About 8,500 workers at General Motors Corp.'s Delphi Packard plant in Warren, Ohio, walked off their jobs at midnight in a strike that could shut down assembly plants across North America in a few days.
The Warren plant makes electronic components for wire harnesses that distribute electricity throughout a car or truck.Nick Border, a spokesman for the International Union of Electrical Workers Local 717 in Warren, said Tuesday that within a week, GM assembly plants across North America will be shut down because of the strike, for lack of wire harnesses.
General Motors officials couldn't immediately be reached to comment. The automaker's shares fell 17/8 to 567/8 in midmorning trading after a delayed opening.
The union is seeking a contract that will protect as many local jobs as possible, while GM has been trying to move some of the jobs out of the union's jurisdiction.
The strike's impact could be even wider, since the Warren complex provides wire harnesses to more than a dozen other automakers besides GM.
GM is currently facing two strikes by United Auto Workers. A midsize car plant in Oklahoma City and a full-sized pickup plant in Pontiac, Mich., are on strike, idling a total of 9,400 workers.
Nick Nichols, the electrical union's top negotiator at GM, said Tuesday that the two sides were close to an agreement and that he was surprised and disappointed a strike wasn't avoided.
The union's goal, he said, was to secure "job security for the youngest to the oldest member and to stop the company from moving our work out."
Since last year, the IUE has been fighting the company's plan to shift away from Local 717 about 1,800 "cutter" jobs. These are workers who prepare bundles of wires for attachment to electronic switching devices. The company would shift new work into the Local 717 jurisdiction, but the union considers these jobs less secure.
In what was viewed as a conciliatory move in 1984, the IUE signed a contract allowing multiple wage scales, or tiers. The lowest-tier worker now makes $10.60 an hour, or about half the wage of a veteran worker. The union wants cash bonuses for high-wage workers who retire and accelerated transfers of low-wage workers into high-wage jobs as the older high-wage workers retire.
The IUE struck GM's sports-utility factory in Moraine, Ohio, for three days in January. That was the IUE's first strike at the company since 1986.