5,000 workers at GM's Arlington Assembly Plant join UAW strike

Patrick Hilsman
·3 min read
8
UPI
The United Auto Workers union announced Tuesday that 5,000 employees from General Motors' Texas-based Arlington Assembly Plant have joined the union's "Stand Up Strike." File Photo by Aaron Josefczyk/UPI

Oct. 24 (UPI) -- The United Auto Workers Union on Tuesday expanded its strike against the so-called "Big Three" U.S. automakers to include 5,000 more workers at a Texas General Motors plant.

UAW announced the strike at GM's Arlington Assembly Plant which it touted as the company's "largest plant and biggest moneymaker."

"The workers who make some of GM's most profitable vehicles, the Chevy Tahoe, Chevy Suburban, GMC Yukon and Cadillac Escalade, are joining the unprecedented Stand Up Strike against all there of the Big Three automakers," UAW said.

Around 5,000 workers joined the United Auto Workers strike against General Motors Tuesday, according to a press release from the UAW. The action is part of a broader UAW strategy called the "Stand Up Strike."

The strike expansion came as GM reported third-quarter earnings of $3.5 billion, the UAW noted.

"Another record quarter, another record year. As we've said for months: record profits equal record contracts," UAW President Shawn Fain said. "It's time GM workers, and the whole working class get their fair share."

The UAW also accused GM of offering far less than the company should be capable of, comparing it to offers provided by Ford Motors, which union officials have also condemned as insufficient.

"Despite having made $10 billion in profits in the past nine months, breaking revenue records for another consecutive quarter, and beating Wall Street expectations, GM's offer lags behind Ford," the UAW said.

In its earnings report, GM said the strike had resulted in an incremental $600 million hit to its earnings and estimated the strike would cost the company about $200 million per week based on the strike numbers entering the week.

GM CFO Paul Jacobson also argued that the record profits did not necessarily mean the company could fulfill the union's demands.

"When we look at the landscape out there, particularly around EVs, we need to make sure that's an agreement that we sign that allows us to compete in the market," he said. "I can appreciate that earnings are strong right now, but there's a lot of uncertainty out there in the future with EV adoption, with the economy and we can't get ourselves in a situation of signing a deal that we can't afford to pay or that doesn't allow us to compete in the global market place."

Tuesday's expansion brought the total number of striking workers to 45,000 throughout 46 facilities in the United States, after 6,800 members UAW at Stellantis' Sterling Heights Assembly Plant in Michigan joined on Monday.

UAW said the most recent action was organized with the intention of taking GM by surprise, after Fain declared earlier this month that the union would no longer wait until Fridays to announce strike expansions.

"This is the third time that the UAW has launched a surprise strike against a plant. During the first month of the strike, the union set a deadline in advance and expanded the strike if an automaker failed to make progress toward a fair agreement. That phase of the strike did produce significant movement, but then the Big Three began to slow walk bargaining until just before each deadline," the UAW said.