GM cuts healthcare benefits for workers, as strike enters 4th day. This induces workers to get more angry. GM thinks this will scare them or get them to rethink the cost of their benefits. It's going to backfire. It's quick, rash and insensitive.
The United Auto Workers said on Sunday that a nationwide strike will begin before midnight. The move comes after the union and General Motors failed to agree on a new contract.
GM recently declared that it will close three major assembly and two smaller transmission facilities in North America. This despite GM’s recent robust profit reports - while labor costs make up less than 10 percent of the average vehicle.
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"GM needs to pay more attention to relationships on the Hill," said U.S. Rep. Debbie Dingell, D-Dearborn, who described GM recently as the “most disliked company in Washington."
With the Lordstown GM plant closing, the idea of tackling worker alienation, behind workers 1972 "industrial Woodstock," seems lost. The measure of that loss is in news that the US death rate is rising due to suicide and drug overdose.
Gerard Di Trolio, David Bush and Doug Nesbitt
RankandFile.CA
The problem facing autoworkers isn’t simply one or two bad rounds of negotiation, but a race-to-the-bottom pattern of bargaining. At the heart of this mess is the company pitting workers against each other in a competition to save jobs.
A deft telling of a Wisconsin town and its people who lost their largest employer, a General Motors auto plant, typifying the collapse of much American manufacturing over the past quarter-century. Janesville is also--ironically or not-- the home of Paul Ryan, the U.S. House GOP speaker.
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