The United Auto Workers union said Sunday that its members at General Motors will walk out by midnight if the automaker does not meet its demands, setting the stage for the nation’s first auto strike in 12 years.
A union statement suggests the two sides are still very far apartin negotiations for a new contract.
As union officials met in Detroit Sunday morning, the union issued a new strike threat.
“If GM refuses to give even an inch to help hard-working UAW members and their families then we’ll see them on the picket lines tonight,” said the statement.
The union’s contract with GM had expiredat 12:01 a.m. Sunday but the union’s 46,000 members at GM did not walk off the job at 31 GM factories and 21 other facilities across the nation at that time.
There remained “significant differences between the parties on wages, health care benefits, temporary employees, job security and profit sharing,” Terry Dittes, the union vice president leading the negotiating team, told membership in a letter late Saturday.
Those issues suggest it will be difficult to reach an agreement in time to avoid a strike, said Kristin Dziczek, vice president of industry labor and economics for the Center for Automotive Research, a Michigan think tank.
“You can’t solve one of those issues without solving all of them,” she said.
If the union goes on strike, it will be the largest by any union against any US business since the last time UAW members struck GM in 2007.
Dittes accused GM of refusing “to put hard working Americans ahead of their record profits of $35 billion in North America over the last three years.”
“We are united in our efforts to get an agreement our members and their families deserve,” he added.
GM, the largest US automaker, said in a statement that it is willing to work around the clock to try to reach a deal to build “a strong future for our employees and our business.”
“We continue to work hard on solutions to some very difficult challenges,” said the company’s statement. It said “there are thousands of GM families and their communities — and many thousands more at our dealerships and suppliers — counting on us for their livelihood.”
The union had earlier extended the contracts at two other US automakers with UAW contracts, Ford and Fiat Chrysler, as it targeted GM in an effort to reach a deal that would set a pattern for the industry. Dittes’ letter said that while membership will keep working for the time being, there would be no long-term extension of the contract at GM.
There was a strike that started early Sunday morning by 850 UAW maintenance workers at GM plants. But they work for an outside contractor, Aramark, not GM. They had been working under an extended contract since March of 2018.
“We have UAW members who work long, hard hours and are still on public assistance,” said Gerald Kariem, Director of UAW Region 1D, speaking of the maintenance workers. “It’s shameful.”
The UAW members at the three automakers have much better contracts. GM says its average hourly employee earns about $90,000 per year, not including benefits.
All three automakers are dealing with slower sales and the need to make huge multi-billion-dollar investments in developing electric and self-driving vehicles that have more long-term potential than current market demand.
To save money for those efforts, GM has already halted operations at three US plants — two transmission factories and an assembly line in Lordstown, Ohio. It plans to shut another assembly line in Detroit, its last Detroit factory, early next year.
The UAW has vowed to win GM’s agreement at the negotiating table to keep all or at least some of those plants operating.
But negotiations come as the union is hit by a scandal involving misappropriation of union funds, and in some cases, union officials accepting bribes from officials at Fiat Chrysler. Nine people associated with the union or Fiat Chrysler have already pleaded guilty to federal charges.
Last week, the Detroit News reported the union’s president, Gary Jones, was the unnamed union official identified in the most recent indictment as “UAW Official A.” The union has not responded to a request for comment about that report.
Experts say the scandal will make it more difficult to get rank and file union members at the automakers to ratify any tentative deal reached by union leadership. Four years ago the deals all passed by only narrow margins, even though there was no scandal at that time.
