DETROIT (Reuters) - The United Auto Workers (UAW) said on Sunday that its roughly 48,000 hourly workers at General Motors Co facilities would go on strike as of midnight Sunday after labor contract talks reached an impasse over wide-ranging issues from wages to health care benefits and temporary workers.
“We do not take this lightly,” Terry Dittes, the UAW vice president in charge of the union’s relationship with GM, said at a press conference in downtown Detroit. “This is our last resort.”
Earlier on Sunday 850 maintenance workers at five GM facilities walked off the job on strike.
The union has been fighting to stop GM from closing auto assembly plants in Ohio and Michigan and arguing that workers deserve higher pay after years of record profits for GM in North America.
GM officials have said the plant shutdowns are necessary responses to market shifts, and that UAW wages and benefits are expensive compared with competing non-union auto plants in the southern United States.
Before the union’s previous four-year contract with the No. 1 U.S. automaker expired at midnight on Sunday, Dittes said that “significant differences” remained between the two sides over wages, health care benefits, temporary employees, job security and profit sharing.
“We are standing up for fair wages, we are standing up for affordable, quality health care,” Dittes said on Sunday. “We are standing up for our share of the profits.”
A broad strike by the union would be the first such action at GM in 12 years and would test both the union and GM Chief Executive Mary Barra at a time
