Old contract ended this past Sunday. Big profits, so workers demanding significant wage bump.
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At midnight, the UAW struck the GM plant that builds the Colorado mid-size pickup, the plant that builds the Ford Ranger and Bronco, and the plant that builds the Jeep Wrangler and Gladiator.
It has not gone unnoticed that they did not, yet, strike the crown jewels, that built the F150, Silverado, and Ran 1500.
Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Michigan, also organized by the UAW, is also on strike.
Meanwhile, writers and actors in Hollyweird continue their strike.
Steve
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The strikes are important to how well we do as a nation. People need to be paid properly. Allowing ignorant bosses to underpay workers is a national obstacle to the country getting wealthier.
If you can not afford to pay people properly go out of business. Smarter better management teams will take your lazy ar$ed place. That goes for GM. We can do better divvying up the business between Ford and Tesla. GM has not really figured out much for the last 20 years. Yes workers at GM would be hurt. The management at GM needs to become more responsible than self-serving MBAs. That MBA does not mean being cheap with hard-working people.
Back during USCAM, the floor of $16 was put in as if a favor. It underpays American auto workers. It was a purposeful $crewing.
How did the UAW come to represent Blue Cross/Blue Shield?
DB2
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Tie worker pay to profits–with 80%-90% of profit paid out as profit-sharing to members. Countdown to mgmt apoplexy… 10-9-8-7…
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The local news ran a clip of Mary Barra saying GM can’t pay what the workers are negotiating for, because they need to invest to grow the company. GM hasn’t “grown” in decades. The company had been losing market share for decades. Since 2016, the end of this graph, GM’s share has more or less stabilized at around 17%. But, as GM continues to abandon whichever market segment is least profitable, their share will continue to shrink over the long term.
When then Chrysler CEO John Riccardo demanded the government give the company $1B, because the company’s failure was “all the government’s fault”, the selling point for the bailout was, of course, “jobs”. Working people are always held hostage to the care and feeding of the “JCs”.
I maintained at the time that, if Chrysler died, there would be no net loss of “jobs”, except for the honchos that ran the company into the ground. The reasoning being that, former Chrysler buyers would not stop buying cars because Chrysler went under. They would buy from other automakers instead. The other automakers would need to hire more people to increase production, to meet the increased demand. Hence, no net loss of “jobs”, except for the honchos. As for those honchos, when Iacocca took over at Chrysler, he observed that, in spite of the company being run by accountants since the early 60s, there were no financial controls. No-one could tell him how much it actually cost to do anything.
Steve
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