An increase of 25%. After six weeks of an unprecedented strike, employees of the big three American manufacturers, Ford, GM and Stellantis, the “Big Three”, ended their movement after winning significant wage increases. An epilogue welcomed by President Joe Biden, along with employees since the beginning of the movement. “I think he’s great,” he responded. The big manufacturers do their homework.
More than a billion dollars in GM and Ford
Although the specific impact of the salary increases on the accounts of the three companies remains difficult to quantify, the automotive groups have already evaluated the deficit of these six weeks of movement. Both Ford and General Motors estimate a loss of more than $1 billion in their operating margin. Stellantis, for its part, reports a slightly lower loss, of less than 750 million euros, in its profitability.
In the Italian-French-American group, almost 3,000 million euros of turnover were lost and in September and October some 50,000 cars were not sold. This significant impact will never be fully offset, believes the group’s chief financial officer, Natalie Knight. This did not prevent the group from recording a stronger than expected third quarter, with a turnover of 45 billion euros. The UBS bank welcomes both these “solid” earnings and the “limited” impact of the strikes on the group resulting from the merger between Fiat Chrysler and Peugeot SA.
Stellantis, less exposed to the American market
If Stellantis seems to have suffered less after this conflict, it is due in particular to less exposure to the American market, since Stellantis is a truly global group.
The UAW union does not see the end of this strike as the conclusion of its action in defense of American auto workers. A little earlier, in October, as Bloomberg recalls, its leader Shawn Fain declared: “the workers at Tesla, Toyota, Honda (who are not unionized, editor’s note) and others are not enemies: they are the UAW members of the future.
Source: BFM TV
