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Workers At GM Walk Off The Job
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VIDEO | Thousands of United Auto Workers walked off the job at GM plants around the country Monday in the first nationwide strike during auto contract negotiations since 1976.
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"You get a company reducing its U.S. workforce while making huge investments all over the rest of the world to the point where they can take a strike or go into bankruptcy," Chaison said. "The UAW has every reason to be worried, to draw a line in the sand about keeping jobs in the U.S."
A North American shutdown costs GM about $350 million in profit each week, analyst Healy said. The figure does not include what the industry calls "production recovery," or the time and money required to restart assembly lines.
GM has 67 days of inventory, meaning it has a two-month supply of new vehicles for its dealerships, Healy said. Vehicle shortages on showroom floors would not occur until October.
GM stock closed Monday at $34.74, down 20 cents. Traders were betting that the two sides would quickly reach a new contract that would remove retiree health-care benefits from GM's responsibility, improving the company's financial health.
The strike marked the first national autoworker walkout since 1976 and comes at a critical time for a U.S. auto industry facing surging competition from foreign automakers.
Neither the union nor GM has the clout it once did. The UAW, which had more than 1.5 million members at its peak in the 1970s, now has fewer than 600,000 members, the union reported. GM, which controlled half of the U.S. vehicle market in the 1960s, now makes fewer than 25 percent of the cars and trucks sold domestically.
The union last called a national strike against GM in 1970; it lasted for two months.
"This is nothing that we wanted. Nobody wins in a strike," Gettelfinger said at Solidarity Hall, the UAW's Detroit headquarters Monday. "But there comes a time when you have to draw a line in the sand."
UAW members began leaving work and raising picket signs around General Motors plants across the country shortly before noon, as talks with the company failed to produce a new labor contract by an 11 a.m. deadline.
Outside of GM's Cadillac plant in the Detroit suburb of Hamtramck, strikers formed five picket lines and prepared to march around the clock. At the UAW Local 22 union hall on Detroit's west side, workers received their picket assignments.
"We worked a lot of long and hard years to get where we are," GM retiree John W. Taylor, 62, said at Local 22. "We can't just hand everything back on the platter."
A prolonged strike could have devastating effects on an already economically troubled Michigan.
