Strikes still powerful for weakened UAW
Recent walkouts snare dozens of plants
Sharon Terlep / The Detroit News
LANSING -- Only a few thousand of the United Auto Workers' nearly 480,000 members will be on strike and walking the picket line today.
But the union, roiled by demands for wage and benefit cuts from a crippled U.S. auto industry, is still managing to snarl the nation's auto manufacturing epicenter with a drumbeat of threats and strikes that continued Thursday with a walkout at a key General Motors Corp. plant near Lansing.
In the seven weeks that have passed since the UAW struck parts maker American Axle & Manufacturing Holdings Inc., GM has lost more than 100,000 units of production and been forced to shuffle parts across the country to keep its factory lines flowing.
Dozens of plants across the United States, from GM factories to independent suppliers, have been either idled or partially shut down. One report put the tally of laid-off workers at more than 40,000.
With GM's Delta Township plant now shuttered by a strike, the automaker faces a potential shortage of some of the vehicles it can least afford to lose -- its trio of crossover SUVs. The factory's 2,300 workers walked off the job after a strike deadline passed with no plant-level contract in place.
The labor actions and the fallout from them underscore how much power the union still wields despite its declining membership, which last year dropped to its lowest level since 1941.
"The strike remains a very powerful tool, particularly in the auto industry, which tends to be so integrated," said labor expert Harley Shaiken of the University of California-Berkeley. "They have been rarely used in recent years, but they can be very effective when they're deployed."
At issue are three separate labor disputes against three companies. In all, fewer than 6,000 workers are on strike in a national auto industry that employs nearly 1 million hourly and salaried auto workers.
The American Axle walkout is over the company's push to slash wages and benefits. About 3,600 workers in Michigan and New York walked off the job Feb. 26 when a contract deadline passed. Negotiations continued Thursday, with both sides reporting progress, but no deal is imminent, Axle spokeswoman Renee Rogers said.
The impact of the American Axle stoppage was dulled because it affected mostly slow-selling large trucks and SUVs made by GM, American Axle's largest customer.
In Delta Township, local UAW leaders say they're on strike because there's no agreement on a plant-level contract after months of hard bargaining.
Doug Rademacher, president of UAW Local 602, which represents the Delta plant, said the UAW has been working under a contract put in place in 1999 when GM built the factory. At the time it was hailed as a reward for local labor leaders' willingness to bend to the company's changing needs.
The deal, Rademacher said, was intended to give GM flexibility to get the factory running, but was never supposed to be long-term.
Contract talks broke off Thursday; Rademacher said he didn't know when they would resume.
A third walkout launched Tuesday against Alliance Interiors, a small Lansing supplier, came because newly organized workers there have no labor deal after nearly a year. The company provides carpeting for GM crossovers made at the Delta plant and that work stoppage threatened to hamper production had the UAW not launched a strike against the plant.
More labor unrest could be on the way. The UAW has set strike deadline for 10 a.m. today at a Warren transmission plant, citing local contract issues. Another threat, with no solid deadline, looms at a GM stamping plant in Grand Rapids.
Interdependence signaled
The combined reach of the disputes dwarfs the impact of last year's labor drama, when the UAW launched broad, but short, walkouts against GM and Chrysler LLC before reaching landmark money-saving labor pacts with Detroit's Big Three.
"We thought that the auto industry had been settled, but in fact it has not been settled at the local level," said Gary Chaison, a labor specialist at Clark University in Worcester, Mass.
The domino effect of the strikes signals the interdependence of the domestic auto industry even as automakers and suppliers work to diversify and reduce that interdependence, Chaison said.
"It's a very tightly wound system and a disturbance in one part will soon affect everything else," he said. "It presents a lot of leverage to the union."
Analysts have said the spate of strikes and threats is a UAW strategy to draw GM into the American Axle dispute -- a claim denied by local labor leaders who say their issues are real and separate.
Labor expert Shaiken said both may be true. "The UAW is well aware that its actions put pressure on GM," he said. "But there were issues on the table that were unresolved for a long period of time. Now this is impacting GM at a particularly opportune moment."
Many of the workers are torn. As striking workers in Delta Township chanted about union strength and solidarity and waved picket signs at honking cars, they also questioned the wisdom of the UAW's strategy.
Art Gonzales, a 42-year GM employee, wore a T-shirt that said on the back, "United we bargain, divided we strike."
His thoughts on the walkout: "I don't know why we're out here."
Many said that while they supported the union's decision, they questioned the timing. If the plant were idled by the Alliance strike, workers would have received layoff pay. Now, they'll get much less in strike compensation.
"I don't want to be on strike," worker Duane McClung said. "And it's really not quite clear why we're striking."
The true long-term impact on GM will take time to assess.
Some analysts have said a depressed U.S. auto market that has cut into demand for vehicles, along with automakers' ability to draw on non-U.S. plants, has mitigated the impact of the strikes.
Others point to GM's fledgling turnaround and its dependence of a few key products.
"If the whole spigot is shut off, they're going to feel an impact on sales soon, within weeks," analyst Tom Libby of J.D. Power's Power Information Network, said of the Delta Township strike. "GM needs to keep the momentum going."
You can reach Sharon Terlep at (313) 223-4686. Staff Writer Eric Morath contributed.
