UAW strike: Friday deadline looms as GM, Stellantis lay off workers
GM and Stellantis are laying off workers, as Stellantis passes on a new offer to the UAW, while another deadline looms tomorrow for Big Three and the United Auto Workers (UAW) to strike a deal.
GM announced that it's idled its Fairfax plant in Kansas, which assembles the Chevrolet Malibu, because it had run out of stampings needed to produce the car. The stampings come from GM’s Wentzville, Mo. plant, where the UAW is currently on strike. As a result, GM is laying off 2,000 UAW workers at Fairfax.
Stellantis will immediately layoff 68 workers at at its Toledo Machining Plant, which assembles the Jeep Wrangler and Gladiator, and potentially 300 UAW workers at two other Stellantis plants, Kokomo Transmission and Kokomo Casting, both in Indiana.
Stellantis also confirmed that the company passed another contract counterproposal to the UAW on Tuesday, its first since the stand up strikes began last Friday. The company said the offer was “focused on subcommittee open issues” and did not give any other details.
This comes as the UAW’s Friday noon deadline approaches. UAW president Shawn Fain said this week that if “substantial progress” hasn’t been made by the deadline, the UAW would add additional locations to its stand up strikes. Barclays analysts believe the next plants affected could be the Big Three’s pickup and truck plants, which are huge profit generators for the automakers.
A source close to the talks told Yahoo Finance that there was a “very big” gap between GM and the UAW in terms of striking a deal and that rhetoric between the two has been heating up.
GM president Mark Reuss, one of the key members of GM’s negotiating team, penned an op-ed in the Detroit Free Press trying to stop a “flow of misinformation” from the UAW, saying it's stymying the negotiation process.
Reuss said the GM pays good wages ($82K in base wages for 85% of the company), has been using profits to invest in the EV transformation and not “corporate greed,” and is addressing issues such as wage tiers and retirement security.
The UAW countered with its own op-ed for the paper, written by UAW VP Mike Booth, arguing that it's fighting for all UAW workers, not just the 85% making a high base pay. The UAW's focus is eliminating the tier system for wages and helping part-time workers who make $16.67 an hour, Booth wrote. “I don’t know what qualifies as ‘poverty wages,’ but show me a Big Three executive who would work for that pay,” Booth said.
GM rival Ford similarly said only 2% to 3% of workers are temp or part-time workers, and that 80% of its workers make the current top wage rage, $32/hour.
With rancor rising on both sides, experts predict an escalation of strikes at noon on Friday is a certainty. The question is whether the UAW will go for the jugular and hit the Big Three’s major profit centers in full-size trucks or target smaller Big Three operations and keep their most damaging strike options as threats for the future.
Pras Subramanian is a reporter for Yahoo Finance. You can follow him on Twitter and on Instagram.
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