The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
GM strike: What you need to know
First, it was teachers in West Virginia, Oklahoma and Kentucky. Then hotel workers at nearly two dozen Marriotts and grocery employees at Stop & Shop locations in the Northeast. Now, in the latest work stoppage, part of a recent surge of labor activism, the United Automobile Workers have gone on strike at General Motors. The strike is sending nearly 50,000 members at factories across the Midwest and South to picket lines. UAW regional leaders in Detroit voted unanimously Sunday to authorize the strike, the union’s first such walkout since 2007. It began at midnight, after the union’s current bargaining agreement expired Saturday. The strike will immediately halt U.S. production, and a prolonged stoppage could affect GM’s Canadian and Mexican operations, crimping the company’s bottom line and the fortunes of its parts suppliers. Here’s what you need to know about the UAW strike.
Why is the UAW on strike?
GM has a smaller UAW workforce than its Detroit rivals, Ford Motor and Fiat Chrysler. But the union has taken aim at GM as the automaker has earned solid profits — it made $35 billion in North America over the past three years — while closing auto plants in the United States.
One of the union’s objectives is getting GM to reopen a shuttered car factory in Lordstown, Ohio, a goal that President Donald Trump has endorsed. GM closed that plant and others in Baltimore and in Warren, Michigan, as part of a cost-cutting effort that eliminated 2,800 factory jobs and thousands of white-collar positions. A new contract could also decide the fate of a plant in Detroit that GM has kept open after designating it for closing.
The UAW is also pushing the automaker to improve wages and close or narrow the difference between pay rates for new hires and veteran workers. The union is delaying talks with Ford and Fiat Chrysler while focusing on a single company, a standard practice in the talks between the UAW and the Detroit automakers every four years.
What has GM offered?
GM wants employees to pay a greater portion of their health care costs, and to increase workforce productivity and flexibility in factories. In a statement, GM said it had offered to make more than $7 billion in new investments in U.S. plants, add 5,400 jobs and increase pay and benefits.
“We presented a strong offer that improves wages, benefits and grows U.S. jobs in substantive ways, and it is disappointing that the UAW leadership has chosen to strike,” the company said Sunday.
Will workers be paid during the strike?
Yes — but significantly less. A long shutdown could prove painful for union members, who would have to get by on strike pay of $250 a week while out of work.
Any hit to GM’s North American profits would also reduce the annual profit-sharing checks union members receive each March. In each of the past three years, those checks have amounted to an average of $11,000.
When was the last time this happened?
As a recession threatened in 2007, UAW members — it had 73,000 at GM at the time — walked out of GM plants for three days before a deal was reached. The company lost $23 million in 2007.
In many ways, that was a different world for the major carmakers, before the recession led to a global crisis in the auto industry. In 2009, GM filed for bankruptcy, although it has bounced back in recent years and now employs 49,000 full-time and temporary UAW members.
Over the past decade, the UAW has negotiated two contracts with GM without resorting to nationwide strikes, in 2011 and 2015.