When Ashley Wilmoth was hired at Stellantis NV's Warren (Michigan) Truck Assembly Plant last April, she made just $15.78 an hour but figured she would soon work her way into a full-time role with better pay and benefits.

The 28-year-old was even more confident after the new contract between Stellantis and the United Auto Workers was ratified last fall. It said thousands of supplemental employees like herself, also known as temps, would be converted into full-time roles with long-term job security.

Instead, Wilmoth and dozens of her supplemental colleagues at the plant were terminated in January — part of a larger layoff of 539 such workers that month across several Stellantis plants. Last week, another 341 supplemental workers at the Toledo (Ohio) Assembly Complex were let go, along with dozens of others spread across several other plants, including Warren Truck.

"I thought if I worked really hard, and showed up every day, and was reliable and dependable, I would have job security," Wilmoth said. "But I did not."

For many Stellantis workers like Wilmoth, last fall's new UAW contract was a win. These supplementals — who have long helped fill scheduling gaps at Stellantis plants and sometimes are assigned full-time hours — secured new starting wages of $21 per hour, more shift flexibility, more union rights and more benefits. Stellantis was to roll 3,200 over to full-time status within the contract's first year, and any newly hired workers with the second-tier status would automatically be converted to full-time after nine months.

But workers and local union officials said they didn't realize hundreds of layoffs would also be part of the deal. Now, UAW officials have said, it appears Stellantis only plans to keep around 500 supplemental workers on the payroll, down from about 5,200 last fall.

Wilmoth said it seems like the new contract was "filled with loopholes" for temp workers like her, adding she doesn't believe UAW leaders are doing enough to fight to get their jobs back. She organized a protest outside UAW Solidarity House in Detroit earlier this month to drive home the point.

But UAW President Shawn Fain said in a statement this week that the union is advocating for the laid-off Stellantis workers. He noted that under the new contract, around 3,000 supplementals have received "life-changing raises and benefits."

"And yet Stellantis has chosen to take the low road and terminate around 2,000 others, while the CEO gives himself a 56% raise to an astonishing $40 million," said Fain, referring to Carlos Tavares' large compensation increase since 2022. "When we said this is about corporate greed, that’s what we meant. Stellantis can do right by every last one of its workers, and we will fight to make sure they do.”

UAW advocacy group Unite All Workers for Democracy was circulating a petition in recent weeks calling on the company to reinstate terminated workers. The organization said beyond the Toledo plant — which has long relied heavily on a large supplemental workforce — there had also been significant layoffs recently at Stellantis' Jefferson and Mack assembly complexes in Detroit, as well as the Sterling Heights (Michigan) Assembly Plant.

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