohn. “We have to say, enough is enough. Not only us, but the entire working class of this country, has to say at some point enough is enough. They’re not going to bestow this upon us because they’re good-natured or they care about us. They don’t. They only care about profit.”