The Economic Stakes of the UAW Strike

For more than a year, a drumbeat of warnings about an imminent recession has haunted even those who casually follow the news. Though a recession hasn’t materialized, many Americans still have a bleak outlook on the economy. So it’s little wonder that news of an imminent United Auto Workers strike last week stoked fears of further economic disruption. On Friday, the UAW decided to proceed with a “limited and targeted” stoppage at three locations: a Stellantis plant in Ohio, a General Motors factory in Missouri, and a Ford plant in Michigan. The strike is relatively small in size so far: About 13,000 of the UAW’s 150,000 workers at Stellantis, GM, and Ford are participating (though the union has threatened to add more). Ahead of the strike, a widely cited analysis—assuming that a strike would shut down all three of America’s major carmakers—predicted that its effects would ricochet across the economy, swiftly causing billions of dollars in damage.

But now that the strike has begun, in a targeted format at just three of the country’s dozens of plants, the economists and labor-relations experts I spoke with said that, barring major escalations in scope and duration, the strike is not likely to have a wide impact on national, or even state, economies. Peter Berg, the director of the School of Human Resources & Labor Relations at Michigan State University, told me that the likelihood of this strike tipping the economy into a recession, or meaningfully boosting inflation, is small, unless the strike stretches out for several more months.