#GM

Buried beneath all of the pay and benefit details contained within the tentative UAW-GM labor agreement is a property sale. No, Ford’s not buying back the Renaissance Center.

A property situated on the banks of the Detroit River hosts the GM Center for Human Resources — the jointly operated training center funded with automaker cash, and one that’s become quite notorious of late. Given that the center sits at the heart of a federal corruption probe, the automaker feels it’s probably a good idea to ditch the property.

As the UAW-GM strike closes out its fifth week, workers now hold the power of determining when it will end. Late Thursday, the UAW National General Motors Council recommended ratification of the tentative agreement forged a day earlier, tossing the ball into the workers’ court.

While the strike continues, some members claim they’ll reject the contract unless GM reopens mothballed assembly plants — an unlikely scenario, given that the suddenly thrifty automaker has already reversed course on the closure of Detroit-Hamtramck. That plant is now tapped for GM’s Ford-fighting electric pickup.

After reaching a tentative agreement with General Motors on Wednesday, the United Auto Workers has released a summary of the proposed labor contract.

Contained within are wage hikes for GM autoworkers, lump sum increases, a generous signing bonus, the removal of caps on profit-sharing payouts, and a health care plan that maintains the status quo. It would also keep one previously doomed assembly plant open.

What we don’t know, at this point, is when the ongoing strike will end.

After 31 days on the picket line, UAW-affiliated General Motors workers could soon be back in the business of building vehicles. Wednesday morning, the United Auto Workers and GM announced that their bargaining teams had reached a tentative agreement — one the UAW says includes “major gains” for its members.

All signs earlier this week pointed to a looming deal. On Tuesday, GM CEO Mary Barra and President Mark Reuss sat in on negotiations, while the UAW called its local union leaders to Detroit for a Thursday meeting.

Now in its fifth week, the strike by UAW-affiliated workers that darkened General Motors plants across the continent and reportedly cost the company $2 billion may soon achieve results.

Late Monday night, numerous media outlets reported that local union leaders were being called to Detroit for a Thursday meeting. This morning, word arose that GM CEO Mary Barra and President Mark Reuss had taken a seat at the bargaining table.

Few expected the labor action by U.S. General Motors workers to last this long, but no one expected reaching a collective agreement to be easy, either. As the the strike by UAW-affiliated GM workers enters its fifth week, picketing workers can expect an extra $25 a week from the union’s strike fund.

GM, on the other hand, can expect its dealers to face increased difficulty in sourcing certain replacement parts, while others worry about the prospect of subpar inventory.

Our last update on the GM-UAW strike revolved around union reps playing hardball on issues like health care, wages, temporary employees, skilled trades, and job security. The United Auto Workers sent General Motors’ proposals back, holding its nose in disapproval.

With the strike now roughly one month deep and looking like it may disrupt the automaker’s well-laid plans, GM is firing back by suggesting the workers’ union is intentionally wasting everybody’s time. The company’s latest contract offer was issued Monday, with the union having yet to offer any formal feedback. Chief Executive Officer Mary Barra even joined negotiations on Wednesday in an effort to speed up discussions. But the UAW has said it will only issue a counter proposal after five separate committees address a “series of issues” and the automaker publicly furnishes its suggestions.

“We object to having bargaining placed on hold pending a resolution of these five areas,” Scott Sandefur, GM’s vice president of North American labor relations, wrote to UAW Vice President Terry Dittes on Thursday. “As we have urged repeatedly, we should engage in bargaining over all issues around-the-clock to get an agreement.”

Industry analysts are becoming concerned that General Motors’ ongoing row with the United Automobile Workers will negatively impact its production commitments. Officially, the automaker has a surplus allowing it to endure strike conditions for a few more weeks. But it’s also supposed to preparing SEMA vehicles and readying production of the new, mid-engined Chevrolet Corvette Stingray — none of which have any back catalog to draw from.

