GM News: The Upcoming Fight Between General Motors and the UAW

[William Maley]

General Motors' announcement to idle and possibly close five plants next year comes around the same time that the company begins their negotiations with the United Auto Workers (UAW). Already, the UAW has said they would go "through every legal, contractual and collective bargaining avenue open to our membership," to try and keep the plants.

GM's rationale for the move is to improve profitability and help reduce the underutilization of its plants. As we reported last week, GM represents 1 million of the 3.2 million units of underutilized capacity in the U.S. through October.

We should note that GM did not say they were going to close down the plants. They used the word "unallocated". We'll let The Detroit News explain why.

Quote

But GM was careful last week in its restructuring announcement when it addressed the affected plants, coining a new term: "unallocated."

The reason: to avoid the words "idle" or "close," which are explicitly addressed in the 2015 agreement between GM and the UAW. The "Plant Closing and Sale Moratorium," outlined on page 356 of the agreement, states that GM will not will not close or idle "in any form, any plant, asset, or business unit of any type" outside of collective bargaining, with a caveat for extreme market conditions or an "act of God."

1

Emphasis mine. Under the current contract, GM cannot close or idle any plant unless it is done through the collective bargaining process. By not providing any future products, GM may have found a loophole they can use in the negotiations. But it may have opened up a Pandora's box. 

"This was long planned through intentional strategic investment decisions and product movement over our objections. They may have kept the news about it quiet, but this was planned and had to be gradually executed long before sales numbers were known,” the UAW said in a statement to the News.

"GM and the UAW will talk about numerous topics that affect our employees and our business during 2019 negotiations. As always, our intent is to work with the UAW constructively to address our business challenges in a way that keeps the company competitive in these changing market conditions," GM said in a statement.

Source: The Detroit News

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[A Horse With No Name]

"If you can't say anything nice....don't say anything at all."

....thankfully it is warm here in Ohio in December. About the only nice thing I can say.

[G. David Felt]

There are always holes and if you have no product allocated to those plants, then there is no reason to keep the going. This is not socialism, but capitalism.

UAW needs to EMBRACE the New Era of EVs and work with GM to produce them at these unallocated plants and increase training of needed new skills for their workers.

[A Horse With No Name]

1 hour ago, dfelt said:

There are always holes and if you have no product allocated to those plants, then there is no reason to keep the going. This is not socialism, but capitalism.

UAW needs to EMBRACE the New Era of EVs and work with GM to produce them at these unallocated plants and increase training of needed new skills for their workers.

I don't think the problem is with UAW embracing EV's, it is the driving public.

[G. David Felt]

46 minutes ago, A Horse With No Name said:

I don't think the problem is with UAW embracing EV's, it is the driving public.

Seems that GM does not think the workers have the skill set based on what they have said for working on and supporting EVs.

Once we have options out there beyond Leaf, BOLT and Tesla, I think it will do just fine, but this also requires the workforce to retrain for the new technology.

[A Horse With No Name]

1 hour ago, dfelt said:

Seems that GM does not think the workers have the skill set based on what they have said for working on and supporting EVs.

Once we have options out there beyond Leaf, BOLT and Tesla, I think it will do just fine, but this also requires the workforce to retrain for the new technology.

I don't think the problem is with the line employees. That is the least of their problems. Being perceived as a legacy brand 20 years after they started building exciting product again by the motoring public is a much larger problem.

Can you believe the C5 corvette first went on sale 22 years ago?

[daves87rs]

18 hours ago, dfelt said:

There are always holes and if you have no product allocated to those plants, then there is no reason to keep the going. This is not socialism, but capitalism.

UAW needs to EMBRACE the New Era of EVs and work with GM to produce them at these unallocated plants and increase training of needed new skills for their workers.

D-Ham actually did pretty good with the Volt. So I doubt it is about the EVs....

It’s simply about one thing-money. GM has had plans to more robots in the plants to build these new cars/trucks. A new Sonata   Is built with a quarter of line workers GM uses. Also with EVs, for example, less stuff is assembled as whole pieces or units are brought in from the outside. Simply based on what I have seen from the Volt- you need like half the workers...

Father time has finally caught up with the assemby process-even the CHinese can build stuff with way less people.....

[G. David Felt]

1 hour ago, daves87rs said:

D-Ham actually did pretty good with the Volt. So I doubt it is about the EVs....

It’s simply about one thing-money. GM has had plans to more robots in the plants to build these new cars/trucks. A new Sonata   Is built with a quarter of line workers GM uses. Also with EVs, for example, less stuff is assembled as whole pieces or units are brought in from the outside. Simply based on what I have seen from the Volt- you need like half the workers...

Father time has finally caught up with the assemby process-even the CHinese can build stuff with way less people.....

Very true, the skateboard concept never took off in the 90's when it was all the rage at GM as it would reduce to 25% the number of folks needed to create an auto and the UAW is all about keeping idiot jobs to keep their leadership in power. We are so way past that. The new jobs will be in maintaining the robots that build stuff. Welcome to the 21st century until the 22nd century when robots repair robots and humans are useless as robots will create all due to AI.  

[A Horse With No Name]

2 hours ago, daves87rs said:

D-Ham actually did pretty good with the Volt. So I doubt it is about the EVs....

It’s simply about one thing-money. GM has had plans to more robots in the plants to build these new cars/trucks. A new Sonata   Is built with a quarter of line workers GM uses. Also with EVs, for example, less stuff is assembled as whole pieces or units are brought in from the outside. Simply based on what I have seen from the Volt- you need like half the workers...

Father time has finally caught up with the assembly process-even the Chinese can build stuff with way less people.....

China is actually getting much better in some ways with innovation than we are, which is rather frightening. 

I don't think Sherrod Borwn, D-Ohio Senate, and Rob Portman, R-Ohio Senate, will save Lordstown with there meeting with Ms Barra.

To me, public perception of GM still lags the quality of product, which is going to e the over riding Meta issue here.