As soon as she showed up on the picket line, Cathy Emery huddled with the other women to hear the latest word. It was not what she wanted to hear.
Don’t get your hopes up, they said, trooping outside one of General Motors Corp.’s massive factories in Flint, carrying their United Auto Workers union signs. Their strike, the women told her in hushed voices, looks like it will go on and on.
For the tens of thousands of GM workers laid off because of two UAW strikes, life has become harder. For weeks now, they have been forced to get by on state unemployment benefits that provide them less than their typical pay.
The strikers, however, receive only $150 a week in strike pay–less than minimum wage. For them, the strike is more than an inconvenience; it is causing families to dip into savings and to sacrifice luxuries.
Emery, a 23-year GM veteran and single provider for three children at home, notes that the strike pay barely covers her family’s weekly food bill.
When Emery and 3,800 UAW members walked off their jobs at GM’s metal-stamping plant in Flint on June 5, the mood was as festive as a summer picnic. But now that high-level negotiations with GM have broken off, their mood has darkened.
Workers on the picket lines at the stamping plant and at a Delphi parts plant that was struck a week later fear they have been swept up in a skirmish that has escalated into full-blown battle, and they worry who will lose. The breakdown in talks has only deepened their concerns.
As GM executives walked out on bargaining Sunday, saying the UAW had not budged, they issued a broad threat to do whatever they could to increase pressure on the union to settle the strikes and get back to business.
GM, of course, is hurting, too. Coming off its annual two-week summer hiatus, GM restarted two assembly plants Monday–its Saturn factory in Tennessee and a truck plant in Ontario. And it has kept open a small-car assembly facility in Mexico all along. On Monday, it also called back 2,880 workers for preproduction work at a truck assembly plant in Pontiac, Mich.
But without parts to keep its factories humming, GM has been forced to idle its other North American assembly plants. As a result, it has lost $1.18 billion and the production of 220,000 vehicles; it also has laid off roughly 165,000 employees.
In addition, GM may be unable to roll out most 1999 models as scheduled. That could further jeopardize its market share, which already has dwindled to less than a third of U.S. sales.
On the picket lines in Flint, where 9,200 workers are on strike at the two plants, there still is talk about solidarity, about hanging tough and outlasting their employer.
But there also is talk about paying bills and slashing expenses. Emery soon has to put down the fall tuition for her 18-year-old daughter, Amanda, who will be starting school at the University of Michigan at Flint, and it pains her that she will have to dig even deeper into savings to do it.
Twice a week, UAW Local 659, which represents the stamping plant workers, has been handing out food donations, but now it is thinking of adding a third day. There seems to be a need.
The local invited ministers to pray on the picket line last week, and it held a giant potluck supper, serving roast pig, to buoy spirits.
When the strike began, the background music that blared from boom boxes on the picket lines was cheerful and upbeat–pounding rock anthems that created a defiant, party-like air.
Now, the music is more likely country and western, and the words of the sad ballads seem scripted for the middle-aged strikers, who grumble about being betrayed by the company they’ve worked for during most of their adult years and misunderstood by others jealous of their high-paying jobs.
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In the first days of the strike, workers boasted broadly about teaching GM a lesson about respecting the union and keeping the company from shifting jobs from the United States.
David Foster, a third-generation GM worker, still feels that way.
“The union is doing the right thing. We have to stand our ground. I don’t want to see jobs going to Mexico,” said Foster, who, like many others in the union, is convinced GM wants to move more jobs to lower-paid workers in Mexico.
But an undercurrent of anxiety is coming closer to the surface every day.
“Somehow, we will pay for this,” said Terry Jones, who walked the picket line not far from Emery. “We may not know what it is, but there will be retribution from the company.”
Even though he was sure GM would get back at the workers, he was determined that the union continue to stand up to GM.
“Who wants to be out of work this long and have it go for nothing?” he explained.
That is what gnaws at Emery: What is down the road?
The day she was hired at GM, she was 22 and it was the happiest day of her life, she recalled, because she knew she had landed a job that would support her well through life.
She never thought the union would strike. Then she never thought that it would last a few weeks. Now, however, she does not know what to think.
“Sometimes, I get worried that I might not go back to work, and then I will have to do something else for the rest of my life. That is not how I thought it would be.”