While GM had 80 days worth of inventory at the start of October to help tamp down any panic, numerous models aren’t included in that pool. The C8 Corvette is supposed to launch this year, with volumes ramping up through early 2020. But orders for the outgoing C7 are backing up due to the UAW strike, requiring the automaker to finish those before retooling Bowling Green Assembly for the C8. That could further stall the Stingray’s arrival date, which was already a little nebulous.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

The issue of China’s totalitarian government intimidating American businesses into silence over protests in Hong Kong and human rights violations in China has come to the fore, with three nearly simultaneous incidents. The National Basketball Association didn’t quite censure the Houston Rockets’ general manager Daryl Morey for tweeting “fight for Freedom” and “stand with Hong Kong,” but league commissioner Adam Silver’s attempts to mollify Xi JinPing’s regime, to preserve the NBA’s profitable ventures in China, have been described as craven. E-gaming company Blizzard Activision, which is 4.9-percent owned by the Chinese Tencent company, stripped a tournament champion of his title and winnings and banned him for a year for expressing support for Hong Kong in a post-event broadcast. When the animated South Park comedy show satirized censorship in China, the Chinese government simply erased South Park from the Chinese internet as though it never existed. On that side of the great firewall of China, South Park has become like Nikolai Yezhov.

To their everlasting credit, Matt Stone and Trey Parker, South Park’s creators, unlike the NBA and Blizzard Activision, didn’t kowtow, instead releasing an “apology” that mocked both Chinese government censors and the NBA.

It’s abundantly clear that China will use the threat of punishing American companies by restricting access to the Chinese market in order to exert intimidating influence here in the United States.

What does that have to do with cars?

The Chevrolet Traverse represents the pinnacle of the brand’s crossover range, offering buyers voluminous cargo and passenger space, and maybe a hidden gremlin.

After purchasing the three-row crossover new in 2018, one owner has had to return to his dealership 50 times to diagnose and fix a range of unusual problems, and his journey isn’t at an end. He’ll be reassured to know that he’s not alone.

Appearing midway through 2014 as a 2015 model, the Chevrolet Colorado and its GMC twin, the Canyon, are growing long in the tooth, which isn’t too big a concern in a segment that hosts the Nissan Frontier. However, consumers like alterations that show their truck is newer than other trucks.

As such, there’s a 2021 model-year refresh on the way for General Motors’ midsize pair. Just don’t expect wild changes.

Never have pickup trucks mattered more to an automaker, especially domestic automakers. As sedans and coupes fall off, trucks make up an ever greater percentage of a company’s sales, and the greater (and quickly rising) average selling prices of these hulking family vehicles means there’s a pot of gold waiting for those who succeed.

While the full-size pickup front-runner hasn’t changed since the early 1980s, Ford’s F-Series faces growing competition from two traditional foes. Both Fiat Chrysler and General Motors have newer pickups on the market, and it’s eating into the popularity of the untouchable F-Series.

One of the more vibrant paint choices for the 2020 Chevrolet Sonic is “Red Hot” — a name that most certainly does not accurately describe the Sonic’s U.S. sales.

Chevy’s Michigan-built subcompact remains in the Chevy lineup for the coming model year, joined by an Impala that sees its production end in January, and accompanied by the ghosts of the remaining unsold Cruzes littering lots after that model’s cancellation. It wouldn’t be a surprise to see Chevy’s 2021 lineup contain just the Malibu, Spark, and Bolt in the non-sporty passenger car stable.

Why? Because, while General Motors chose to deep-six the Sonic in Mexico and Canada earlier this year, buyers apparently didn’t get the message that it remains on sale in the U.S.

As the GM-UAW strike enters its 17th day, it seems the union representing 48,000 of the automaker’s U.S. workers isn’t about to agree to any concessions.

Earlier this week, the General Motors bargaining team slid an offer across the table, hoping to restore labor peace and flip the switches at its darkened plants. The UAW promptly slid it back.

The strike by UAW-affiliated General Motors workers, now in its third week, is piling up costs for the automaker. It’s also hiking financial pressure on the UAW, which just started paying out $250 a week to roughly 48,000 picketing workers in the United States.

As bargaining teams negotiate behind closed doors to reach a tentative contract agreement, the growing financial consequences of the labor action is hitting GM in another way: it’s now impacting GM’s stock price.