UAW Axle Strike Threatens GM Trucks, Echoing 2008 Shutdown

A UAW strike at one small Michigan axle plant just put General Motors’ most profitable vehicles on the clock. At 12:01 a.m. Monday, nearly 1,000 members of UAW Local 2093, part of the United Auto Workers (UAW, the union representing US autoworkers), walked off the job at the Dauch Corporation factory in Three Rivers, the renamed American Axle & Manufacturing, after contract talks collapsed at the May 31 deadline.

The last time this supplier and this union fought, in 2008, the walkout idled or slowed dozens of GM plants and drained the company of hundreds of millions in lost sales. The chokepoint that made that strike bite is still bolted in place.

Local 2093 Walked Out at One Minute Past Midnight

Shawn Fain, the UAW president, announced the strike in a livestream around 10 p.m. Sunday, two hours before the contract ran out, flanked by workers from the plant. Picket lines went up at one minute past midnight, with a second wave at 6 a.m. as the morning shift arrived.

As of midnight tonight, UAW Local 2093 will be on strike at American Axle.

That was Fain, speaking on the union’s livestream Sunday night. The walkout follows a strike authorization vote earlier in May, when members backed the action by 98 percent. You can read the union’s own account in its statement on the Three Rivers contract breakdown.

The plant is the company’s largest in Michigan. Roughly 1,000 hourly workers there now sit outside the gates instead of building the parts that keep GM’s pickup lines moving.

Why a Thousand Workers Can Squeeze GM’s Best Sellers

The Three Rivers plant does not make a small part. It builds driveline components and axles for the Chevrolet Silverado and the GMC Sierra, GM’s half-ton pickups and the trucks that generate the bulk of the automaker’s profit. Cut the axle supply, and the assembly lines downstream run out of work fast.

That is why a workforce of about 1,000 carries weight far beyond its size. GM accounted for roughly 44% of its sales at the supplier in 2025, making the automaker by far its biggest customer, and pickups sit at the center of that relationship.

Here is what is exposed if the strike runs long:

• Truck output: axles for the Silverado and Sierra flow through Three Rivers, so a parts gap can force GM to slow or idle assembly plants.
• Dealer inventory: tighter pickup supply at dealerships, with knock-on pressure on transaction prices if stock thins.
• Other automakers: the supplier also feeds Stellantis and Nissan, so the dispute reaches beyond a single carmaker’s lineup.

The 2008 Strike That Idled 27 GM Plants

Workers in Three Rivers have done this before, and the numbers from last time explain why GM is watching closely. In February 2008, about 3,650 UAW members struck the company’s original US plants in Michigan and New York over a proposed wage cut. The walkout lasted roughly 12 weeks.

How the 2008 Walkout Played Out

The damage spread quickly up the supply chain. The strike idled or slowed as many as 27 GM plants that depended on the company’s axles. The supplier later said the action cut its full-year 2008 sales by about $370 million, a figure laid out in its 2008 financial disclosure to the SEC. Workers eventually accepted deep wage cuts to keep the Three Rivers plant alive during the recession.

What Looks the Same in 2026

The cast is different but the leverage is identical. One supplier, one critical part, one customer that cannot easily source axles elsewhere on short notice. The table below lines up the two disputes.

The Wage Math Behind the Picket Line

The fight comes down to a wage that workers say never recovered. In 2008, top earners at Three Rivers made as much as $29 an hour before agreeing to roughly half that to save the plant. Today the highest union wage tops out at about $22 an hour after a five-year progression.

The union frames it as a real pay cut once inflation is counted, and the figures back the complaint. Some long-tenured members say they cannot cover basic costs, with the union citing workers sleeping in their cars.

• $29 an hour was the 2008 top wage, which the union says equals roughly $44 an hour in today’s dollars.
• $22 an hour is the current ceiling, about half the inflation-adjusted 2008 figure.
• 98 percent of voting members authorized the strike before the contract expired, per the union’s tally of the Three Rivers authorization vote.

Dauch’s Profits and the Dowlais Clock

The company on the other side of the table is in the middle of its own transformation, and the timing of a strike could hardly be worse.

From American Axle to Dauch Corporation

American Axle & Manufacturing changed its name to Dauch Corporation in late January 2026, and on February 5 its New York Stock Exchange listing switched from the ticker AXL to DCH. David C. Dauch remains chairman and chief executive; his father, the late Richard Dauch, founded the business in 1994 as a spinoff of GM driveline and forging assets. The rebrand was detailed in the company’s name-change filing to the SEC.

Why the Timing Stings

The union argues the company can afford to pay more. It says the supplier generated $8.4 billion in profit over the past decade, that the chief executive collected $111 million across that span, and that the top five executives took home nearly $231 million combined. The company has not endorsed those figures.

Recent results show a thinner cushion. Through the first nine months of 2025, the supplier reported about $4.46 billion in sales and roughly $55.6 million in net income, a margin near 1 percent, according to its third-quarter 2025 results filed with the SEC. At the same time, the company is working to close its planned acquisition of the Dowlais Group, a deal valued at about $1.4 billion that would create a combined parts maker operating in more than 20 countries.

GM Sits Out the Talks but Owns the Risk

GM is not at the bargaining table, yet it stands to lose the most if the picket lines hold. The automaker’s pickup franchise runs through the axles built in Three Rivers, and any extended gap pressures truck output just as GM moves through a model refresh on its half-ton lineup.

For now, both sides are dug in. The union has its leverage, the supplier has a merger to protect and a stock now trading under a new ticker, and GM is left hoping the part it cannot easily replace keeps moving.

If the strike is settled in days, the disruption stays a footnote and GM truck inventories barely flinch. If it drags toward the kind of timeline the 2008 dispute set, the bill lands on a company already stretched by a merger, and on the automaker that never sat down to negotiate it.