GM’s In A Spot … Again
“Production at a GM plant has come to a screeching halt”, sounds like a line which has been done to death in the last month. While its true, yet again, this time the halt has got nothing to do with the UAW versus American Axle face off that has become a kind of never ending saga. UAW, however, is once more at the heart of the issue.
A local faction of UAW,UAW 602, struck work on Thursday morning. The strike will affect a GM plant, the Lansing Delta Township plant, near Lansing, Michigan. While the 3,300 hourly UAW workers, that have struck work, have not given the exact nature of their misgivings, it is believed that the strike has resulted due to a breakdown in contractual negotiations that had been on for almost a year.
This marks a second production halt at the Lansing plant in two days. The earlier disruption, on Wednesday, was a result of labour problems at their carpeting supplier, Alliance Interiors. This occurred due to about 90 UAWworkers. While GM could resume work on Thursday, the work had to halt due the fresh eruption of a strike in the course of the day.
The UAW workers at Alliance remained on strike on Thursday, but the union had started talks with the Alliance management.
This strike will hit GM hard, as the Lansing plant mainly manufactures GM’s hot selling crossovers- Buick Enclave, Saturn Outlook and GMC Acadia, all built on the Lamda platform. All these cars are popular products, whose sale was actually 47% higher in the first quarter this year than the same in last year. Inventories for these cars, therefore, are pretty slim when compared to the lesser selling SUVs and pickups.
This strike is sure to hit GM harder than the long standing American Axle-UAW war, about which GM has remained tight-lipped so far.
GM Spokesman Dan Flores, in his communication with Automotive News, has stated that GM will continue to monitor the situation and discuss the discrepancies with UAW in order to reach a solution as soon as possible.
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