Three weeks in, the United Auto Workers strike against Detroit’s carmakers has nearly all the hallmarks of a dug-in labor battle: euphoric worker walkouts, rushed contingency plans, wall-to-wall media coverage and fiery rhetoric.
The one thing missing—at least so far—is much financial pain, on either side.
About 25,000 workers are now picketing at General Motors, Ford Motor and Chrysler-parent Stellantis facilities across the Midwest, or about 17% of the companies’ unionized workers. UAW President Shawn Fain is expected to disclose whether there are plans for additional walkouts Friday, in what is becoming a weekly ritual of widening strike actions.
The union’s gradually unfolding pop-up strikes—which resemble tactics deployed by the Association of Flight Attendants in the 1990s—are meant to keep the companies off balance through the element of surprise. It is also aimed at maximizing worker enthusiasm. Union members have gathered while on the job to watch Fain’s livestreams to find out if their facility is next to walk out.
The union is applying pressure unevenly across the automakers, sparing one company in a given week while turning up the heat on the other two, a tactic intended to pit the companies against one another and reward progress at the bargaining table. Another advantage: It has kept a sizable majority of UAW members on the job, conserving the fund used to compensate striking workers.
Still, the decision to forgo the all-in strike that many industry observers had expected has so far considerably softened the disruption to the companies’ factory footprints and bottom lines.
For example, when all of GM’s factory workers walked off the job in 2019, the company lost an estimated $1 billion over the first two weeks. Its losses during roughly the first two weeks of the latest strike was about $200 million, a company spokesman said Wednesday.
The five factories on strike across GM, Ford and Stellantis accounted for about 16% of the vehicles produced in North America by the three companies this year through August, data from Wards Intelligence showed. So far, the plants where the companies’ full-size pickup trucks and large SUVs are made—their most-profitable vehicles—remain humming.
“It’s creating a lot of headlines,” said Colin Langan, a Wells Fargo analyst. “Financially, it’s not very impactful at all.”
Each automaker has complained that union leaders aren’t serious about getting a deal done and are trying to drag out the strike. Last month, they cited purported private messages posted by the UAW’s communications director in which he references keeping the companies “wounded for months” and seeking to do reputational damage to them.
“It’s clear that there is no real intent to get to an agreement,” GM Chief Executive Mary Barra said Friday, after the union staged a walkout at the company’s SUV plant in Lansing, Mich.
Wages have been a focal point in the talks. The companies have made proposals of roughly 20% wage increases over four years, while the union had been pressing for an increase in the mid-30% range. The UAW also is demanding cost-of-living adjustments, which it says Stellantis and Ford have since agreed to, along with better retirement benefits and pensions.
The relatively tame financial damage so far is in line with the strategy Fain articulated from the outset, analysts say. He has vowed to gradually turn up the heat on companies that don’t move closer to the union’s demands.
“Fain is still throwing softballs,” said Warren Browne, an automotive consultant and retired GM executive. “I think hardballs will come the longer the strike lasts.”
Disruption from the limited strike has rippled out to other aspects of the companies’ businesses. More than 6,000 workers at the three companies and at outside suppliers have been put on temporary layoff because of knock-on effects from certain operations going down from the strike.
Last week, Stellantis was subject to the whipsaw effect of the union’s strike strategy.
On Friday morning, Fain spared Stellantis from further strikes, while calling further walkouts at GM and Ford. But Stellantis executives didn’t have time to celebrate, as they rushed to contain fallout from the prior week’s labor action.
Later Friday, the company’s top North American executive told employees in an email that “passionate volunteers” were immediately needed to work shifts at two Michigan parts-distribution sites that had gone on strike the previous week. Employees were being asked to meet early the next morning, a Saturday, to board charter buses to the facilities.
Stellantis declined to comment.
Both GM and Stellantis have scrambled to find white-collar staff to work shifts at 38 parts depots that went on strike in the second wave announced by the UAW, and Ford in recent days has sought volunteers to sub at its own parts centers, people familiar with the matter said. Stellantis also rented a nonunion warehouse to store 30 days worth of extra parts to supply to dealers for servicing, the Wall Street Journal has reported.
The decision to slowly trickle out which facilities go on strike has resulted in an uneven impact on union members. Most are working full time, while some are laid off and others are on the picket lines receiving $500 in weekly strike pay. The union has said the automakers’ laid-off workers also will get strike pay.
Landan Dibble was working the assembly line at the GM plant in Lansing last Friday when cheers rang out following word that Fain had called a walkout there.
“I think everyone understands what we’re fighting for.” Along with stints on the picket line, Dibble, 35, is working as a handyman to make up for his lost wages.
The union’s strategy for now might be to generate more public attention than it is to hit the companies’ profits, said Nelson Lichtenstein, a labor historian at the University of California at Santa Barbara.
“Right now, it’s a political strike,” he said. “And the UAW is skillfully doing it.”
Nora Eckert contributed to this article.
Write to Ryan Felton at ryan.felton@wsj.com
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