Daniel Howes

UAW turns up the heat

A week ago, the United Auto Workers president disclaimed any role for General Motors Corp. in resolving a protracted strike against Dick Dauch’s American Axle & Manufacturing Holdings Inc.

"I don’t see how we’d benefit by them getting involved," Ron Gettelfinger told The Detroit News, evidently trying to deflect suggestions that strikes against GM were intended to break the logjam at America Axle. "I’ve told GM that."

Except that’s not what it looked like then and it’s certainly not what it looks like today, now that 2,600 union members are striking GM’s Fairfax Assembly, one of two plants that are home to GM’s hot-selling Chevrolet Malibu.

Add the nearly three-weeks-and-counting walkout at GM’s Delta Township plant near Lansing, where its mid-size crossover utilities are built, and this metastasizing labor meltdown evokes the "heat-and-light show" they do so well at Solidarity House — the union turns up the heat until the company sees the light.

GM strikes are leverage play

How could it be anything else? GM’s Malibu is the midsize Camry fighter GM has been trying to build for a generation, and talks on a local agreement just happen to reach a breaking point as the American Axle strike shifts from long to painful? This, after the inconvenience of stopping production of GMC Acadias, Buick Enclaves and Saturn Outlooks near Lansing failed to make GM a party to an Axle deal?

Even if local grievances in Fairfax, Kan., are legit, taking down the Malibu nonetheless amounts to a bid for more union leverage over a situation that, with each passing day, is less likely to move in the direction of 3,650 UAW members at American Axle sites in Detroit and near Buffalo, N.Y.

Why? Because the timing is terrible. Sales of cars and trucks are dropping like a stone, as April’s numbers confirmed. Rising gas prices are fundamentally changing buyer behavior. Demand for full-size trucks and SUVs, a bread-and-butter revenue engine for GM and American Axle, is slackening so much that the industry rumor mill holds that American Axle can supply GM’s short-term needs from its plant in Mexico.

Market hurts union effort

That, as the saying goes, ain’t good. If gas was $2.25 a gallon and the market was humming along at an annual sales rate of 17 million cars and trucks, American Axle would be settled by now and the folks at Fairfax and Delta Township would be on the job. But they aren’t, and GM isn’t shipping some of its hottest new vehicles to dealers around the country.

The American Axle strike began Feb. 26, surpassing the union’s 54-day GM strike in Flint a decade ago. Now UAW members are striking the two U.S. plants building GM’s hottest new vehicles and saying none of it is related to Axle.

Whatever you say.