The General Motors Co. walkout came to a close on Oct. 25 after employees voted to accept a four-year labor agreement. The vote marks the end of a strike that lasted more than five weeks. Employees will also be returning to normal production schedules.
“GM is proud to provide good-paying jobs to tens of thousands of employees in America and to grow our substantial investment in the U.S.,” Mary Barra, GM Chairman and CEO, said in a statement. “As one team, we can move forward and stay focused on our priorities of safety and building high-quality cars, trucks and crossovers for our customers.”
The strike, which involved around 48,000 workers, delayed the manufacturing and delivery of replacement parts and new car deliveries around the country. Bank of America estimated that the strike cost GM $2 billion. Even Hillsdale’s businesses suffered during the strike.
A few weeks ago, Ken Joswiak, the owner of Hillsdale Buick GMC, told The Collegian that he noticed it was more difficult to get spare parts.
Now, Joswiak said his business should begin receiving normal shipments sooner rather than later. According to Joswiak, GM still has extra parts in stock, but it couldn’t get the parts delivered everywhere they needed to go.
For Joswiak’s dealership, deliveries were delayed, but parts were even harder to get.
“The biggest issue has been parts for the service and body shop,” he said. “There have been some delays on deliveries, but many parts are just not available.”
This proved particularly difficult in the body shop, where repairs can require many different parts if a car was in an accident.
“If you’re just servicing a car, you typically only need one or two parts,” Joswiak said. “But in the body shop, you can need many parts, sometimes even 10.”
Fred Glowe, the parts manager at Frank Beck Chevrolet, said he and his team also experienced difficulties trying to get parts, but have found other solutions to most delays. “Luckily, with the jobs we’ve gotten, we’ve been able to come up with most of the parts to get them going,” Glowe said. “It just shut the whole system down. They had marginal workers trying to fill orders. White collar people tried to fill in for some of the deliveries.”
Like Joswiak, Glowe said he didn’t know when everything would return to normal, but he thought it could take a few weeks for GM employees to catch up on backorders.
“Once they go back to work, they’ll start filling orders from before the strike,” Glowe said. “If you were to order parts right now, it would take a long time for them to arrive.”
Joswiak said he didn’t know exactly when GM would be up and running, but all of the back-ordered parts and delayed cars will arrive, eventually. He said it might take some time before GM is operating at full capacity once everyone gets back to work.
“They’ve started to get back online in the next few days,” he said. “We’re just glad it’s over.”
