Manny Lopez

GM gets tougher; will UAW cry ‘uncle’?

The guerrilla game of chess the United Auto Workers union is playing with General Motors Corp. turned into a serious game of chicken on Wednesday.

The Detroit automaker canceled medical and life insurance benefits for workers striking the Delta Township factory outside Lansing, something the company hasn’t done in a decade.

Call it payback for the myriad walkouts and threats of strikes the UAW has been waging against GM for the past month — ostensibly because of local contract issues. In reality, the local walkouts are a poorly disguised attempt at getting American Axle & Manufacturing Holdings Inc. to increase its offer to striking workers there. Or call it appropriate financial management because the union now will rightly pay those benefits for workers who voluntarily left their jobs, not the company.

Either way, it signals that labor negotiations today are nothing like those of the past.

Times have changed

Rarely would an automaker or a supplier go on record insisting that it will shut factories, as American Axle CEO Richard Dauch has done, or take advantage of provisions in national contracts that allow them to take benefits away. But that’s what we’ve got today, and both GM and American Axle have the stronger hand in this shoving match.

The dour economy and diminishing clout that goes with union membership declines bolster the companies’ claims that they can’t operate with costs significantly higher than their competitors here and abroad.

Throw in the fact that plenty of people are willing, if not begging, to work for $14 an hour, and the union’s case is made tougher to defend. The blogs and coffee shops are abuzz with chatter between American Axle workers who are job hunting because they can’t afford to be on strike, or from others aching to still get into the industry despite its issues.

Struggles will go on

That doesn’t mean the UAW should roll over, and we all know it won’t. And it doesn’t lessen the struggles those workers and others will face when forced to live on lower wages.

But it certainly makes it harder to turn down an offer of up to $200 million, as GM has made to help out with the Axle talks, or drag on a strike for weeks, if not months, solely in the name of solidarity.

After all, let’s not forget that most workers in America do not belong to unions, and they scoff at the union’s complaints that buyouts and bonuses being offered to the UAW’s work force are not generous enough.

Perhaps Michigan’s automotive entitlement culture finally is taking its last breath. That change isn’t easy, but it’s necessary, and once it is accepted the game playing can end.