Let's be a bit more specific. GM made $8.9 billion last year on $157 billion of revenue, a 5.7% sliver. A large portion of the costs to earn that revenue is labor, and they are asking a 40% increase of those costs, while GM had said 20%. This is a company with $118 billion in debt, which is increasingly going to roll over to much larger interest payments from now on, due to the Fed Funds rate of 5.25%. And they're trying to reinvest those profits into the transition to EV. If they don't do that, they're dead. This is also a company that made profits before going bankrupt just 15 years ago, which our taxes had to pay for. I don't want to see employees out of jobs ("every auto job is a good job" -UAW), nor do I think UAW is entirely well meaning when they've been shown trying to weaken EPA regulations[0] so they can pump out more polluting Camaros and Cadillacs for the past decade while Tesla created EV's.

[0]https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/uaw-wa...

If they cannot pay their employees a fair wage someone else will. There is no need to cry for the rich overlords and lament their lack of more profit.

This is just nonsense, the point of capitalism is to extract value efficiently, if Big 3 cannot, then other companies will. There is no in between or buts.

GM gave all the hourly employees a $12,750 bonus check this year because of company profits.

Actually. No one else will.

UAW was unable to unionize non-big 3 factories in the US.

Past performance is not a guarantee of future results.

There's a huge wave of increased support for labor in the US right now. It's definitely not a good idea to bet on any particular area remaining un-unionized.

You’re not getting it.

There is zero chance non-us car factories unionize. There is nothing stopping them from closing the factory and moving internationally. The same isn’t true for the big 3.

Sure there is: whatever reasons led them to build factories in the US in the first place.

And for, say, German automakers, they already have unionized workforces outside the US.

This whole narrative of "we cannot possibly try to improve anything for our people, because any time we do the wealthy overlords will move their business/money/etc overseas" is demonstrably bullshit, and always has been. It doesn't hold up for raising taxes on the wealthy, it doesn't hold up for unionization, and it won't hold up for whatever the next thing people like you try to use it to argue against will be.

Thank you!

No one will pay them a fair wage because there will no plants for them to work in. The US manufacturers will simply ramp up offshoring of entire vehicles to China. The new Lincoln SUV is an entirely in house design from Changan motors soup to nuts. You can fully expect this to become common for US brands.

They big 3 currently have $354 Billion in debt.