Strikes such as the one now threatened by the United Auto Workers have a way of being averted (if they are averted) at the last moment.
Automaker Stellantis was reported earlier today (Monday) as saying it was on a “good path” to avoid a strike.
The UAW’s Shawn Fain sounded rather more cautious.
United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain said Monday the union is prepared to negotiate around the clock with the Detroit Three automakers with just four days before a potential strike of 146,000 U.S. autoworkers.
“We are ready to negotiate in Detroit 24/7, just as we have been for the past seven weeks since we gave them our Members Demands,” Fain said in a statement. “Despite receiving no response for over a month, when the CEOs are ready to make a serious offer we’ll be there, day or night.”
Speaking on Larry Kudlow’s show on Fox (so before the weekend), Kevin Hassett commented that he thought it was “very, very likely” that there would be a strike, and that if it happened it would be a long one, and that, with the higher oil price, it could be enough to tip the economy into recession.
Hassett stressed the background against which the UAW was negotiating, which is the “existential” threat posed by the transition to electric vehicles to large numbers of jobs. He referred to the speed at which that transition is meant to be occurring, and he was right to. Whatever you think of the desirability of forcing a change to EVs (it’s not exactly a spoiler to say that I am not a fan), it is hard to defend the pace at which it is meant to be implemented, which will make no material difference to the climate.
It’s not unknown for central planners to try to force the pace of a project beyond what is reasonable, and it’s not unusual for that insistence to compound the problems that their plans were always going to cause. Hassett is no climate “denier” (to use that repellent term), but he does not think that there is a climate emergency. He can, however, see how the current handling of the transition to electric vehicles might lead to a “human emergency” in the auto sector, and one that won’t be confined just to those working in auto factories.
In the course of an article for Capital Matters on September 7, Hassett wrote this:
American Automakers, an industry association, estimates that about 7.5 million people in the U.S. have work that is related to cars. This is bigger than those just in manufacturing, because it includes people working at dealerships, repair shops, and gas stations. The Democrats’ policy objective is for two-thirds of new cars to be EVs by 2032. If they succeed at that, millions of lives will be disrupted.
Please read the whole thing.