UAW Strikes at 3 GM Truck Plants
Nine thousand workers at three General Motors truck plants in Pontiac, Mich., walked off their jobs Thursday in a strike that analysts called a show of union muscle as summer’s national contract talks near.
“We’re in pretty good shape and we hope it will be a short strike,” said Frank Cronin, spokesman for the GM Truck & Bus Group. Cronin said he had no other information on potential strike effects on the company.
Talks between the United Auto Workers and GM had intensified last week when union leaders in Detroit gave the Pontiac workers permission to strike and gave GM a week to resolve the dispute.
Negotiators failed to resolve more than 1,000 grievances on issues including subcontracting of union jobs to non-union workers, contract rules on job classifications, alleged health and safety problems and assembly line speedups.
“The talks broke down on the strikeable issues and the deadline came, so we walked out,” Ron Miller, vice president of UAW Local 594, said of the strike that began at noon. “The main problem was the subcontracting.”
A negotiating session was scheduled for 10 a.m. today, Cronin said.
Truck Work Will Move
The three plants build the new full-size Chevrolet and GMC pickup trucks, the small Chevrolet Blazer and GMC Jimmy S-10 and S-15 sport-utility vehicles, medium- and heavy-duty commercial trucks and transit buses.
But GM has entered into a joint venture with Volvo’s North American heavy truck arm, which will eventually take over GM’s heavy truck work and move it from Pontiac, said GM spokeswoman Judy Lawson.
GM also plans to move medium-duty truck production from Pontiac to Wisconsin and is selling the bus operation to Greyhound, which has said it will move bus production out of Pontiac.
The sport utility vehicles are profitable, popular entries in a highly competitive segment of the market. The new pickups, which are made at three North American plants, are still being launched.
“This is strategically significant. When a new product is starting up, it’s important that the product as advertised is arriving in the showrooms,” said Maryann Keller, analyst with Furman, Selz, Mager, Dietz & Birney in New York. However, she said the strike should have little effect on GM’s profits.
It would take three weeks for buyers to feel its effect through shortages in dealer showrooms, and the main effect would be difficulty in ordering certain models, said Thomas O’Grady, analyst with Integrated Automotive Resources Inc. in Wayne, Pa.
