Yet if the GM strike shows anything, it is how America’s economy has transformed since the days when industrial firms and blue-collar unions called the shots. That past was at times glorious. The 1936 strike in Flint led to the unionisation of GM. The Treaty of Detroit in 1950, between the UAW and GM, offered full medical benefits to workers. But in time unions and industry started to drag each other down. The unions’ victories made carmakers less competitive. As two sociologists write in a new book, “Wrecked”, the carmakers responded to organised labour by moving away from Detroit, lest strikers turn it into a choke point. That weakened the unions’ bargaining power—but also the carmakers’ productivity by pushing them away from innovation clusters. Meanwhile, America’s economy has become tech-centric, making 20th-century industrial relations look like a relic. As such, the battle between GM and the UAW may be one of the last gasps of a form of collective bargaining that seems obsolete in the 21st century.

The strike itself is mostly about pay and health care. Pay, historically a big bone of contention, is the easier part to settle. Since its bankruptcy and bail-out in the financial crisis of 2008-09, GM has become Detroit’s most profitable car company, with earnings last year of $8bn. Workers, who made sacrifices in the lean years, receive a share of those profits. They think they deserve a bigger one. The UAW says that Mary Barra, the firm’s boss, makes 281times as much as an average GM worker. GM probably has enough dosh to offer them a pay rise that would narrow this gap, which many people, not just the UAW, find outrageous.

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