Awkward Timing

Labor relations in the 1990s could boil down to a collision between an irresistible force (worker demands for job security) and an immovable object (industry insistence on lower operating costs). General Motors and the United Auto Workers have just been in such a collision. A job action that began among 2,300 workers at a GM body-stamping plant in Lordstown, Ohio, expanded to nine GM assembly plants before the two sides finally reached a tentative settlement. It had idled 42,000 workers over the issue of the company's right to determine which jobs would be eliminated under a sweeping corporate restructuring scheduled to cut 74,000 hourly and salaried jobs by 1994.

On the surface, the strike was spurred by GM's decision to close down a tool-and-die shop -- but both sides know that larger issues are at stake. What + the corporation insists is a drive to banish outmoded practices that have made its factories the least efficient in the auto industry is perceived by the union as an effort to eliminate jobs. Dave Kimmel, president of UAW Local 1714, said his members received support from workers at distant plants whose weekly incomes are dropping from $700 to $200 a week. "Job security is important to everybody," he said. But the strike also came at an awkward time for the automaker. With stocks of the best-selling Saturn nearly depleted, GM had been losing between $1 million and $2 million a day, which still might doom the company to its eighth consecutive quarter in the red, the longest dry spell in corporate history.