UAW Strike: 5K Auto Workers Shutter GM’s Biggest Plant as Automaker Abandons Electric Vehicle Strategy
About 5,000 American auto workers shut down General Motors’s (GM) biggest and most profitable plant in Arlington, Texas, joining more than 40,000 fellow United Auto Workers (UAW) members in their ongoing strike against the Big Three.
On Tuesday morning, the auto workers walked out at GM’s Arlington Assembly plant and joined the UAW picket line. The plant, which produces the Chevy Tahoe, Chevy Suburban, GMC Yukon, and Cadillac Escalade, is GM’s most profitable in the United States.
The UAW timed the walkout at Arlington Assembly just hours after GM reported $3.5 billion in third-quarter earnings. Executives said that GM has lost about $800 million since the strike started more than a month ago.
“Another record quarter, another record year. As we’ve said for months: record profits equal record contracts,” UAW President Shawn Fain said in a statement. “It’s time GM workers, and the whole working class, get their fair share.”
Today, there are nearly 46,000 auto workers on strike against GM, Ford, and Stellantis across 22 states, including eight assembly plants and 38 parts distribution centers.
The walkout at GM’s biggest plant comes after 6,800 auto workers shut down Stellantis’s most profitable plant in Sterling Heights, Michigan, this week and 8,700 auto workers shut down Ford’s most profitable plant in Louisville, Kentucky, earlier this month.
As a result of the ongoing strike, GM CEO Mary Barra and other executives told investors they are abandoning their goals to produce 400,000 Electric Vehicles (EVs) from 2022 through mid-2024, among other EV priorities, according to Reuters:
“We’re just not going to be talking about the interim production goals,” Jacobson said.
Barra said GM has “work to do” to hit its low- to mid-single-digit earnings before interest and taxes (EBIT) margin target by 2025.
GM’s decision to delay retooling of a large factory in Orion Township, Michigan, to build electric pickup trucks will save $1.5 billion in capital investments in 2024, Jacobson said.
As Breitbart News has chronicled, the UAW is striking to score higher wages to keep up with record inflation under President Joe Biden, as well as commitments that their jobs will not be eliminated entirely as a result of Biden’s EV mandates included in the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA).
The IRA promises to shower billions in taxpayer money on automakers via EV tax credits, but auto workers and UAW leadership have repeatedly warned that the money is not trickling down to their pockets and, instead, cutting their wages and eliminating their jobs.
“I think EVs are going to wipe us out,” an auto worker on strike in Beaverton, Oregon, told E&E News this month. “… [EVs] don’t need spark plugs, what else, oil filters, we sell a lot of those. If we don’t have all those parts, I feel like we don’t have a lot to do.”
Breitbart News has long detailed the outcome of Biden’s EV mandates where automakers eliminate millions of American auto jobs and slash wages because the green vehicles demand far less labor to produce and include batteries at least partly sourced or produced in China.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.
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